About as unconvincing as it gets.
Under the guise of soul-searching, Ayers offers an exercise in self-flattery. He and his comrades in the Weather Underground, we’re to believe, were idealists, exquisitely concerned with the value of human life. No mention, of course, that they subscribed to an authoritarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and had outright contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.
The Fox News caricature of Ayers was deceitful, but this too is deceitful.
Worst of all, Ayers still telegraphs the message that nonviolent protest doesn’t work. As if his antics accomplished something that peaceful marches did not. As if the Weather Underground’s violence didn’t enable the right to score points against the left for decades, up to the most recent presidential campaign.
Ayers’s strategy of obfuscation works, however. We see it in reader comments like this one, from Bill Allen in Arizona:
Bill Ayers had the right values, but sometimes engaged in behavior in pursuit of those values that most of us then – and now – consider to be unacceptable. But he exhibited the real measure of patriotism – to be able simultaneously to love what one’s country could stand for, and to loathe what had gone most wrong with it.
This is gobbledygook. It describes an unobjectionable liberal viewpoint that Ayers did not hold in the ’60s and ’70s. The Weather Underground didn’t articulate reformist goals; on the contrary, it directed some of its most virulent rhetoric at liberal reformists. No, Ayers sought to “smash the state,” i.e., to overthrow the U.S. republic. A piddling and pathetic attempt, maybe, but that was the aim. Whatever he was, he was not a patriot. Had anyone called him that back in the day, he would have been offended.
For reasons partly pertaining to luck, the right-wing attempt to link Obama and Ayers had no real effect and was defeated. Thank goodness. That doesn’t mean we have to play along with Ayers’s whitewash.
[Update: From Hilzoy —
They say they did it to end the war in Vietnam. But how, exactly, that was supposed to happen is a total mystery. It’s the Underpants Gnome theory of political activism:
Phase 1: Set a bunch of bombs.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The war ends!
Hilzoy also calls Ayers out for beginning his narrative conveniently in 1970, after Weatherman morphed into the Weather Underground.]
[Update 2: Katha Pollitt gives Ayers a thorough drubbing from the left, thank god.]
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