Bill Ayers: Semi-repentant domestic freedom fighter?
As disgusting as I found the McCain-Palin attempts to tar-and-feather Barack Obama with the concocted Bill Ayers association, I was less-than-impressed with Ayers’ own post-election interviews about his Weather Underground past. I think his decision not to become a public player in the campaign drama until the campaign ended was wise, but after seeing a couple of television interviews he’s done in recent weeks, I think it was also a benefit to Obama. Ayers came across as dissembling and less-than-forthright, though not about reports of their “palling around.”
But now Ayers has an Op-Ed in the NYTimes that seems to me to lay out useful facts and to express a more welcome and straightforward degree of regret, if not the self-flagellation some might want. My own reactions (largely negative) to Ayers are, I admit, visceral and not completely comprehensible, to myself. I suspect many others will react postively or negatively to him as well depending on one’s relationship to that era, or the aftermath of that era. Then again some may be more dispassionate and informative.
Read “The Real Bill Ayers” and let a discussion begin.
I’m not looking for self-flagellation from Ayers, but I heard him a few weeks ago on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and I thought he was somewhat evasive and that he downplayed his role in what the Weather Underground had been doing. When pressed about the group’s acts of violence, he usually reverted to a defense along the lines that we were young and extremely upset about the public’s failure to grasp the horror that was going on in Vietnam. He almost always tried to turn the interviewer’s questions about the group’s violent activities to what he believes was the far greater violence that the U.S. was committing during the war.
Though he acknowledges some wrongs in his NYT’s op-ed, he’s still trying to downplay the acts of the Weather Underground and his personal involvement with the group: “I never killed or injured anyone,” and “[t]he Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.”
“Several small bombs?” Does it really matter if they were “small?” A bomb is a bomb. “Placing” the bombs “in empty offices?” I’m offended by the use of the word “placing.” They were live bombs, and at least one went off, in a rest room if I remember correctly. Also, it only takes a moment for an empty office to become occupied. He’s nothing more than lucky that he “never killed or injured anyone.” And, as he did on “Fresh Air,” he again tries to explain away to some degree his illegal acts by tying them to “an illegal and unpopular war consum[ing] the nation.”
I thought McCain’s efforts to tie Ayers’s past history of terrorism to Obama was misplaced, but as for Mr. Ayers himself, I think he’s still substantially in denial.
Fox news always made the charge that Obama’s campaign ‘was started in Ayers livingroom’
A political house party I assume. But was this just one of hundreds? community organizers are big on house parties in campaigns. Does anyone know how many Obama had as State senator candidate? In what order was Ayer’s?
Thanks, Ed – I’ve already written off Fox as a source of objective reporting. The McCain/Palin linkage was another canard in the “rough and tumble” campaign.
I think anyone talking about this should indicate if they lived as an adult during those uproarious years, which some demonize and others think were great.
They were a mixed bag.
Bill Collier is right objectively on the morality of those actions!
As Ayers states, looking back after 40 years, he would not countenance thenm; I think this is not minimization but a sense of how subjectively they were considered and prerhaps as necessary at the time.
Part of an interesting question here is how we frame our(moral judgements) of others and is at play in the discussion of morality in the Church in general, viz. do we focus on individual acts or do we view the person’s whole moral development and situate acts in context.
I’ll leave it to the commentators here which approach to take, but I do not think the answer is simple.
I found the 2 part interview with Ayers and his wife on Democracy Now! to be really interesting:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/14/exclusive_in_first_joint_broadcast_interview
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/24/democracy_now_exclusive_part_2_bill
And I thought his wife Bernardine raised a very good question about the nature of “terrorism” and what is implied when we use such a term. She suggest there is a significant differences between what they were doing in the Weather Underground while she and her husband were involved (destroying buildings and doing everything they could not to kill people in the process) and what we tend to perceive as terrorism today (actually striving to killing people):
BERNARDINE DOHRN: Nothing the Weather Underground did was terrorist. And, you know, we could make lots of choices if we were reliving it. Nothing we did was perfect. But decision was made, after the death of our three comrades in a townhouse, not to hurt people, to engage in direct actions that were symbolic, that were recognizable and understandable to the American people and that protected people. And that kind of restraint was widespread. There were tens of thousands of political bombings over that first three—1970, ’71, ’72, ’73, all across the country, not under anybody’s leadership, but they were overwhelmingly restrained, symbolic.
Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings. How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context. So you have to go back to the savage and unrestrained terror that the United States was unleashing in the world, in Vietnam, as Bill said, and at home. You remember that the assassinations of black political leaders in the United States was a regular feature of life. And, you know, it seemed—the context of the time has to be understood.
That being said, I don’t want to deny that destroying buildings are violent acts and in a sense still pushing a worldview of violence, but I do think that this is far less serious than violence against people. When most people nowadays heard McCain/Palin and others call Ayers a terrorist though, they probably didn’t make a distinction like this.
Chris,
Terrorism seems to me to be the targeting of innocent victims, and while I don’t condone blowing up empty buildings, I am not sure it is accurate to call it terrorism.
In any case, the whole point of trying to connect Ayers and Obama, I think, was to play on people’s emotional reaction to the word “terrorist” in a post-9/11 world.
