Bill Ayers Redux
By dcmediagirl on November 7, 2008 at 7:29 AM in Current Affairs
Now from the New Yorker comes the following little interview with William Ayers:
One night, Ayers recalled, he and Dohrn were watching Bill O’Reilly, who was going on about “discovering” Ayers’s 1974 manifesto, “Prairie Fire.” “I had to laugh,” Ayers said. “No one read it when it was first issued!” He said that he laughed, too, when he listened to Sarah Palin’s descriptions of Obama “palling around with terrorists.” In fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”
Ook.
Ayers seemed curiously calm and cheerful about the way he had been made an issue in the campaign. He seemed unbothered to have been part of what he called “the Swiftboating” process of the 2008 campaign.
It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.” Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.
Uh, “swiftboating” refers to false attacks directed at a candidate. The last time I looked, Ayers and his wife WERE members of the Weather Underground. Ayers and Obama DID have a relationship that extended beyond running into each other in the neighborhood. The shamelessness of the lies is simply mindboggling.
The kicker:
Ayers said he felt “a lot of sympathy” for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “who was treated grotesquely and unfairly” by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: “Wright’s a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone.” Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of economic equality. “Martin Luther King was not a saint,” Ayers said. “He was an angry pilgrim.” Ayers said that he had commiserated recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right wing in recent weeks.
Call me crazy, but somehow I doubt that if Martin Luther King had been able to react to 9/11 he would have used the terminology Jeremiah Wright used. But that’s just me.
Poor Bill Ayers. Poor Rashid Khalidi. It’s always such a bummer when meanies throw your words (and deeds) back in your face and start asking all those rude questions and making you all upset.
I’ve thought long and hard about why the Ayers story got no traction in the press. The only conclusion I can come to is that baby boomer-age managers, who hold the lion’s share of decision-making posts at the most influential media outlets, are still romanticizing the ’60s — and to a lesser extent, the early ’70s — adhering to the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mentality. Sure the Weather Underground kicked up a fuss, but we didn’t want to go to Vietnam, man! Besides, all those hippie chicks raising their fists in defiance of the Man were hotttt.
The younger people in newsrooms go along with their superiors’ narratives because, not to put too fine a point on it, they’re completely and wholly ignorant about American history. They wouldn’t know the SDS or the Symbionese Liberation Army from a hole in the wall.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
by 
* (Included in the 
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.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
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