Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President
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None reacted more fiercely than chief Obama cheerleader Oprah Winfrey. When she finished drawing and quartering Frey before her national TV audience, the janitor with the sawdust was needed to mop up the pieces. Ace New York Times columnist and Obama fan Maureen Dowd cheered the dismembering on:
It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.’s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying.
And Frey, at least, had written his own books!
Dowd herself would soon enough contribute to the long national slide. In May 2009, she was accused of lifting a paragraph from the blog of Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall. “I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing,” Dowd said in her own defense. Apparently, this friend “suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent—and I assumed spontaneous—way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.” If you are expecting some rough approximation of Marshall’s blog, brace yourself. Here is what Dowd wrote:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Here is what Marshall had written earlier. See if you can spot the difference.
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Dowd had matched every single word, even every single comma, but changed “we” to “the Bush crowd.” Then she just flat-out lied about what she had done. The gratuitous Bush-bashing likely saved her career. A less prominent or politically useful columnist would have been dispatched to the 4 A.M. shift on the delivery trucks, if not drummed out of the building.
Remnick cuts Obama a whole lot more slack than Dowd or anyone else cut James Frey. What makes Dreams “exceptional,” he observes, is “not that Obama allows himself these freedoms, but, rather, that he cops to them right away.” Not that exceptional. Ayers cops to these freedoms right away, too. He asks of his own memoir, “Is this then the truth?” He answers, “Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.” The reader knows that Ayers—with some justification—has much to hide. He senses that Obama does, too, but he is never quite sure why.
In early October 2008, a correspondent alerted me to an essay by Ayers titled “Narrative Push/Narrative Pull.” The lessons that Ayers offers on the art of the narrative seem to have found their way into Dreams unmolested. The Ayers quotes come from this essay unless otherwise specified. Obama quotes come from Dreams:
AYERS:
The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy…. But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency.
OBAMA:
And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged….
Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black.
AYERS:
Every narrative is, of course, necessarily incomplete, each a kind of distortion. Reality is always messier….
OBAMA:
I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative….
I had felt my voice returning to me that afternoon with Regina. It remained shaky afterward, subject to distortion.
AYERS:
Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this.
OBAMA:
Truth is usually the best corrective.
AYERS:
The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page.
As far as race in America was concerned, the problems and contradictions were all taken care of in the deep past. (Teaching Toward Freedom)
OBAMA:
But I suspect that we can’t pretend that the contradictions of our situation don’t exist. All we can do is choose.
AYERS:
The reader must actually see the struggle. It’s a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.
OBAMA:
But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary.
AYERS:
Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant.
OBAMA:
I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.
AYERS:
But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification.
OBAMA:
At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap.
AYERS:
Forgetting can be confused with remembering—the fictions we force ourselves to carry replace the facts we are hiding from the world, facts buried within fictions. (Fugitive Days)
OBAMA:
I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions, how badly he wanted them to be true, even if he didn’t always know how to make them so.
AYERS:
When history is being rewritten in the interest of a smoother, less troublesome tale … (Fugitive Days)
OBAMA:
It corresponds to what I know about my grandfather, his tendency to rewrite his history to conform with the image he wished for himself.
Although I cite no more than two examples for each, Dreams offers many more. There are ten “trap” references alone and nearly as many for “narrative,” “struggle,” “fiction,” and “journey.” With less frequency, the two authors dabble in advanced postmodern slang as well—the “grooves” into which they have fallen, the “poses” they assume, and even the “stitched together” nature of the lives they or their relatives lead.
This postmodern posturing leads to the frequent manipulation of dates and numbers to score political points, a sleight of hand that Ayers justifies in Fugitive Days: “I’ve come to see, in any case, that fiction does a better job with the truth in almost every instance.”
When citing numbers to make a point, Ayers is as reckless as an Enron accountant. In the “rotten and unjustifiable” Vietnam War, he tells us, America was responsible for the “indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese.” During the American bombing along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, he insists, “perhaps three-quarters of a million peasants were murdered cleanly from the air.” This figure represents many more people than lived in the area and more than 10 percent of the Cambodian population. In reality, fewer than 750,000 Cambodians died violently during that whole era from all causes.
