There's a lot of crazy folks in the world. A lot of people were against the war in Vietnam.
From what some of my vet friends tell me, it's a war that should have never been fault.
I don't get much out of them besides that it's to difficult for them to talk about it.
With all due respect, just because your a POW, doesn't mean your ready to be President. There were many POW's, that didn't get the help they needed after the war. Are they forgotten? YES, many were forgotten. When they came home, there wasn't much for them to come home to.
I don't blame Obama for what went on in the 60's. He was just a child. I don't play that guilt by association.
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In one revealing passage of his 2001 memoir, Ayers writes about charging a police line in Chicago during a demonstration: "Spinning again, I sailed back toward the light and into the waiting arms of three pink pigs in bright blue uniforms, one with prickly whiskers, another with rippling fat from jowl to hoof, all three glistening and welcoming as they broke my fall with their padded embrace on that hot and fiery night, carried me gently off the stage, and then beat the s--t out of me in the soft green grass of Grant Park. It was sheer joy and wild relief to be there cherishing every lovely blow, bleeding a bit, but neither broken nor murdered on the IC tracks below."
The liberals of this world, the Obamas, favor persuasion, compromise and accommodation. "Those tendencies have to be totally discredited, smashed, and destroyed," Ayers wrote in 1969 as the Weatherman organization was taking shape. Cathy Wilkerson, another member of the group, recalled in her 2007 memoir "Flying Close to the Sun" (Seven Stories), that this meant "rather than engage with our friends who questioned aspects of Weatherman's analysis or tactics, we should shout them down or ignore them." As Wilkerson put it, "We had become a voice of outrage whose single-mindedness had cut us off from the movement, from reality."
Such arrogance is true of just about all firebrands, whether Leninist, nationalist, fascist or, for that matter, Islamist. Which is why it is so easy for them to slide into terrorism. In the Green and Siegel documentary, Ayers says the Weather Underground planted bombs in government buildings in the early 1970s to draw attention, not to kill people. But one of the first big operations they planned was the bombing of a dance for noncommissioned officers at Fort Dix, N.J.
Ayers was not there, but his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, was helping cobble together the explosives for that attack in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse when the dynamite detonated unexpectedly. Successive blasts erupted up through the building, destroying the house and killing Oughton along with two other members of the group. (Wilkerson, whose father owned the house, escaped. So did Kathy Boudin, who had been in the shower and struggled naked into the street as the walls collapsed.) Only after that horrific own goal did Ayers and the other leaders of the group decide it was time for symbolic, not deadly, attacks.
Eventually Ayers married Bernardine Dohrn, the impassioned poster girl of the Weather Underground. They had children of their own and, when Kathy Boudin and her partner were jailed for killing cops during an armored car robbery in 1981, Ayers and Dohrn raised their baby boy.
Maybe as their days of rage gave way to years of aging, Ayers and Dohrn lost interest in terror tactics. But they never lost their self-righteousness or, I suspect, a revolutionary fervor that burns in them like a hot red coal under cool white ashes. Even when Ayers was embarrassed by a New York Times profile claiming that he had loved explosives—an interview that appeared in the issue of September 11, 2001, as it happened—his "clarification" published later on the Web hardly seemed a mea culpa: "I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told [the reporter] that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn't do enough to stop the war." Interestingly, the Vietnamese never asked for that help, and didn't need it.
The saga of the Weather Underground is a compelling story, I guess, if you were an American student in college or a GI in Vietnam back then. But if you were in elementary school? It must seem like ancient history. And what is most striking about the Weatherman story now is how completely irrelevant those passions of four decades ago are to the vast majority of voters.
Is Bill Ayers the last real obstacle to Obama's election? If so, then Obama's probably home free. But in the contradictory world of revolutionary thought, of worse is better and liberals be damned, the triumph of a moderate like Obama might just be another something that Ayers actually regrets.
© 2008
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