Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President

by Jack Cashill

  What makes Boerner problematic for the Obama narrative is his very normality. This obliging middle-class guy from suburban D.C. makes Obama sound so thoroughly cheerful and white that one questions whether the Sturm und Drang of Obama’s New York is really Obama’s. “Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display,” writes Obama, “trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could re-enter.” Reenter what? This seems more the reflection of a soon-to-be ex-fugitive than that of a metrosexual happily browsing the Met. Ayers, by the way, uses the phrase “human possibility” twice in Fugitive Days.

  As might be expected, Manhattan proves more seductive than Hawaii or Los Angeles. Obama finds himself as attracted as he is repelled by “the beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess” of the city. There was no denying “the city’s allure,” he writes, nor its consequent power to corrupt. Smitten by the Siren song of the city, Obama feels himself “uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation.”

  The opening scene of Dreams unfolds in 1982, Obama’s senior year at Columbia, in and around a small New York City apartment with “slanting floors” that he shared with Siddiqi on East Ninety-fourth Street. As the scene unfolds, Obama is making breakfast “with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet.” In Fugitive Days, Ayers lives in apartments with “sloping floors” and talks about food almost as lovingly as he does bombs. He too uses the Southern regionalism “skillet.”

  Obama makes an exception to his alleged New York “solitude” for an elderly neighbor, a “stooped” gentleman who wore a “fedora.” In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers’s grandfather who was “stooped” and a helpful stranger who wore a “fedora.” One day, Obama finds his neighbor dead, “crumpled up on the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and curled up like a baby’s.” In Fugitive Days, Ayers tells of watching his mother die, “eyes half open, curled up and panting.”

  After the neighbor’s death, the police let themselves into the old man’s apartment, and for no good reason Obama finds himself in the apartment as well. On the neighbor’s mantelpiece, Obama reports seeing “the faded portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile.” Obama is the rare writer to fix on eyebrows—heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. There are seven references to “eyebrows” in Dreams. There are six references to eyebrows in Fugitive Days—bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones. This eyebrow fixation is unusual to the point of fetish.

  At the climax of Dreams’ opening sequence, Obama receives the critical phone call. It comes from his aunt Jane in Nairobi. “Listen, Barry, your father is dead,” she tells him. Obama has a hard time understanding. “Can you hear me?” she repeats. “I say, your father is dead.” The line is cut, and the conversation ends abruptly.

  Apparently, Ayers so liked the dramatic structure of the Dreams opening sequence that he mimicked it in Fugitive Days, which also opens in medias res with a dramatic phone call. The call comes from Dohrn. Ayers learns that Oughton has been killed in a Greenwich Village bomb blast. “Diana is dead,” says Dohrn. Ayers has a hard time understanding. “Diana is dead,” she “repeats slowly.” Ayers drops the line, and the conversation ends abruptly.

  It is in Manhattan too that Obama meets his Circe, the aforementioned Oughton-like figure. “Her voice sounded like a wind chime,” he would later tell Auma. “We saw each other for almost a year.” Odysseus too shares the temptress Circe’s bed for a year. Like Obama’s unnamed girlfriend, Circe lives in a “splendid house” on “spacious grounds.” She likewise wants her lover to stay forever, but Odysseus’s mates warn him off: “You god-driven man, now the time has come to think about your native land once more, if you are fated to be saved and reach your high-roofed home and your own country.”

  Ultimately, Obama steels himself against New York’s Sirens, rejects Circe, and manages to find his way to Chicago and an adventure as a community organizer. What he still lacks, however, is a “guide that might show me how to join this troubled world.” He still feels the “incompleteness” of his identity as a black American. Thinking Kenya might make him whole, Obama leaves on his African pilgrimage immediately after his weepy first visit to Reverend Wright’s church and just before he begins Harvard in fall 1988.

