Jack Cashill Charges that William Ayers Ghost-wrote “Dreams from My Father”
Winfield Myers • October 13, 2008 • Uncategorized
This morning at World News Daily, the Emmy Award winning author Jack Cashill makes a case that the Obama-Ayers relationship goes far deeper than most have imagined. Not only was Ayers Obama’s friend and sponsor during the mid-90s, Cashill charges; he was his ghost-writer.
He bases his argument on two points: first, that Obama’s writing style prior to the publication of Dreams from My Father was “pedestrian” and “cliche-choked.”
Second, he sets some of Ayers’s own prose against that of Dreams. Claiming that Ayers is an excellent stylist with a penchant for sea metaphors and a post-modern stance, Cashill concludes that Obama is something of an Ayers creation; that Ayers was not merely an influence, but the man who shapped Obama’s public persona by both opening the doors to the Annenberg millions and by literally creating Obama’s compelling story and style.
Omitting the line-by-line comparisons that Chashill offers, here is the heart of his argument:
As to Ayers, envision him as the seafaring Odysseus to Obama’s father-hungry Telemachus. By Obama’s own admission, “Dreams” would become “a record of a personal, interior journey – a boy’s search for his father.”
The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then-obscure Obama.
Before Obama’s ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout and the street cred. Ayers could also write, and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had several books published.
My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and he chose to mold it. The calculation in “Dreams” is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. And if “Dreams” were beautifully written, it could launch a career.
As I have documented earlier, one thread that ties Ayers to “Dreams” is the repeated use of maritime metaphors throughout both books, a testament to Ayers’ anxious year as a merchant seaman.
There is, however, a deeper thread, namely a shared postmodernist perspective. A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.
In true postmodernist fashion, Ayers rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys with “narratives” we “construct” and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.
Thus, “Fugitive Days” is laced with repeated reference to what Ayers calls “our constructed reality.” So, curiously, is “Dreams.”
“But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie,” writes Obama, “something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother.”
I’m not familiar with the writings of either Obama or Ayers. But Cashill at least has made a strong case for Ayers’s authorship of Dreams that fits what I do know of Obama: that he is an empty suit whose knowledge of contemporary issues is far exceeded by his charisma.
I hope Stanley Kurtz looks into this.
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One Response to “Jack Cashill Charges that William Ayers Ghost-wrote “Dreams from My Father””
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The purported semantic profiling that is the basis of this “discovery” is discredited hogwash. I written semantic analysis algorithms and worked with other authors in this area off and on for the last 18 years.
The supposed analyst did an appallingly slipshod job that would pass muster with no expert in the field and very few first year IT undergrads.
For one thing, he not make comparisons out of significant material.
To do so requires familiarity with latent semantic analysis tools which the purported “analyst did not use.
Most importantly the assessor, did not matrix the few samples he had against a “norm” or corpora of other autobiographical essays, or written materials from other high quality writers.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VC8-4CMVXVT-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=21705cd64218f0f7d846cdd6023a2a23
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.108.8490
Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval – Salton – 1968
I used to work at NewsEdge one of the pioneers (along with Factiva) in this kind of analysis
To do any sort of accurate analysis of “who wrote” a given passage of open text one needs to reference such passages against material focused on similar subjects and written by authors of the same time period and the same kind of socioeconomic and educational class. All these factors will show far stronger correlation than anything else and obscure any meaningful comparison.
In the case of Ayer’s book Fugitive Days, the subject was largely about racial conciliation and identity. And written by an academic.
Unsurprisingly, given that this was the theme of Obama’s first book, and he too is a bookish sort of fellow, the two use a lot of similar terminology , like “people of color” or “Chicago” or “racism or University” .
And so?
This would be like assessing a melody by Mozart and a melody by Haydn, matrixing the two pieces against a bunch of contemporary Rock ‘n roll and concluding that Mozart ghost-wrote Haydn’s music .
Before posting this nonsense you would have been well advised to go to any of the recognized experts in natural language processing and analysis.
In Cashill’s eagerness to trash a political opponent he has trashed an important research area in linguistics and computer processing
Jack Bryar
See:
Institute for Intelligent Systems
University of Memphis http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/iis/
Scott Crossley, Ph.D. Linguistics/TESOL, Department of English, Mississippi State University http://www.msstate.edu/dept/english/tesol/tesolfaculty.html
(662) 325-2355
Thomas Hofmann, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Department of Computer Science. Box 1910, CIT 505. Brown University. Providence,
Ian M. Soboroff Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Randy L. Ribler , Hugh Craig,
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&doc.view=content&chunk.id=ss1-4-1&toc.depth=1&brand=9781405103213_brand&anchor.id=0
Or any of the members of SIGIR: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval