Ed. note: to celebrate our final week, we’re taking a look back at some of our most frequently covered topics.
If local conservative “writer” and famous non-intellectual Jack Cashill were to quote Shakespeare, we have little doubt he’d choose to paraphrase Tybalt: “Liberals? I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee.” Because, you see, the problem with Jack has always been his total disregard for actual intellectual heft — far easier it is for him to doggedly stick to polarizing extremes of political viewpoints. If something emerges that threatens his long-since-molded reactionary viewpoints, it earns his dismissal, if not his outright scorn. This is a far cry from the origins of conservatism, with its Burkean roots and often admirable philosophical comportments. Jack, who (frustratingly) holds a PhD (albeit from an engineering school), has never seemed interested in the actual work of thinking, choosing instead to level platitudes and banalities about the threats of liberalism, always couched in the language of hatred. Today, we survey his work as mocked critiqued by us.
We were fortunate to start this little project at about the time a serious threat emerged to Jack’s worldview. The stunning rise of Barack Obama as literary star — his rise as political talent seemed to barely cross Jack’s radar — was deeply disturbing to Jack, who, as a mediocre literary talent himself, could barely fathom the emergence of a politician who wrote so very well. To Jack’s dichotomous mind, there was only one possible resolution to this paradox: Obama must be a fraud.
Jack’s literary detective work started in August, when he displayed some pretty terrible misinterpretations of George Orwell’s work. Just a few days later, Jack brought the world the first announcement of his theory: Barack Obama was not the author of his widely lauded memoir. Exactly who the author was wouldn’t be a mystery for long. However, Jack’s dogged pursuit of the “truth” caused him to play a little fast and loose with his detective work, in what would be just the first example of his thin evidence.
The sorriest part of this whole affair has been Jack’s comical attempts at literary analysis. Now, Jack’s academic work happens to have been in American history, not English literature, but even that is no excuse for what Jack turns out in the name of analysis. His specious work started here, where he claimed to have uncovered remarkably similar passages in the work of “terrorist emeritus” and covert Dreams author William Ayers. The problem was that there were no similarities, and that Jack was violating Doyle’s first rule and was suiting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Jack continued in this vein with what he claimed to be quantitative analysis of similar passages from the two books, though he ignored the obvious problem that the passages weren’t at all similar. What Jack and his loyal army of wingnut web followers fail to realize is that simply using imagery doesn’t imply similarity. Conservative writers have never made great strides in fiction, and thus seem unable to recognize much in the way of narrative devices. This, obviously, hurts Jack’s analysis. But it didn’t stop there: Jack brought as “evidence” a poem that Obama wrote in 1981, as if to prove that talent cannot evolve (that is, provided you believe in evolution). He also claimed, somewhat absurdly, that only sophisticated writers would know the meaning of an elementary term like “ballast”: this only betrayed his own intellectual shortcomings. He also acknowledged his total lack of literary knowledge when he condemned Obama for using perfectly acceptable language and imagery.
It was around this time that Jack grew increasingly desperate, latching onto totally incidental nautical imagery in both authors’ works and announcing that he had somehow found a way to scientifically prove his crackpot theories. He also seemed to grow distracted and antsy at the total rejection of his ideas by (damned liberal) places like MSNBC and the Times, and so began to focus his efforts on creating cringe-worthy graphics.
Anyway, you get the picture. Jack’s ideas failed to gain any traction outside of the arena of the political fringe, and he got himself into a bit of a battle with the local paper. He took a turn toward drama and told some dubious stories about a traffic stop. Lately he’s turned to more important work: defending Phill Kline and making a promising documentary. His work will go on, rest assured.
So will we miss Jack? Probably. To know good, after all, one must also know evil. Without the laughable theories of a man like Jack, we’d never be able to recognize the better parts of political commentary. There are of course things we won’t miss, like Jack’s bizarre and perhaps self-loathing condemnations of academics. In fact, this is really just something we’ll never understand about conservatism in general: how do professors at places like George Mason keep a straight face when saying you can’t trust anything that comes out of those elite ivory towers of academia? How does Jack reconcile his own possession of a PhD with his constant criticisms of so-called elite academics? We’ll never know.
Jack is not a pundit of great stature (Glenn Beck appearances notwithstanding), so his vitriol is mostly confined to our little metro area. He’ll carry on with his total disregard for opposing viewpoints, which is always a mark of a feeble mind. Those who claim to be in possession of the one sole truth about something — be it abortion, religion, or tax policy — are those of whom you should be the most suspicious. Jack neatly fits that category, and we’re going to miss the polite deconstruction of his remarks. But hey, we’re friendly Midwesterners: we wish him the best.