  Structurally, this timing works. Its accuracy is another question. Africa.com traced his first visit to Kenya to 1983, the summer after college graduation, “when he had come to mourn his late father.” In that Barack Sr. died in late 1982, this makes sense. Mendell also puts this first visit in 1983. Britain’s Independent and Obama’s uncle Sayid specify 1987 for the first trip, as does Obama himself when speaking at a Kenyan university at 2006. Remnick sticks to the official version, 1988, the year that Obama suggests in Dreams.

  Which account, if any, is correct I cannot say, and the answer is not terribly relevant in itself, save that this level of uncertainty haunts the entire Obama story as told and retold. Obama, for instance, first hears from his half sister Auma in 1983 when she calls to tell him his half brother David was killed in a motorbike accident, but David was not killed until 1987. Barack Sr. apparently lost both legs in car accidents, but in Dreams he has both legs until the last accident kills him. Almost nothing can be taken at face value, including, as shall be seen, the date of Obama’s birth.

  One trip that Obama does not even allude to in Dreams or Audacity is his 1981 trip to Pakistan. In fact, it was not until April 2008 at a San Francisco fund-raiser that Obama casually let it be known that he had traveled to Pakistan at all. Two weeks before the Pakistani admission, someone had improperly accessed Obama’s passport on three occasions. The CNN lead suggests a major story in the making: “The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.” That consultant was John Brennan, a former CIA operative then advising Obama.

  The story predictably went nowhere despite the fact that Obama would later appoint Brennan deputy national security adviser. The most likely explanation is that Team Obama was doing oppositional research on its own candidate—and possibly the other candidates as well—and that Obama outed himself on a questionable trip to a Muslim country before the opposition could. Whatever the motive, a caper like this, once discovered, might have cost a less charmed candidate his career.

  About his African pilgrimage Obama is much less shy. As told in Dreams, he spends eight weeks on this journey, an inexplicable luxury for a chronically broke young man no matter what the year. His first stop is allegedly Europe. I say “allegedly” because most of the specifics sound like they were pulled from a Michelin Guide. The one exception is a sojourn to the Spanish boondocks that even Remnick concedes is “not an especially convincing sequence.” Its details sound like they were pulled from Ayers’s memory.

  After a couple of weeks wandering around Paris’s Luxembourg Garden and other tourist hot spots, Obama finds himself awaiting the night bus at “a roadside tavern about halfway between Madrid and Barcelona.” While waiting, he shoots pool at what might be the only pool table in any bar in Europe.

  Here, emerging “out of nowhere,” is a classic Homeric guide-god in the guise of a Senegalese traveler. This man is “somehow making the same journey”—that is, the journey of all dispossessed thirdworlders struggling to find their way home, to their own Penelopes. The traveler shows Obama a photo of his young wife, with whom he would reunite as soon as he saved the money. Home, he seems to be telling Obama—in Spanish no less—is where a man and his wife make it to be. Need I mention that in Fugitive Days Ayers tells us he was a pool player who, during his merchant seaman days, frequented roughneck bars in this part of the world?

  Whether he actually went to Europe or not, Obama realizes that this side trip was a “mistake.” Although beautiful, Europe wasn’t his. “I began to suspect,” writes Obama, “that my European stop was just one more means of delay,
one more attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Old Man.” Like Odysseus, he knows he has to find his way back home. Obama hopes to find that home in Kenya. He will not. Despite the rush of “freedom that comes from not feeling watched,” he soon realizes how much he still looks and thinks like an American. Africa is not Obama’s home. It is his Hades.

  Needing to consult the blind prophet Teiresias, Odysseus makes a long and difficult journey to “Hades’ murky home,” specifically a stream called Acheron, which branches off the river Styx. There he is instructed to pour libations to the deceased. Once he does, he is swarmed by the many and sundry “shades of the dead.” Once in Kenya, Obama makes a similarly difficult journey of several days’ duration by train, bus, jalopy, and finally on foot to “a wide chocolate-brown river,” besides which rests the grave of Obama’s great-great-grandfather in the heart of “Obama Land.”

