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

by Jack Cashill

  “I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of these adventures. Yet it struck me as entirely curious that much of this “singular” language flows through Obama’s earthbound memoir. Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives little indication that he has had any real experience with the sea or ships beyond bodysurfing at Waikiki. Ayers, however, knows a great deal about both.

  “Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” Ayers writes at one point in Fugitive Days. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama, like Ayers, has a fondness for the word murky and its aquatic usages. “The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs,” he writes, one of four times murky appears in Dreams.

  Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. “The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed,” he writes in a passage that sounds as though he had just been called from sleep to man a late watch. In these two wind-conscious memoirs, the word flutter appears often and imaginatively.

  Not surprisingly, Ayers uses ship as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is “the captain of her own ship.” For Obama, it is his father who acts like a “sea captain.” Ayers imagines the family ship as “a ragged thing with fatal leaks” launched into a “sea of carelessness.” In another stressful instance, he feels as if he were “going over the side of a sinking ship.”

  Obama too finds himself “feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.” He writes of a “silent sea” and a “tranquil sea.” More telling still is Obama’s use of the word ragged, as in the poetic “ragged air” or “ragged laughter.” In A Kind and Just Parent Ayers also uses “ragged” metaphorically, as in the phrase “a ragged mess.”

  Ayers and Obama each use storms and horizons as both substance and as symbol. Ayers writes of an “unbounded horizon,” and Obama weighs in with “boundless prairie storms” as well as “eastern horizon,” “western horizon,” and “violet horizon.” Both use the words current and calm as nouns, the latter word more distinctively, as in Ayers’s “pockets of calm” and Obama’s “menacing calm.” Their imaginative use of the word tangled suggests a nautical genesis, as in Ayers’s “tangled love affairs” and “tangled story” and Obama’s “tangled arguments.”

  In Dreams, we read of the “whole panorama of life out there” and in Fugitive Days, “the whole weird panorama of my life.” Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one “an immense panorama of waste and cruelty.” Obama employs the word cruel and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams. On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of “despair,” as in an “ocean of despair.” Ayers counters with a “deepening despair,” a constant theme for him as well. Both distinctively pair “violence and despair.” Obama’s “knotted, howling assertion of self” sounds like it had been ripped from the pages of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, or, more proximately, from Fugitive Days, where Ayers too uses howling metaphorically, as in “the unleashing of a howling political storm.” The word knot or its derivatives, an Ayers favorite, is used eleven times in Dreams.

  In Fugitive Days Ayers uses the word moorings on two occasions, both times figuratively but precisely, as with, “in time words lost their moorings and floated away.” Obama uses the word literally and too knowingly. “The boats were out of their moorings,” he writes, “their distant sails like the wings of doves across Lake Michigan.” In his book A Kind and Just Parent, which I had secured and read by this point, Ayers speaks lovingly of his bike rides along Lake Michigan, “a shining sea of blues and greens.” He knew the lake well. In this book, too, Ayers fuses his anger with his seamanship to create the memorable “whirlpools of rage.”

  At the end of the day, I found in both Dreams and in Ayers’s several works the following shared words: fog, mist, ships, sinking ships, seas, sails, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, floods, shores, storms, streams, wind, waves, waters, anchors, barges, horizons, harbor, bays, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, voyages, narrower courses, uncertain courses, and things howling, wobbling, wind-whipped, fluttering, sinking, leaking, cascading, swimming, knotted, ragged, tangled, launched, boundless, uncharted, turbulent, and murky.

  Not unlike Ayers, I had had my own intimidating encounter with the sea. Each summer of my childhood, my parents would unearth their squirreled-away poker earnings to rent a bungalow in Ortley Beach, New Jersey, for as long as the money held out. (Ortley, by the way, borders the now-infamous Seaside Heights, the setting for the rococo MTV reality show Jersey Shore.)

  The summer I was seven, two hurricanes hit the shore back to back. When the skies cleared, thousands of us, the governor included, drove up to Point Pleasant to watch the dramatic return of a fishing boat all had thought lost. The boat rolled violently as it approached the inlet, the crow’s nest very nearly touching the sea, first on one side, then on the other. The scene affected me. Not a month goes by that I do not dream about being at the shore as a storm brews and the waves mount.

