Threat Quality Press

I want to draw your attention to this.  It’s from a site called the American Thinker, and I’m kind of torn about giving it any credence.  I don’t know that I want people to actually read this article, because I don’t want to contribute, in even the remotest way, to its credibility.  It’s an article hypothesizing that Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, was actually ghost-written by Bill Ayers.

And it is utterly moronic.

What I mean when I say “moronic” is that Jack Cashill’s analysis is so embarrassingly, shockingly, painfully stupid that I am ashamed on his behalf when I read it.  The only thing that prevents me from suspecting that the article was written by a three-year-old is the fact that it’s capitalized correctly, and that I have some lingering faith in the idea that a PhD is indicative of some kind of intellectual ability. But I’m rapidly re-evaluating that last position.

From the beginning, the premise of his argument is ridiculous.  On the one hand, he posits that because Barack Obama never wrote an articles for any law journals, it was necessarily impossible that he could write a well-written memoir–or, rather, that writing a good memoir would be nothing short of “miraculous.”  This is stupid for a number of reasons, among them the fact that there are many memoirists who have ALSO never written anything for law reviews.  Many who have never written anything appreciable except in the privacy of their homes, or for classes that they were taking, or what have you. (Do you think they make people in law school write papers?  You know, I’m not sure!)  Moreover, the idea that someone might have very little literary experience and then turn around and write something astonishing is not only plausible, it’s not even unprecedented.

It happens.  You can pick up a lot of good rhetoric from reading, interestingly enough.

But Cashill asserts that Obama’s memoir is so astonishingly well-written that the only explanation is that Obama had heretofore-unknown talents of rhetoric (again:  much more plausible that Cashill seems to think), or that he had help from an editorial staff.  As though, somehow, those things are mutually exclusive, or as though the use of an editor would indicate some kind of fraud on Obama’s behalf.

Strangely, Cashill then goes on to say that Dreams of My Father actually isn’t that well-written.  That there are parts of it that are very good, but that Bill Ayers’ memoir is consistently stronger.  So, the argument here is that Obama’s book is too good to have been written by himself, just not as good as the person’s that wrote it for him.

Enough of all this reason!  I know what you want to see–you want to see some science.  And Mr. Cashill does not disappoint!

Here’s an example of some of his analysis–provided under what he calls “a little science”:

The “Fugitive Days” excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12^th grade reading level [on the Flesch Reading Ease Score].  The “Dreams’” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12^th grade reading level.  Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A little science indeed, Mister–excuse me, Doctor Cashill–very, very little science.  Cashill is suggesting that because these two books are at the same reading level then they must have been written by the same person.  Of course!  They’re both on a 12th-grade reading level!  Dreams of My Father, along with every other book you read in TWELFTH GRADE, must have been written by the same person!  Bill Ayers will be pleased to know, I’m sure, that he can start collecting royalties on A Brave New World, 1984, and Heart of Darkness.

I’m not sure if it’s just 12th-grade level books that were all written by the same person, or was every book that matches every other book’s Flesch Reading Ease score written by the same person?

But it’s not just readability that Mr.–sorry, sorry, DOCTOR–Cashill thinks about!  Look at how similar the vocabulary of the books are (part of what Cashill talks about as his “good, old-fashioned literary detective work”):

“Memory sails out upon a murky sea,” Ayers writes at one point.  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 also 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 typical passage.  Both also make conspicuous use of the word “flutter.”

Did you read that right?  Did I?  Is Cashill positing a link between Ayers’ work and Obama’s because the word “murky” appears ONCE in Ayers’ text, and FOUR TIMES in Obama’s?  Because of their conspicuous use of the word “flutter”?  (I’m assuming that here “conspicuous” means “occurred at least one time, possibly as some kind of metaphor.”)  Because Barack Obama, in a four-hundred and sixty-four page book uses the imagery of “wind and waves” twelve times?

While we’re asking, I guess, is that twelve times that wind and waves are used together, or twelve times each?  Or is it a total of twelve times that Obama used wind OR waves?  It doesn’t say; I’m guessing it was that last one.

Cashill really begins to flex his literary detective muscles, though, when he moves on to suggest that the metaphors in Dreams of My Father are primarily nautical ones–and it is impossible for Barack Obama to know any nautical metaphors!  Because, unlike Bill Ayers, Barack Obama has never been on a boat!  I think my favorite one is this:

The metaphorical use of the word “tangled” might also derive from one’s nautical adventures.  Ayers writes of his “tangled love affairs” and Obama of his “tangled arguments.”

Which suggests that, not only did Barack Obama never encounter anything that even resembled the ocean (despite being from HAWAII, which is AN ISLAND), he also never encountered anything that resembled rope.  This one is also pretty sweet:

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 did.

First of all, it’s what we call “An Argument From Personal Incredulity”–i.e., I can’t think of how it can be true, therefore it must be false.  But the real clincher here is the absurdity, just the clock-melting lunacy, of the idea that only a person who worked on a ship would use “ballast” as a metaphor.  I think it actually tells us a lot about Mr. Cashill–DOCTOR, I mean, sorry, Doctor Cashill–and what kind of writing he does.  Namely, he only uses metaphors that he has directly encountered in his life.  This suggests a man who has probably never picked up and read an actual book, a man who doesn’t know the first thing about actual writing, and a man with the imagination of a brain-damaged gibbon.

I shouldn’t say that, that was harsh.  I don’t know anything about gibbons.  Maybe the ones with brain damage have rich inner lives, how would I know that?  Pretending to know about things I don’t understand isn’t my bag, it’s DOCTOR Cashill’s.

But, I think it might be true.  Check this out, which is DOCTOR Cashill talking about his own book, Sucker Punch:

Sucker Punch again offers a useful control.  It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky.  None.  And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

It is a book about Muhammed Ali, and it does not include any references to any of those things–horizons, panoramas, things howling or fluttering–despite the fact that Cashill knew about them!  ASTONISHING!  Interestingly, this article that I just wrote right now contains no references–metaphorical or otherwise–to things puncturing, stabbing, slashing, cutting or slicing, despite the fact that I fenced for four years, and kind of want to stab Jack Cashill in the mouth!

Metaphors that are not contained in this post also include:  Cyclopean horrors (despite my documented interest in H. P. Lovecraft), mutants with healing factors (despite the fact that I think Wolverine is really cool), and references to soft sandy shores and sunsets on the beach (despite my having spent a couple of summers vacationing in North Carolina).  Holy crap!  My article must have been ghost-written!

I used words like “books,” “reading,” and “writing” at least once each–words that appear SEVERAL TIMES in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest–which is also within eight-tenths of a point of my work on the Flesch Ease of Reading Scale!  My blog is being ghost-written by David Foster Wallace from beyond the grave!

In closing, I would like to say:

Dear Purdue University:

In the interests of intellectual discourse, and in the interest of maintaining your reputation as a credible institution, I am hereby requesting that you either retract DOCTOR Jack Cashill’s PhD in American Studies, or else award me one in Basically Being Able to Use Words.

This entry was posted on October 13, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Braak, Politics with tags Braak, News?, Politics, shitheads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.