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What the Media Won't Say about Frank Marshall Davis
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
7/24/2012
Excerpt:
"Salon contributor Eric McHenry will likely be surprised to find himself categorized as "the media," but his omissions and evasions about Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis so impressively mirror the major media's that he deserves the honor.
What drew my attention to McHenry's recent article in Salon, "Obama's Oddest Critic," is that yours truly is the "critic" in question. According to the subtitle, "Jack Cashill is obsessed with the president's college poetry and positive it proves his life is 'one massive fraud.'" In that exactly none of my most recent 100 articles is about Obama's poetry -- and only a few even mention it -- I doubt I rank high on anyone's obsession index other than McHenry's.
The reason I mention the poetry at all is to shed light on the young Obama's relationship with Davis, his Hawaiian mentor. In my early writing on Obama's literary talents, I took him at his word that he wrote some "very bad poetry" and largely ignored the two radically different poems he submitted as an Occidental College undergraduate, the cringe-worthy "Underground" and the more complex "Pop."
It was my co-conspirator Don Wilkie who prompted me to take another look at the latter poem. "I have read 'Pop' now maybe 20 or 30 times," Wilkie wrote me a few years back, "and I think it is about Obama telling us that 'Pop' really is, his pop."
At the time, all serious critics were insisting that the subject of "Pop" was Obama's grandfather Stan Dunham, a man whom Obama called "Gramps." On the name alone, this interpretation made no sense. By late 2010, I knew enough about Davis to be sure he was the poem's subject, and I said so in my book. A year and a half later, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss confirmed as much in his biography, Barack Obama: The Story. McHenry kept this confirmation from his readers.
In fact, Davis was the subject not only of "Pop," but also of an Obama high school poem, "An Old Man." Both poems deal with the relationship between a naïve young man and a jaded older one. Curiously, so does Davis's poem, "To a Young Man," written just a few years before Obama's. Had McHenry given his readers a link to the article in which I make the case for Davis as author of the Obama poems, they might not have thought it as amusing as McHenry does.
McHenry likewise thinks it irrelevant that "Obama didn't remember the poem from his high school magazine when reminded of it in 2008." Again, however, he denies his audience critical information. When Obama was shown "An Old Man" in 2008, he responded, "It sounds in spirit that it's talking a little bit about my grandfather." Obama knew better than that. Like his handlers and their media accomplices, he consciously steered the conversation away from Davis.
There was good reason for the steering. As McHenry concedes, Davis was a communist and a pornographer. Had Mitt Romney written two youthful poems about a man of comparable interests, that man's name would be more notorious than "Bain Capital." As it is, not one Democrat out of a hundred could identify "Frank Marshall Davis."
Hewing to the media norm, McHenry reassures his readers that Davis merits attention only from a monomaniac like myself, an "Ahab," a "Javert." "Like many other black intellectuals of his generation," writes McHenry dismissively, "Davis had at one time been a communist." That is all he says on the subject."
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View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...all_davis.html
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
7/24/2012
Excerpt:
"Salon contributor Eric McHenry will likely be surprised to find himself categorized as "the media," but his omissions and evasions about Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis so impressively mirror the major media's that he deserves the honor.
What drew my attention to McHenry's recent article in Salon, "Obama's Oddest Critic," is that yours truly is the "critic" in question. According to the subtitle, "Jack Cashill is obsessed with the president's college poetry and positive it proves his life is 'one massive fraud.'" In that exactly none of my most recent 100 articles is about Obama's poetry -- and only a few even mention it -- I doubt I rank high on anyone's obsession index other than McHenry's.
The reason I mention the poetry at all is to shed light on the young Obama's relationship with Davis, his Hawaiian mentor. In my early writing on Obama's literary talents, I took him at his word that he wrote some "very bad poetry" and largely ignored the two radically different poems he submitted as an Occidental College undergraduate, the cringe-worthy "Underground" and the more complex "Pop."
It was my co-conspirator Don Wilkie who prompted me to take another look at the latter poem. "I have read 'Pop' now maybe 20 or 30 times," Wilkie wrote me a few years back, "and I think it is about Obama telling us that 'Pop' really is, his pop."
At the time, all serious critics were insisting that the subject of "Pop" was Obama's grandfather Stan Dunham, a man whom Obama called "Gramps." On the name alone, this interpretation made no sense. By late 2010, I knew enough about Davis to be sure he was the poem's subject, and I said so in my book. A year and a half later, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Maraniss confirmed as much in his biography, Barack Obama: The Story. McHenry kept this confirmation from his readers.
In fact, Davis was the subject not only of "Pop," but also of an Obama high school poem, "An Old Man." Both poems deal with the relationship between a naïve young man and a jaded older one. Curiously, so does Davis's poem, "To a Young Man," written just a few years before Obama's. Had McHenry given his readers a link to the article in which I make the case for Davis as author of the Obama poems, they might not have thought it as amusing as McHenry does.
McHenry likewise thinks it irrelevant that "Obama didn't remember the poem from his high school magazine when reminded of it in 2008." Again, however, he denies his audience critical information. When Obama was shown "An Old Man" in 2008, he responded, "It sounds in spirit that it's talking a little bit about my grandfather." Obama knew better than that. Like his handlers and their media accomplices, he consciously steered the conversation away from Davis.
There was good reason for the steering. As McHenry concedes, Davis was a communist and a pornographer. Had Mitt Romney written two youthful poems about a man of comparable interests, that man's name would be more notorious than "Bain Capital." As it is, not one Democrat out of a hundred could identify "Frank Marshall Davis."
Hewing to the media norm, McHenry reassures his readers that Davis merits attention only from a monomaniac like myself, an "Ahab," a "Javert." "Like many other black intellectuals of his generation," writes McHenry dismissively, "Davis had at one time been a communist." That is all he says on the subject."
.......................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...all_davis.html