  After noticing the nautical thread in both Dreams and Fugitive Days, I checked to see if my own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, was similarly threaded. It is not. The book makes reference to precious few of these words precious few times in any context, and yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean and many a day on a boat. As an additional point of comparison with Dreams and Fugitive Days, in Sucker Punch there are no contrived memories, no composite characters, no phony names, no jacking with the timeline, no postmodern quibbles about truth. In this regard, mine is like most memoirs, Frank Marshall Davis’s included.

  Even if there were no other evidence, the frequent and sophisticated use of nautical terms in Dreams makes a powerful case for Ayers’s involvement. One passage in particular caught my attention. It is the one with which I introduced this theme, namely the notion that for black nationalists, a steady attack on the white race “served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair.” As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as ballast unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely could.

  SECRET SHARER

  After publishing an article on the nautical theme, I heard from several correspondents almost simultaneously on a likely inspiration for the Ayers-Obama project, the Anglo-Polish author Joseph Conrad. In the way of background, Conrad retired from the British merchant marine in 1894 after sixteen years in the service. It was only then, in his late thirties, that he began his formal literary career, one that would result in any number of classic novels and short stories, Heart of Darkness foremost among them.

  My Conrad scholar correspondent “Ishmael” saw the Conrad touch all throughout Dreams. “It’s apparent that Joseph Conrad was a considerable influence on whoever wrote Dreams,” Ishmael wrote. I had already been thinking along those lines. Obama refers to Conrad on three occasions in Dreams, none of them convincingly. “While we packed, my grandfather pulled out an atlas and ticked off the names in Indonesia’s island chain: Java, Borneo, Sumatra, Bali,” Obama writes. “He remembered some of the names, he said, from reading Joseph Conrad as a boy.” Obama was six years old at the time. He was as unlikely to have remembered a specific allusion to Conrad as his grandfather was to have made one.

  The second and third reference derived from Obama’s own reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reportedly as an assigned text at Occidental College in Los Angeles. It is possible that he did read the book, but it is more likely that he would have read it at Columbia in the modern fiction class taught by Edward Said, who had himself written a book titled Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. “To postmodernists,” observed Ishmael wryly, “it’s understood that all autobiography is fiction. Regular Joes, however, who
have purchased Dreams of my Father [sic] probably think otherwise.”

  A serious student of literature, Ayers had a relationship with Edward Said dating back to his New York days, and he had a particular interest, like Said, in the art of the memoir. As Ishmael noted, there is a highly favorable blurb on the back of Fugitive Days by Said. Although Ayers does not acknowledge Said as having read the manuscript, Ishmael has to wonder whether Said contributed any editorial advice prior to its publication. Regardless, Ishmael was convinced that Conrad influenced Ayers. “Ayers became a merchant seaman like Conrad,” he wrote. “Ayers also became involved in an underground terrorist organization not unlike the one found in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.”

  In terms of style, Ishmael pointed out, Conrad is perhaps best known for his use of triple parallels unbroken by a conjunction. Not surprisingly, the signature rhetorical flourish for both Ayers and the Obama of Dreams is the triple parallel unbroken by a conjunction. Ishmael provided scores of samples from all three books, a few of which follow:

  From Heart of Darkness:

  … a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.

  The man filled his life, occupied his thoughts, swayed his emotions.

  It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions.

  From Fugitive Days:

  He inhabited an anarchic solitude—disconnected, smart, obsessive.

  He continued, outlining a bottle, roughing in the bottom two thirds with diagonal lines, blocking out the remaining third with horizontals.

  We swarmed over and around that car, smashing windows, slashing tires, trashing lights and fenders—it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.

  … trees are shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, shorelines rearranged.

  From Dreams:

  … the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.

  Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered, she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office before anyone else.

  … his eyes were closed, his head leaning against the back of his chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving stone.

  Bruce Dunstan of Sydney, Australia, also intuited the Conrad influence on Dreams before I had written about the same. “I’m reading Dreams right now and amazed at the nautical metaphors right in the intro, stunning writing,” he wrote. “But it reminds me of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Dunstan saw an ironic parallel between the book’s brilliant and charismatic character, “Mr. Kurtz,” and our own Mr. Obama. Says the book’s protagonist, Charles Marlow, of Kurtz:

  The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

  Blogger Bob Calco found still another fascinating Conrad parallel, and this with his short story “The Secret Sharer.” In this case, as Calco argues, Ayers made no conscious effort to evoke Conrad. Rather, his relationship with Obama had come to mirror the relationship between the murderer “Leggatt” and the unnamed narrator of “The Secret Sharer,” an inexperienced and insecure young sea captain.

