of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,"
Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at 1 point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability.
The latter writes of its breaks, blurs, edges, lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones
Liberals brag about having won the hearts and minds of America, as if, through logic and argument, they've persuaded people to accept their bankrupt European socialist ideas.
Democrats haven't changed anyone's mind. They changed the people.
More white people voted for Mitt Romney this year than voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Barack Obama lost white voters by 20 points -- the widest margin since 1984.
But in 1980, whites were 88 percent of the electorate. In 2012, they were 72 percent of the electorate. Not only that, but the non-white electorate is far more Democratic than...
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." Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency.
Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial 1 either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."
Obama too finds himself "feeling like the 1st mate on a sinking ship."
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