Bill Ayers Speaks

Good old Bill Ayers. Now that Barack Obama is President Elect, Ayers has decided to tell his sad story of victimization. Oh, he is so tortured and put upon. Poor Bill. Back in the 1960s, he and a bunch of his wealthy, entitled friends managed to destroy Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in no time at all by creating the Weatherman group and advocating the violent overthrow of the federal government. They ruined the reputation of the peace movement too with their bombs and threatening communiques. Lots of people back then assumed the Weathermen were CIA infiltrators. They certainly weren’t helping the cause of peace. Bill Ayers never spent a day in jail for the violence he perpetrated, and now he’s an author and a tenured professor of education. In fact lots of the ex-weathermen are professors, and they’re all pretty wealthy. They aren’t exactly living up to their socialist ideals, are they?

So Ayers has published a piece in In These Times.

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

The man is a regular saint.

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

Oops! He left out how he got Barack the job as chairman of the Annenberg Challenge and how they spent several years passing out loads of money but not doing anything to help Chicago school children.

Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.

That Hillary Clinton! She sure is e-vil!

I’m going to skip over the long, philosophical reflections on the ’60s and the praise of Obama’s abilities to listen to all kinds of people. We know that only includes people who are among the elite–certainly not the grass roots of the Democratic party or people who have to work for a living instead of living high on the hog on foundation grants.

But the ending sounds kind of familiar. I wonder who thought of it first?

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

And did you know Bill and Bernadine have a new book coming out? It’s all about white supremacy, something two privileged upper-middle-class white academics probably know all about.

This is an open thread.