  His trip to the interior serves the same purpose that Odysseus’s trip to the underworld serves, a chance to reconcile with the spirits of the past. “The Old Man’s here,” Obama thinks, “although he doesn’t say anything to me. He’s here, asking me to understand.” Here Obama meets, among other relatives, a blind great-uncle who pours him his own home-brewed libation. The night passes for Obama as in a dream. Men come and go, drinking “ceremoniously,” perhaps six men, perhaps ten. Obama is not quite sure. They “merge with the shadows of corn.”

  If the blind seer Teiresias gives Odysseus involved instructions on how to return home, Obama’s great-uncle cuts to the chase. He tells Obama that many men have been lost to the “white man’s country,” including his own son. “Such men are like ghosts,” he says, adding that if Obama hears of his son, “You should tell him that he should come home.” Obama leaves the land of his ancestors—after some prerequisite weeping—wiser than when he came, his great-uncle’s “blind eyes staring out into the darkness.” He knows that he too will become ghostlike unless he finds his own home.

  What Obama pulls from his African experience, in a sequence that feels heavily indebted to his muse and largely contrived after the fact, is that home is where the heart is. Cultural “authenticity” is an illusion, and there is “no shame in confusion.” There was shame only in the silence that leads the individual to try to form an identity without help from a community of others.

  From Africa, the book passes at warp speed through Obama’s Harvard experience and culminates with his wedding to Michelle. Just as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus reuniting with his wife, Penelope, Obama rounds his circle by marrying into the African American culture that has beguiled him all his life. Michelle is “a daughter of the South Side,” the real McCoy. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves,” Obama would remind America during his briefly celebrated Philadelphia race speech.

  With the promise of fatherhood implicit in marriage, the abandoned son claims the potential to be a father, and the father of authentic African Americans at that. The penultimate paragraph of the book has Obama describing his older half brother Roy, who now calls himself “Abongo.” (Had Obama called himself “Abongo Obama,” he would not have won a state senate seat, let alone the presidency.) The alert reader hears in Obama’s description of his brother, especially its first sentence, a mischievous muse describing Obama:

  The words he speaks are not fully his own, and in his transition he can sometimes sound stilted and dogmatic. But the magic of his laughter remains, and we can disagree without rancor. His conversion has given him solid ground to stand on, a pride in his place in the world. From that base I see his confidence building; he begins to venture out and ask harder questions; he starts to slough off the formulas and slogans and decides what works best for him. He can’t help himself in this process, for his heart is too generous and full of good humor, his attitude toward people too gentle and forgiving, to find simple solutions to the puzzle of being a black man.

  In Dreams, as in the Odyssey, almost nothing can be taken at face value. This is why Stephen Maturin, one of the two protagonists of Patrick O’Brian’s masterful sea novels, did not much like Odysseus. “He lied excessively, it seems to be,” observes Maturin in The Far Side of the World, “and if a man lies beyond a certain point a certain sad falseness enters into him and he is no longer amiable.”

  HOG BUTCHER

  In the spring and summer of 2009 I had little opportunity to pursue authorship issues. I had entered a contract to write a book on the economy, eventually called Popes and Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debit from Aristotle to AIG, and I labored under the antique notion that once you sign a contract and accept an advance, you have a moral obligation to honor that contract. Thus, when I saw a message in my AOL inbox whose subject heading was “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works,” I at first ignored it. The claim seemed too outsized to take seriously. When I was unable to open the documents, I emailed the sender, asked him to reformat, and then forgot about the email. He resent his documents a few days later.

  This time I was able to open them, and I was duly impressed. The analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. From the 759 I culled out 180 that deserved the term striking. Some of them I had already reported. Others I was holding in reserve, waiting for a long-form opportunity to present, but many others I had not yet noticed.