Date changes allow for symmetry in the storytelling, but they can also enhance the propaganda value of the story. “I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War,” writes Ayers in Fugitive Days. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.
Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. The date of the visit is specific: “during the summer after my father’s visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday.” This was 1972. Traveling around the country on Greyhound buses with his mother, grandmother, and baby sister, the ten-year-old Obama and his family “watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed.”
Only the cruelest of ideologues would force her children to watch Senate hearings before bedtime, but Ann had no opportunity to play mommy dearest. She and her family took this trip a year bef
ore the Watergate hearings, which actually began in the late spring of 1973. This is not an isolated misrepresentation.
According to Dreams, the little family with one-year-old Maya in tow made an improbable long-distance detour from the obvious places they might visit—Seattle, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone—to spend three days in Chicago. Obama mentions a Kansas City stop along the way, and Madelyn’s youngest brother in suburban K.C. would later provide photographic evidence of the same. He confirms the year as 1972. Why they would have traveled an additional five hundred miles each way beyond Kansas to spend three dreary days in a motel in the South Loop is anyone’s guess.
In Chicago, Obama’s most vivid memory is of seeing the shrunken heads on display at the Field Museum. Yes, the museum did have those heads on display. Examining them, according to one source, was a “crucial rite of passage for generations of Chicago kids.” Ayers was one such kid. He grew up in suburban Chicago.
In Dreams, Obama remembers the heads to be of “European extraction.” The man looked like a “conquistador” and the woman had “flowing red hair.” This reversal of Euro-fortune struck the precocious ten-year-old as “some sort of cosmic joke.” This memory too is thoroughly contrived. That some conquistador would wander into the Ecuadorian jungle with a woman in tow, let alone Rita Hayworth, and end up as a shrunken head defies all probabilities. No source on the Field exhibit even hints that these were Europeans. In fact, one source suggests that the tribe in question vanished seven hundred years before the first European arrived.
Ayers, however, has something of a fascination with headhunting. In Fugitive Days, he recounts a 1965 antiwar protest on the University of Michigan campus that proved formative in his own radicalization. At the protest, Ayers saw a series of photos that moved him. One showed “four American boys kneeling in the sun, bare-chested, smiling broadly.” Although these soldiers looked like the kind of guys Ayers had grown up with, they “cradled in their hands now, the severed heads of human beings, their dull, unseeing eyes eternally open, their ears cut off, strung into a decorative collar worn around one smiling kid’s neck.” That this photo never made its way beyond this particular protest testifies to the easy malevolence of Ayers’s imagination.
Obama would claim to return to Chicago as an adult “fourteen years later.” In fact, Obama arrived in Chicago thirteen years after his presumed 1972 visit or twelve years after the Watergate hearings. This error struck me as no more than careless data transmission between co-authors. Ayers seemed to be taking the raw data of Obama’s life and improvising as he saw fit, often without checking facts.
While driving around town upon his arrival in Chicago in 1985, Obama found himself sharing magically in the black oversoul, as he recounts in Dreams:
I remembered the whistle of the Illinois Central, bearing the weight of the thousands who had come up from the South so many years before; the black men and women and children, dirty from the soot of the railcars, clutching their makeshift luggage, all making their way to Canaan Land.
In 1988, Obama had tried to voice a similar cultural memory in “Why Organize?” This awkwardly structured excerpt likely does capture the real voice of Obama:
Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to …
“Threadbare budgets”? It is remarkable how much better a writer Obama would become in the next few years. The pages in Dreams reminiscing about the Chicago return end thus: “I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theater.” The point is made: Obama was not merely moving to Chicago in 1985. He was returning home as spiritual heir to progressive black Chicago icon Frank Marshall Davis. We will hear more about “Frank” later.
WEIRD SCIENCE
As soon as I started writing on the authorship subject, correspondents began to advise me of computerized programs designed to sniff out literary mischief, like the one that tagged Time magazine’s Joe Klein as the author of the Clinton-era novel Primary Colors.
