Jack Cashill, who received a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1982 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it, has returned with more evidence that my assessment of him (“an idiot of long-standing“) was correct. He accuses Michiko Kakutani of plagiarizing his 2008 blockbuster, “The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama,” and begins his defense of this claim as one does: by demonstrating that William Ayers is familiar with Homer’s Odyssey.
Ayers knows his Homer. In his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for instance, he specifically identified the Odyssey’s “Cyclops” as a metaphor for the “doomed and helpless” United States. “Picture an oversized, somewhat dim-witted monster, greedy and capricious,” Ayers wrote in his uniquely patriotic way, “its eyes put out by fiery stakes and now flailing in a blind rage, smashing its way through villages and over mountains.”
If, as Cashill hopes to establish, “Ayers knows his Homer,” it would behoove him not to quote Ayers saying that Odysseus put out the eyes of the famously one-eyed monster Polyphemus. That Ayers speaks of a stereoscopic cyclops speaks ill of him; that Cashill attempts to establish both his own and Ayers’s classicist credibility via a quotation about a two-eyed cyclops only proves that neither should be trusted with Homeric parallels. (Leave that to the experts.) Then, as if he anticipated the complaint of the previous sentences, he politely offers evidence of their validity:
In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian.
Obama once spoke with a one-eyed man, Cashill argues, therefore this reference to a one-eyed cyclops in Dreams From My Father corresponds with Ayers’s reference to a two-eyed one in Fugitive Days. Granted, my summary of his point may be uncharitably literal, even though Obama’s one-eyed man had, to all appearances, two eyes (“an older balding man with a glass eye,” the “drift of [which] gave the Iranian a menacing look”); and even though the point of Obama telling this story is that, despite one of the man’s two eyes giving him “a menacing look,” he “was a friendly and curious” person; and even though, unlike the Odyssey, in which the curse of the one-eyed cyclops Polyphemus results in his father, Poseidon, to unleash contrary winds and furious storms, thereby extending the travels and travails of Odysseus, all that resulted from this conversation was that someone else quoted Malcolm X; even though all those parallels break down, maybe I am being uncharitably literal. Once the sentence I quoted above is inserted back into its context, the parallels between Homer’s epic and Obama’s memoir become clear:
In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian. Before he completes his heroic cycle, he also confronts many of the other distractions: green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the “ghosts” of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry “demons.”
Obama, as scripted by Ayers, lived the most Odysseus-esque life of anyone ever. I never even knew he went to the underworld! But our President is even more Homeric than that because, in Cashill’s estimation, Obama
assumes the role of both Telemachus and Odysseus, the son seeking the father, and the father seeking home.
This novel statement—no variation of which has appeared in the 2,800 year history of criticism on one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition—was later brazenly stolen by the chief literary critic of the New York Times:
“Dreams From My Father,” written before [Obama] entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots—a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.
Kakutani should have known better than to borrow such a unique insight into the structure of the Odyssey. Did she really think no one would notice her thievery if she included it as an afterthought to a sentence with which it bears an organic connection? If Cashill’s larger argument is correct—if, that is, “Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama’s ‘personal interior journey'”—then any literate person who reads both the Odyssey and Dreams From My Father would pick up and comment upon the Homeric parallels, meaning his sentiment is too mundane to be plagiarized.
Of course, Cashill’s larger argument is not correct. Just because Ayers and Obama both use words that relate to the sea (“fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky”) doesn’t mean that Ayers ghostwrote for Obama or that either are directly indebted to Homer. Cashill predicates his complaint against Kakutani on her having stolen the substance of his argument while denying its conclusion. She did nothing of the sort. She tossed off a nifty parallel that fit organically within a larger framework; Cashill erected a larger framework in order to draw tendentious parallels between Circe and Diana Oughton on the grounds that she dated Obama for a year and lived in a nice neighborhood.
UPDATE. It turns out I was wrong—Cashill’s claim that William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father has been independently confirmed. Should you desire to see a man eat his hat, here is a link to my formal apology.
23 comments
August 30, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Rob_in_Hawaii
Jack “Cash-Hill.” Thanks. Now I’ve got the name of the main character for the Wall Street novel I’ll write some day.
August 30, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Rob_in_Hawaii
Hey, maybe Homer plagiarized Obama. Did Cashill think of that? Time-Space Continuum or something. Makes as much sense as what he’s put together so far.
August 30, 2009 at 5:31 pm
dana
Wouldn’t this piece, strictly speaking, be an argument against the overproduction of literary critics?