  As a control, I tested these words and phrases against those in my own 2006 book, Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race. In that I am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, and family and cultural background than is Obama, our styles should have had more chance of matching. They don’t. Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six. Even by the most generous standard, I matched on only sixteen.

  For this new source of meticulously indexed data I had, in no small part, Emanuel Swedenborg to thank. The 18th century scientist and Christian mystic wrote some eighteen theological works, the best known of which was a treatise called, in its English translation, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell from Things Heard and Seen. In the book, Swedenborg offers a meticulous, detailed account of the afterlife, which he claims to have experienced firsthand.

  In the centuries that followed, Swedenborg attracted any number of followers, many of them influential, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Butler Yeats, and some obscure, like the fellow who contacted me, a forty-something surveyor, ski resort jack-of-all-trades, and mathematician, who prefers the anonymity of “Mr. Southwest.” Working for several hours a day for several months, he had compiled this amazingly detailed compendium in his spare time. He attributes his discipline to his daily reading of Swedenborg.

  It was altogether serendipitous that Mr. Southwest stumbled onto this issue. Largely apolitical, he had voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in the previous three elections. After he had acquired a satellite radio, he found himself listening to Sean Hannity and Rusty Humphries and began to think that maybe they made some sense. In September 2008, he heard me on Rusty Humphries. This inspired him to do some digging on his own. The pickings were ripe. He sent me some early discoveries and when I sent him back a thankful email, he was “psyched” and started burrowing in seriously. He did his research using the interlibrary loan service at the college from which he had graduated with a math degree.

  In isolation, none of the 759 similarities was enough to indict. So when critics attacked my research they tended to single out one or two specific parallels and mocked them. For instance, both Ayers and Obama not only quote the “hog butcher” phrase from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” but they also misquote it the same way as “hog butcher to the world.” It should read, “Hog Butcher for the World.” (Sandburg liked caps.) When I wrote about the research of Mr. Southwest and Nebraskan Ryan Geiser—“Mr. West” and “Mr. Midwest” in my online postings—any number of critics isolated this reference and assailed me for daring to infer anything from it. “Not an uncommon slip-
up,” Washington Post blogger Steven Levingston assured his readers.

  Levingston underestimates the degree of difficulty. To slip up in the same way, Obama and Ayers must make a series of identical choices. First, they have to refer to the Sandburg poem. For Ayers, this would be natural. He grew up in Chicago in an era when students were still expected to memorize poems. Obama, however, uses the “hog butcher” line before he moves to Chicago. Still, he uses the exact same phrase from that poem that Ayers does. “What do you know about Chicago anyway?” Obama is asked. “I thought a moment. ‘Hog butcher to the world,’ I said finally.”

  Like Ayers, Obama uses only those five words in isolation and no others. Like Ayers, he gets the third word wrong and no other and chooses, like Ayers, not to use capital letters the way Sandburg does. Finally, Obama could have adapted any number of noted phrases from the poem, “City of the Big Shoulders” for instance, or “Player with Railroads.” In Livin’ the Blues, Frank Marshall Davis, whose favorite poet was Sandburg, paraphrases the former, referring to Chicago as that “broad-shouldered brute of a burgh.”

  “If I were writing a book that was supposed to endear me to the voters of Chicago, and I wanted to insert a line from a poem about the city, I would probably quote it accurately,” wrote Geiser about the genesis of the Sandburg glitch. “Ayers likely misquotes Sandberg from memory.” In a similar vein, when both authors misspell Frantz Fanon’s first name as “Franz” and incorrectly refer to the South African city of “Sharpeville” in the possessive as “Sharpsville” (Dreams) and “Sharpesville” (Race Course), they have to make multiple choices to make the same mistake.

  Of similar note, both Obama and Ayers use the phrase “pie-in-the-sky.” Although I have used the phrase myself, I have always used it the way most people do, as an adjective. Both Obama and Ayers use it as a noun, as in “gray beards preaching pie-in-the-sky.”