Note: This is Part 2 of Cashill's 3-part series. Click here for Part1.
Bill Ayers and Barack Obama have a good deal in common. Indeed, their respective memoirs, Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father, read like they could have been written by the same person—and, in fact, they may very well have been.
Dreams melds two styles: one, a long-winded accounting of conversations and events, polished just well enough to pass muster; the second, a fierce, succinct and tightly coiled analysis of the events that have been related.
Fugitive Days is fierce, succinct and tightly coiled throughout. It lacks the sometimes tedious fluff of Dreams and is the better book.
In the way of background, Ayers and Obama both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.
Just as Obama resisted “the pure and heady breeze of privilege” to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted “white skin privilege” or at least tried to.
“I also thought I was black,” says Ayers only half-jokingly. He read all the books Obama did—James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Richard Wright, The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son “Malik” after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son “Zayd” after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his careers as a self-described “community organizer,” Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago.
“They talked into the night about children, welfare, schools, crime, rent, gangs, the problems and the life of a neighborhood,” Ayers tells us of the poor black folks he tried to organize. Dreams is filled with such encounters.
Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that the author writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "knotted, howling assertion of self," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.
Indeed, the Weathermen’s inaugural act of mass violence was the “Days of Rage” in 1969 Chicago.
Ayers writes, “I felt the warrior rising up inside of me—audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity.” This is one of several references.
The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. 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. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
The reader knows that Ayers—with some justification—has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why.
This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.
“I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War,” writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.
Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.
One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence.
In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of ugly and unrelenting racism.
In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."
In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment.
"There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."
Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony.Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.
“White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy,” Ayers reminds the reader again and again. He writes as though he were not one of them.
In Obama, alas, Ayers may have found a much more a lethal weapon to use against the “marauding monster” called America than any pipe bomb he could have ever built.
Next: Part III: Why It Matters.
Part 1: Did Bill Ayers write Obama's "Dreams"?