August 30, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Ahistoricality
Wouldn’t this piece, strictly speaking, be an argument against the overproduction of literary critics?
More like a case for licensing.
August 30, 2009 at 5:40 pm
teofilo
It’s an argument against the overproduction of fake literary critics.
August 30, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Davis X. Machina
Hey, maybe Homer plagiarized Obama.
Even Homer ripped off Homer. The Odyssey is, after all, a sequel.
August 30, 2009 at 6:08 pm
andrew
Homer didn’t rip off Homer, but rather another man of the same name.
August 30, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Vance
What — Oughton (d. 1970) dated Obama (b. 1961)? Now I’m really confused. Or was it Kakutani who dated Obama? Are you pretending to be serious, or pretending to be joking?
August 30, 2009 at 7:46 pm
SEK
Both and neither. Here’s Cashill:
I should’ve written “dated Ayers-Obama/Obama-Ayers,” but that would’ve just confused Cashill’s confusion. (By which I mean: I lost track of who was sleeping/writing about whom, and when they were doing so, at least when there was no actual sailing involved.)
August 30, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Vance
Ugh, sorry I asked. What a maroon. It’s as though rolling the few things he knows around and about Obama over his tongue feels, to Cashill, just as good as actually having a thought or making a point.
August 31, 2009 at 8:38 am
Anderson
Here’s Cashill: * * *
Please, don’t do that to us again.
August 31, 2009 at 10:01 am
Malaclypse
I demand to see the original of Homer’s birth certificate. Until I do, questions will remain.
August 31, 2009 at 11:21 am
ben
More like a case for licensing.
He got a license, though.
I’d like to take this comment space to inaugurate a NEW FEATURE here on The Edge of the American West. I can’t say anything about the regularity of its appearances because I’m doing this mea sponte, as it were, and without the approval or even knowledge of the blogmasters. It will be called “Ask a Historian”, and the first question is: “What’s the deal with the history channel? Has it always been terrible?”.
Expect a post responding to this question at length shortly!
August 31, 2009 at 11:21 am
ben
Future installments will feature competently executed HTML formatting.
August 31, 2009 at 11:25 am
ari
I once had dinner with the president (ceo?) of the History Channel. Nice guy. Anyway, over a too-heavily-sauced white fish, he explained that the demographic profile of the channel’s viewers is almost exactly the same as ESPN’s, and that, in fact, many middle-aged men flip back and forth between the two. He also explained to me, at some length, the meaning of “for-profit”.
August 31, 2009 at 11:27 am
Charlieford
I saw a program about A. Kroeber, the anthropologist, on the History Channel back in the mid-90s, and it was great. Unfortunately, that’s the only program I’ve seen on it. So, not a particularly scientific sample.
August 31, 2009 at 11:34 am
Ahistoricality
More like a case for licensing.
He got a license, though.
No, he got a degree. Like the Law, credentially for literary critics (and other pundits) should be independent of educational institutions, and should require both continuing education and periodic retesting, as well as the potential of revocation for malpractice.
August 31, 2009 at 11:35 am
kevin
Anyway, over a too-heavily-sauced white fish
Are you writing for Vanity Fair now?
August 31, 2009 at 11:53 am
Erik Lund
“Jack “Cash-Hill.” Thanks. Now I’ve got the name of the main character for the Wall Street novel I’ll write some day.”
Rob-In-Hawaii:
what kind of gold? Boring old ore, or something more interestingly American, like Holy scripture (_The Book of Mormon_ in Cumorrah), or “the [genealogical] source of the Susqehannah” in Leatherstocking’s cave in _Pioneers_?
August 31, 2009 at 11:56 am
ari
Are you writing for Vanity Fair now?
That’s a gig I would really enjoy. But no, in this case I was just reaching out to ben, trying to find a common language with my intended audience.
September 1, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Gary Farber
Return with me to last October (second part of the post, under the YouTube and unrelated first half), when I beat on Mr. Cashill then, if you like.
You’ve read the original lunatic uber-source for the birthers, I trust
September 1, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Gary Farber
“I saw a program about A. Kroeber, the anthropologist”
Alfred L. Kroeber, for those interested, is also the father of Ursula K. Le Guin.
September 24, 2009 at 6:39 pm
SEK
UPDATE. It turns out I was wrong—Cashill’s claim that William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father has been independently confirmed. Should you desire to see a man eat his hat, here is a link to my formal apology.