Eric Posner (law prof at Chicago) was a bit less impressed with the Ayers op-ed: http://volokh.com/posts/1228580698.shtml
No doubt Prof. Posner’s citation of a legal definition is correct. However, I doubt that the use of the term since 9/11 is that broad. Today, it seems to me, the meant g is likely to include the killing of innocent people.
In that sense Ayres was not a terrorist, so to call him such in the context of the campaign was dirty pool.
Somehow I detect an effective PR campaign to rehabilitate Ayers in advance of publication of his upcoming book, Race Course. The very smooth rationalizations, the timing of numerous interviews and op-eds, all designed to gain respectability. Technically, terrorist or not; shifting blame, contextualizing, etc. etc. — helpful diversions all.
Ayers’ comments on 9/10/01 in the NYTimes show that *any* contrition is a recent construction. His earlier boast when not prosecuted due to technicalities: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird, America is a great country.” Shifts in standards of unrepentance conveniently appear.
An intriguing question for me is if Ayers may have substantially written Obama’s first autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Any of this convincing? There are so many skilled writers here whose opinions I value.
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75528
“On closer examination, the path to publication appears more straightforward than I anticipated. There are two sources here to consider.
One, a surprising 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos for the American Century Foundation offers some hard evidence on what Osnos describes as the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent.
The second, more speculative source – Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir “Fugitive Days” – may very well answer the questions that Osnos cannot.
As Osnos relates, a 1990 New York Times profile on Harvard’s first black editor caught the eye of a hustling young literary agent named Jane Dystel.
Dystel persuaded Obama to put a book proposal together, and she submitted it. Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, signed on and authorized a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where the University of Chicago offered him an office and stipend to help him write. Obama dithered.
At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract and likely asked that Obama return at least some of the advance.
Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled wannabe into a literary superstar. (Was the muse accessed at Ayers’ dining room table?)
As the New York Times gushed, again with a straight face, Obama was “that rare politician who can write … and write movingly and genuinely about himself.”
Intriguing. Any thoughts? Writing samples/analysis below comparing Ayers and Obama. Or does it matter?
Obama didn’t write ‘Dreams from My Father’
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=77815
Part 1, “Bill Ayers’ motive for penning memoir”
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75528
Part 2, “Deconstructing the text”
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75606
Part 3, “Real author of Barack book: Why it matters” http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=75611
BTW, the comments at the Times site on the Ayres piece are very perceptive (well, at least the first couple of the 613 that I read. Hey, isn’ that the number of mitzvot?)
Find them here: http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html
Two struck me: One noting that Ayres doesn’t “get” (among other things) that his campaign didn’t just not work, it actively prompted the kind of backlash that extended support for the war and tarnished “liberals” and helped usher in an era of Republicans that hasn’t worked out so well. The second point was Ayres continuing to conflate activism with politics. That seems to me to be a point the pro-life movement could do well to note, as well.
The other thing that keeps rattling around in my brain is how the Ayres moment, as 9/11 and subseuqent events, have shown that violence breeds violence. It’s simple, an iron law of nature.
I’m glad Ayers had the sense and self-possession to resist the campaign spotlight. But I’m not sure he’s the best person to be giving lectures about mature and responsible political discourse! I would have liked to see more serious discussion from him about the appropriateness of the Weather Underground’s methods of protest (instead of just their effectiveness). He’s sorry that their efforts didn’t stop the war: fair enough. But does that mean he wishes they’d tried something else? Not tried at all?
A fascinating account of Ayers’ career in education and how he views his role:
“Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools….
Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system.”
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html
His doctoral dissertation is well…”The Discerning ‘I’: Accounts of Teacher Self-Construction Through the Use of Co-Biography, Metaphor, and Image.” There wasn’t much biography, metaphor, or image in the 180-page text. Ayers’s research consisted solely of a few days spent interviewing and observing the classroom practices of three nursery school teachers he knew personally…”
“The readings that Ayers assigns are as intellectually stimulating and diverse as a political commissar’s indoctrination session…”
Our schools of education are in worse shape than I imagined if this is their currency.
Obama’s autobiography ghost-written by Bill Ayers??? This unlikely scenario was dismissed by Peter Millican, the Oxford don who invented a software program that detects works written by the same author. When Republican activist Robert Fox offered him $10,000 to compare Ayers’ and Obama’s books, he did a cursory examination and declared that it was “very implausible” that Ayers had authored both books. He then offered to continue, on the condition that the results be made public even if no link to Ayers was proved. The $10,000 offer was hastily withdrawn.
Since many contributors to this blog have focussed on the morality (as opposed to the effectiveness) of destroying property as a means of protest, I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Daniel and Philip Berrigan (one still a priest, and the other, deceased, a former priest.) The Berrigans burned draft files, hammered on bombers, and mutilated the cones of nuclear weapons. As far as I know, they never apologized for their actions. (Granted – they never planted bombs.)
Ayers has said,” the responsiility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions… never leaves my thoughts for long.” Not exactly an apology, but certainly evidence of some regret.
I believe that destruction of property is usually counter-productive in the pursuit of a nonviolent world. However, what is equally evident to me is that to persons of a certain mindset violence perpetrated by our government is “legal” and must be tolerated almost indefinitely. Whereas violence perpetrated by civilians upon property, as a means of protest, is not only illegal but intolerable, and its practicioners must be humiliated for the rest of their lives.
“President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better. ”
FWIW – Before election day, several journalists had investigated links between the two men, and what Ayers writes here is the gist of what they had also concluded.