Give Us Liberty

Four Curious Errors in Obama’s “Dreams”

June 9th, 2011 Jack Cashill, WND.com

In the retelling of his life in the acclaimed 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama embellishes and fabricates at will. He is particularly cavalier with dates. He gets these wrong as often as he does right.
Obama does not, however, make an unusual number of errors in regards to general knowledge. Let me cite the four such errors I found and explain why they deserve our attention.
Obama misquotes the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago.” Instead of writing “Hog Butcher for the World,” he writes, “hog butcher to the world.”
In discussing radical anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, Obama misspells his first name as “Franz.”
Obama refers to the South African city of Sharpeville, the site of a notorious massacre, as “Sharpsville.”
On another occasion, Obama misspells the name of rebel slave leader Denmark Vesey as “Denmark Vescey.”
Those few critics on the left who have bothered to look at my book “Deconstructing Obama,” instinctively scoff at my thesis, namely that domestic terrorist Bill Ayers took over the book from a floundering Obama and put his own stamp on it.
One minor clue to Ayers’ involvement is that in his book “A Kind and Just Parent” Ayers misquotes the Sandburg poem in exactly the same way as Obama does, “hog butcher to the world.”
To be sure, there is much stronger evidence than this: the comprehensive postmodern patois that Obama and Ayers share, the matching 55 nautical metaphors, the identical educational philosophies, the shared use of the Conrad-like triple parallels, the nearly fetishistic eye and eyebrow metaphors, the three stunning parallel stories, the same weary ’60s worldview, the borrowed Ayers girlfriend in “Dreams,” the inarguably similar Homeric openings, the dramatically inferior writings of Obama before and after “Dreams,” and more.
Leftist critics routinely ignore most of this and fix on the seemingly trivial, like the Chicago poem. “Not an uncommon slip-up,” Washington Post book editor Steven Levingston assured his readers when I first posted this online in 2009.
In his review of my book in 2011 for the same Washington Post, Craig Fehrman made the same point. Among the “flimsy examples of stylistic overlap,” Fehrman cites the fact that “Obama and Ayers both misquote a line from Carl Sandburg’s famous poem ‘Chicago.’”
When I first read this, I had to wonder whether graduate student Fehrman had actually read the book or was merely trying to suck up to book editor Levingston. I say this because I had included an explanatory note about Levingston’s criticism in “Deconstructing Obama.”
“To slip up in the same way,” I wrote in the book, “Obama and Ayers must make a series of identical choices.” For starters, they both have to refer to the poem, a natural for Ayers who grew up in Chicago in an era when students memorized poems, but not for Obama, who misquotes the poem even before he moves to Chicago.
Obama could have adapted any number of noted phrases from the poem, “City of the Big Shoulders” for instance, or “Player with Railroads.”
In “Livin’ the Blues,” Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, whose favorite poet was Sandburg, paraphrases him, referring to Chicago as that “broad-shouldered brute of a burgh.”
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