[Vision2020] Barack Obama: Bill Ayers' alter ego

No Weatherman no.weatherman at gmail.com
Wed Oct 22 07:47:15 PDT 2008


This guy's doing a yeoman's job of isolating every verb, noun,
metaphor, and analogy in Ayers' books and comparing them to Obama's
"Dreams From My Father."

It's like a nightmare.

The entire series is here:

http://www.cashill.com/articles_all/recent.htm

Highly recommended if you want to peek inside the world of a domestic
terrorist who was ghostwriting a book for his young protégé.


Barack Obama: Bill Ayers' alter ego
By Jack Cashill

The evidence overwhelms the dispassionate observer that semi-retired
terrorist Bill Ayers played a major role in the writing of Barack
Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father."

For those unpersuaded by authorship studies, timelines, parallel
themes, matching metaphors, Ayers' role as neighborhood editor, or
Obama's overnight transformation from struggling hack to literary
superstar, allow me to introduce another variable: Obama's conspicuous
channeling of the thoughts and experiences of Bill Ayers into his own
presumed autobiography.

In his 1993 book, "To Teach," for instance, Ayers lays out the
difference between "education" on the one hand and "training" on the
other.

"Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who
would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," Ayers
writes.

"Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for
tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers."

In Obama's "Dreams," these thoughts find colloquial expression in the
person of "Frank," the real life poet, pornographer and Stalinist,
Frank Marshall Davis.

"Understand something, boy," Frank tells the college-bound Obama.
"You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to
get trained."

Frank shares Ayers' distaste for training. "They'll train you to
forget what it is that you already know," Frank tells Obama. "They'll
train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about
equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."

Says Ayers similarly, "What we call education is usually no more than
training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of
learning."

In the same 1993 book, "To Teach," Ayers tells the story of an
adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of
New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and
history of the city.

As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River
nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one
student said, "Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said,
"No, it has to flow south-down."

Upon further research, the teacher discovered "that the Hudson River
is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had
visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."

In his 1995 book, "Dreams From My Father," Obama shares a stunningly
similar story from his own brief New York sojourn.

As Obama tells it, he takes an unlikely detour to the exact spot on
the parallel East River where the north-flowing tide meets the
south-flowing river.

There, improbably, a young black boy approaches this strange man and
asks, "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then
sometimes it goes this way?"

Obama tells the boy it "had to do with the tides." The seeming
indecisiveness of this tidal river is used here as a metaphor for
Obama's own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and
heads for Chicago.

In his 1997 book, "A Kind and Just Parent," Ayers tells of a useful
reading assignment from the 1992 book, "The Kind of Light That Shines
on Texas," by black author Reginald McKnight.

The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first
black student in a newly integrated school, who tries to distance
himself from Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.

"Can you believe that guy?" Clints tells a white student. "He's like a
pig or something. Makes me sick." Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I
was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin
even existed."

In "Dreams," Obama reflects on his own first days as a 10-year-old at
his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of
"Coretta," the only other black student in the class.

When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama
shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone.

Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other
students, Obama, like Clint, understands that he "had been tested and
found wanting."

The shared interest of Obama and Ayers in education may account for
their first meeting as well as for these oddly parallel adventures.

In "Dreams," Obama describes his "breathless" efforts "working with a
citywide coalition in support of school reform." This took place in
the winter of 1987–1988 following the death of mayor Harold
Washington.

In "To Teach," Ayers tells us how, shortly after his arrival in 1987,
"A real [education] coalition had formed among the parents and
community organizations."

"I became involved with that," says Ayers. "The best friends I have in
Chicago today are the result of that development." It is not a stretch
to imagine that Obama was one of those friends.

It is possible too that Ayers had met Obama earlier in the decade
during their overlapping years on the Columbia University campus in
New York.

Whether or not they had met in New York, Obama relates an experience
at Columbia with the kind of insight and regret that only someone like
Ayers could have felt and expressed.

As Obama tells it in "Dreams," he went to hear the black activist
formerly known as Stokely Carmichael speak at Columbia. As he is
leaving, he watches ruefully as "two Marxists" scream insults at each
other over minor sectarian differences.

"It was like a bad dream," thinks Obama. "The movement had died years
ago, shattered into a thousand fragments."

These sentiments seem much too knowing and weighty for a 20 year-old
just in from Hawaii and L.A. They make perfect sense, however, for a
radical of nearly 40 emerging from a futile decade in hiding.

In an interview for the book "Sixties Radicals," Ayers makes this
clear. "When the war ended, our differences surfaced," he regrets. "We
ended up in typical left-wing fashion: We ate each other . . .
cannibalism."

Similarly, when the young Obama pontificates about "angry young men in
Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta," one hears the voice of someone
much edgier and more aware than Obama.

Ayers was obsessed with Vietnam. It defined him and still does. He
knows the emotional weight that a phrase like "Mekong Delta" carries.

Similarly, Ayers would have had a much deeper connection than Obama to
"Detroit," whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's 6th
birthday.

Ayers was posted to Detroit the year after the riot and experienced
its fallout firsthand. In 2007, on his blog, he "commemorates" the
40th anniversary of what he predictably calls the "Detroit Rebellion."

Obama tells us repeatedly that he was only 8 years old when the decade
of the '60s ended and knows nothing about it.

I am altogether inclined to take him at his word.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78749



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