They say that the best way to get over trauma in one part of your life is to throw yourself headlong into something else. To that end, I’ve decided to tackle Jack Cashill’s most recent column about — no surprise here — his bizarre and singleminded quest to expose Barack Obama as a literary fraud. Yes, I know: that seems preposterous. And it is, in fact. But hey, facts never stood in the way of Jack! This week, Jack sits back in his rhetorical easy chair, kicks up his feet of illogic, and takes us on a frightening journey of how he arrived at his “conclusions.” So buckle up and prepare for some barely coherent assumptions!
Take a quick gander at this paragraph:
That same year, Obama contributed an unsigned case note to the Harvard Law Review, his only contribution to any law review ever. Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that “the temperate legal language doesn’t display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later.”
Yeah, you read that right. Jack is basing his assumption of fraud on the fact that Obama’s note in a law review — hardly the forum of exciting language — didn’t display the soaring rhetoric of his later political rallies.
Seriously?
And when in doubt, Jack returns to his singular nautical obsession:
Obama’s frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like makes a powerful case for Ayers’ involvement in the writing of Dreams. Ayers knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.
What, you ask, was this “sophisticated use of nautical metaphors”? I’ll tell you: it was both authors’ usage of “ballast.” One time. No, really. Hey, I wonder if another fringe writer ever used “specious extrapolation”?
In To Teach, Ayers tells the story of a teacher in NYC whose students are struck by the fact that the Hudson River seems to flow North and South simultaneously. In Dreams, Obama shares a amazingly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn. “Excuse me, mister,” a boy asks him, “You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?” This is one of many such incidents.
Hold the phone: you mean to tell me that more than one person has wondered why a major American river seems to flow two cardinal directions?!? No! Impossible! Oh, and please note the conclusion of that paragraph. Note also that Jack has so far failed to provide a single other incident. More:
Ayers imposes his 60’s consciousness on an Obama too young to know or remember. In Dreams, Obama relates an experience at Columbia in which “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. They make perfect sense, however, for a radical of nearly 40 emerging from a futile decade in hiding.
Yes, how dare a 20-year-old have knowledge of a major philosophical divide! Should I even bother telling Jack that I read The Communist Manifesto when I was 17? That would be far too knowing and weighty, right? And I saved the best for last:
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.
Wait… what? Those aren’t two similar passages. Those aren’t even two similar thoughts. I honestly have to ask, Jack: are you even trying anymore? We used to be able to rely on you as a great source of crazy right-wing ranting. You’ve still got the ranting down, but where’s the effort? Where’s the thought, the intellect?
I guess you waved goodbye to it when you undertook this asinine task, huh?
“These sentiments seem much too knowing and weighty for a 20 year-old just in from Hawaii.” Really, Jack? Unlike what the McCain campaign would have you believe, age does not unconditionally beget experience, talent or wisdom.
Malcom Gladwell had an excellent piece in the recent New Yorker that examines a similar discusson from THE EXACT OPPOSITE end of the spectrum, noting that rightly or wrongly, youth tends to be more associated with creativity (article at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all).
Gladwell cites examples such as:
- Orson Welles wrote “Citizen Kane” at 25
- Mozart wrote Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at 21
- Herman Melville wrote “Moby-Dick” at 32, and had written a book a year through his late twenties
No one is saying Obama even approaches those levels of various skill, but O’Neil correctly calls bullshit on Cashill when he makes blanket statements about how young people are not capable of critical thinking and sophisticated writing.
Jack, I have known college students who write with more developed logic and better prose than your writing could aspire to. You, sir, are no college student.