  As the story unfolds, the new captain surprises his skeptical veteran crew by taking a night watch alone. During the watch, he discovers a naked young man clinging to the bottom rung of the ship’s ladder. He helps him on board, dresses him in his own clothes, and hears out his tale. What Leggatt tells him is that as first mate of a ship, now anchored nearby, he got into a fight with an insolent sailor during the frenzy of a storm, strangled him, and was promptly locked up by his own captain.

  Leggatt makes no attempt to deceive. He expects to be tried and executed. He has escaped his own ship and swum to this one expecting little more than a moment of freedom, but the young captain senses “a mysterious communication” between him and the fugitive and decides to shelter him. “He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes,” observes the captain. He decides to hide Leggatt, not only from his own crew but also, and more perilously, from the visiting captain of the ship that Leggatt had escaped.

  Upon rereading Conrad’s story, I imagined Ayers as Obama’s Leggatt, his “second self,” one who put Obama at risk much as Leggatt did the captain. “An accidental discovery was to be dreaded now more than ever,” fretted the captain, and I suspect Obama felt much the same after Ayers’s September 2001 comments had made him something of a pariah.

  Like Leggatt, however, Ayers had been at least partially misunderstood. In numerous letters to various editors after September 11, he protested that he had never meant to endorse “terrorism,” which he defined as the commission of “random acts of terror against people.” He was being at least halfway sincere. After the Greenwich Village bomb factory disaster in 1970, the Weather Underground chose to avoid human targets.

  In Fugitive Days, published before September 11, Ayers had made this same case: “We simply didn’t have it in us to harm others, especially innocents, no matter how tough we talked.” In the 2004 preface to Dreams while discussing September 11, Obama echoes Ayers’s concern in language that sounds very much like Ayers’s own: “My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.”

  Killing “innocents” is wrong. Both Fugitive Days and Dreams make this clear, but there is another, more salient observation that both make: “real” terrorists, those who kill innocents, hide behind a blank, impenetrable veil. If in Dreams Obama cannot “penetrate the blank stares” of the September 11 terrorists, in Fugitive Days Ayers cannot “penetrate” what the American terrorists in Vietnam “have posited as impenetrable,” namely their “smug veil of immutability.” For Ayers, Americans will always remain the real terrorists. Even in his exculpatory letters, he cannot resist equating the terrorism of September 11 with the “terrorism … practiced in the countryside of Vietnam by the United States.”

  For all his protestations, Ayers had already been convicted of terror, at least in the court of public opinion. After September 11, Obama had little choice but to keep their relationship quiet. So well did he distance himself that Mendell, who covered Obama closely beginning in 2003, does not so much as mention Ayers in his 2007 book. Unlike the young sea captain, however, Obama could never be sure that his hidden partner would keep their shared moment forever secret.

  THE POSTMODERN PRESIDENT

  As much for fashion’s sake as for ideology, leftist literati like Edward Said and Bill Ayers have grabbed the banner of postmodernism and waved it proudly. Whether Ayers recruited Obama to his larger worldview is arguable. That he schooled him in its language—at least in Dreams—is all but beyond debate.

  Before Dreams, Obama showed no hint of a postmodern flair. In fact, only one real prose sample of Obama’s writing would surface prior to the 2008 election. In 1988, a journal called Illinois Issues had published his essay “Why Organize?” In 1990, the University of Illinois at Springfield included it in a collection titled After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir’s techniques, it does so without a trace of style, sophistication, or promise. Earnest to a fault, the essay would pass unnoticed in a freshman comp class.

  In this essay, Obama re-creates dialogue, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here his ungainly conjuring of black speech in a conversation between himself and a neighborhood woman would have gotten an organizer with two white parents fired:

  “I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that de
gree and become a community organizer.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don’t nobody appreciate you.”

  Dreams was published just five years down the road from After Alinsky. America was asked to believe that Obama metamorphosed in these few short years from an awkward amateur into what the New York Times has called “that rare politician who can actually write … and write movingly and genuinely about himself.”

  A much more likely explanation is that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of “Why Organize?” into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams. What is undeniable is that their two memoirs follow oddly similar rules. The evidence is in the text. Ayers describes his as “a memory book,” one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Names have been changed. Events occur out of precise chronology.

  Remnick concedes that Dreams is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a “mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping.” The same could be said for James Frey’s bestselling memoir, A Million Little Pieces. For no clear reason, however, Frey’s many inventions, when revealed in 2006, incensed the literary gatekeepers.