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Bill Ayers' Semi-Fictional Black Surrogates
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
3/23/2012
Excerpt:
"In this much ballyhooed season of "vetting," please allow me to zero in anew on Barack Obama's Achilles heel -- namely, his willingness to take credit for a book that he did not write in any meaningful way. This would be the book on which his genius myth is founded: his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
From early on, I have argued that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, is the primary craftsman behind Dreams. Thanks to the video interview of mailman Allen Hulton by WND's Jerome Corsi, we have a clearer picture of why Ayers would have invested so much time in this project and how he might have been reimbursed.
Say what one will about the sanity of Ayers' educational philosophy, there is no denying his sincerity. He has been plugging away at educational reform his entire adult life. Dreams, I will argue, gave him the opportunity to address the one great obstacle to the reform of Chicago schools -- namely, an obstructionist black educational bureaucracy. To make his case in the book, Ayers employs three semi-fictional African American surrogates, the third of whom easily being the least fictional and most useful.
To be sure, there is much other evidence to believe that Ayers crafted Dreams: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 50 or so nautical metaphors, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple-parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the four matching errors, the same weary '60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in Dreams, the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after Dreams, and more. It is Ayers' strategic use of black surrogates, however, that will tell us why he involved himself in Dreams.
The first of the surrogates readers of Dreams know as "Frank." In real life, of course, he was poet, pornographer, and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Despite his influential role as mentor to the teenage Obama and his talents as a writer, Davis remains unknown to 99 percent of Obama supporters. The media are queasy about the "Communist" part.
In Dreams, Frank tells the college-bound Obama, "Understand something, boy. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." He continues, "They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know. 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."
Not surprisingly, Ayers too has strong opinions about "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," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Adds Ayers, "What we call education is usually no more than training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning."
Just as Ayers makes the case that students are often stripped of their ethnic identity and "taught to be like whites," Frank argues that university expectations include "leaving your race at the door." I call Frank "semi-fictional" because Ayers used him to voice an educational philosophy that was not Davis's own."
.............................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...urrogates.html
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
3/23/2012
Excerpt:
"In this much ballyhooed season of "vetting," please allow me to zero in anew on Barack Obama's Achilles heel -- namely, his willingness to take credit for a book that he did not write in any meaningful way. This would be the book on which his genius myth is founded: his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
From early on, I have argued that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers, a skilled writer and editor, is the primary craftsman behind Dreams. Thanks to the video interview of mailman Allen Hulton by WND's Jerome Corsi, we have a clearer picture of why Ayers would have invested so much time in this project and how he might have been reimbursed.
Say what one will about the sanity of Ayers' educational philosophy, there is no denying his sincerity. He has been plugging away at educational reform his entire adult life. Dreams, I will argue, gave him the opportunity to address the one great obstacle to the reform of Chicago schools -- namely, an obstructionist black educational bureaucracy. To make his case in the book, Ayers employs three semi-fictional African American surrogates, the third of whom easily being the least fictional and most useful.
To be sure, there is much other evidence to believe that Ayers crafted Dreams: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 50 or so nautical metaphors, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple-parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the four matching errors, the same weary '60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in Dreams, the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after Dreams, and more. It is Ayers' strategic use of black surrogates, however, that will tell us why he involved himself in Dreams.
The first of the surrogates readers of Dreams know as "Frank." In real life, of course, he was poet, pornographer, and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Despite his influential role as mentor to the teenage Obama and his talents as a writer, Davis remains unknown to 99 percent of Obama supporters. The media are queasy about the "Communist" part.
In Dreams, Frank tells the college-bound Obama, "Understand something, boy. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." He continues, "They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know. 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."
Not surprisingly, Ayers too has strong opinions about "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," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Adds Ayers, "What we call education is usually no more than training. We are so busy operating schools that we have lost sight of learning."
Just as Ayers makes the case that students are often stripped of their ethnic identity and "taught to be like whites," Frank argues that university expectations include "leaving your race at the door." I call Frank "semi-fictional" because Ayers used him to voice an educational philosophy that was not Davis's own."
.............................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...urrogates.html