I was wary of such science for any number of reasons. Most practically, I did not believe that Ayers wrote Dreams the way Klein wrote Primary Colors. Rather, my belief was that he served as Obama’s muse, editing the book lightly in some parts, heavily in others, and taking over principal writing duties in others still. This pattern, I suspected, would defy existing forensic programs.
I knew too that controversy dogged the whole field of literary forensics. The case of Don Foster, the Shakespearean scholar and Vassar professor who helped uncover Joe Klein, is instructive. Using computer analysis, Foster was the first to attribute to Shakespeare an otherwise anonymous poem, “A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter.” This being the first new Shakespeare find in more than a century, Foster received a good deal of international acclaim.
Not everyone agreed, however, that Foster deserved the honor. In 2002, one such critic, Gilles Monsarrat, made such a compelling case for John Ford as the poem’s author that Foster yielded to Monsarrat’s argument. In a rare moment of academic grace, Foster wrote, “No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.”
I labored under no illusion that the media would greet my challenge to Obama with anywhere near that level of civility. Given their barrels of ink and reels of tape, I wanted to know what kind of science they might use to undercut me. So before proceeding further, I decided to seek out expert advice. Among those I contacted was Patrick Juola of Duquesne University, the author of two highly regarded books on the subject of authorship attribution. My query and his thorough response both took place on September 27, 2008:
Patrick
You come highly recommended as someone who might help me solve a linguistics challenge on which I have been hacking: the authorship of Barack Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” I have no idea of your politics. If you reject this challenge out of hand I would understand. If, however, you have an interest in influencing history, this might be fun. What makes the project particularly intriguing is that I firmly believe that the primary author is Bill Ayers.
I had written an earlier book on intellectual fraud called “Hoodwinked,” but I am in over my proverbial pay grade on things like QSUM analysis. What follows are some introductory articles I have written. I can also provide pdfs of “Dreams” and “Audacity of Hope” and extensive notes on Fugitive Days.
Thanks
Jack
Dear Mr. Cashill,
Thank you very much for the extremely interesting opportunity, but—politics aside—I don’t think that the technology is currently available to do what you would like. Not to put too fine a point on it, the accuracy simply isn’t there. The best-performing methods we know about can get 90%+ accuracy, but can also get 50% or less (and we don’t yet understand the conditions that cause that to happen) which means that for high stakes issues (such as national politics), the repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction). In fact, this is what much of my research is on—trying to improve the accuracy rate of these techniques so that they can be used reliably in important cases, or at least to understand when these techniques can be used with safety.
If you go to my home page, http://www.mathcs.dug.edu/~iuola, you will be able to download a copy of a recent book of mine, called “Authorship Attribution.” (I encourage you to do so, and don’t worry, it’s free. Special deal with the publisher.) I talk a bit on page 11–13 about a couple of well-publicized failures (including a failure of the QSUM technique you mentioned on national TV, where the researcher Morton “could not distinguish between the writings of a convicted felon and the Chief Justice of England.”) I hope you understand my reluctance to be pilloried as Morton was (or as Don Foster later w
as over the _Elegy_).
Having said that, … I will happily offer you a couple of cautionary notes and travellers’ tales that might help your search for evidence. My first suggestion is simply to look at my book, particularly chapters four and five, which might help you understand better the type of stuff that people have been doing since the fall of QSUM. (And in particular, don’t bother with QSUM; it simply doesn’t work.) In general, single-valued measures such as average word length, average sentence length, or mean “reading level” tend not to work as well as multivariate measures, where you measure lots of different properties of the text, such as the frequencies of fifty or a hundred different words. There’s even some software out there that might be able to help you in the analysis; I have the JGAAP program available for download and I believe David Hoover has a “Delta Spreadsheet” that also does authorship analysis. But a better approach is simply to do what you’re already doing (as far as I can tell from the columns you were so kind as to send)—good old-fashioned literary detective work. If you can get Dystel or Osnos into the metaphorical back room and ask them some hard questions, that’s the sort of thing that would be much more convincing than an abstract numerical argument based on something like “entropy” that no one really understands anyway….