Bill Ayers is a funny guy.
Well, maybe not so funny when he was saying things like: ’‘Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”
But his memoir—Fugitive Days, an accounting of his life on the run in the 1960s and 1970s as a chieftain of the radical and violent Weather Underground—is funny. I know, we’re supposed to be taking Ayers seriously ever since he showed up as a contributor to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) But a read of his 295-page book suggests he is a bit more notorious than he deserves, and a lot more comical.
Considering the controversy that Ayers has stirred up, I thought that his book might provide needed insight. But getting through it was like a slog through a used clothing store crammed with bellbottoms, psychedelic art, tie-died T-shirts, fat ties, extra-wide lapels and huge collars. It was hard to tell whether his book was meant as hommage to those goofy days, or a put-on. Was it written as an acknowledgement of the banality of his cause, or was it in praise of the banalities? A parody, a lampoon, a spoof? After fighting through one platitude after another, the question raises itself: Did he, could he, really mean any of this?
In one medley of self-righteousness, he wrote: “It was illegal, yes, and dangerous, and the plans for the stuff [125 pounds of stolen high explosives] apocalyptic. But we were freedom fighters, and we came to it in the spirit of John Brown and Nat Turner in the name of liberty. We knew that others would brand us criminals, and try to hunt us down to jail or kill us, but they were wrong and I didn’t care anymore. We wouldn’t give up, we sang louder and louder now and we won’t turn back.”
Sound trumpets.
Ayers’ book is loaded with such tired, overwrought and discredited dribble of ‘70s chic radicalism—class warfare, revolutionary movements, guerrilla and street theater, fascist Amerikkka, radical communiqués and manifestos, blah, blah and blah. Of course, Studs Terkel, always one to live in the imagined glories of working class struggles, thought it great, calling the book “a deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world. Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves.”
These guys are kidders, right?
Hard to tell. Ayers himself says he’s not sure if his recollections are accurate, but he never directs us to which passages in his memoir are true and which are fuzzy and which are fiction. He’s undeterred by such interrogatories, because his motives are pure: “In my book,” he said in a Nov. 23, 2001 letter to the Chicago Tribune: “I explore the complex relationship between justice, commitment and action. I try to examine the glorification of sanitized and distanced violence in our culture, and I condemn all forms of terrorism—individual, group and official.”
Well, that’s not quite right. Maybe he thinks that setting off bombs isn’t a form of violence; the Weathermen took responsibility between 1970 and 1974 for 12 bombings, and Ayers almost gleefully details his part in some of them. ’‘Even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it,” he says of the attack that demolished a restroom. Ayers actually tries to minimize the violence by claiming that no one was killed and prior warnings were issued. Yet, he glosses over the fact that the bomb that killed three of his co-conspirators in an accidental explosion in a New York townhouse was full of roofing nails meant to be deadly shrapnel. In a glaring moment of self-absorption, he doesn’t lament the possible loss of life, but he admits (it’s all about him, you see) that he is “embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.”
Ayers declaims on his blog that asking now for apologies from him is too simplistic. In a rambling and boring disquisition, he explains that all of this is complicated. Well, yes. So is attempting to repaint a room to make it look simultaneously red, orange, blue and yellow. This kind of quick-stepping around the truth moved a New York Times interviewer to suggest that Ayers seems “to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.”
Even a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (a predecessor of the Weathermen) at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University in the 1960s finds Ayers a bit, well, disingenuous. The book, said Jesse Lemisch, history professor emeritus of History at City University of New York, is “full of anachronisms, inaccuracies, unacknowledged borrowings from unnamed sources…archaic sexism, littered with boasts of Ayers’s sexual achievements, utterly untouched by feminism.”
“There are too many inaccuracies in Fugitive Days to list here,” Lemisch continues. “Some are petty: Howdy Doody fans will wonder whether Ayers’s “Uncle Bob” is the same as “Buffalo Bob.” Lemisch calls other, more serious inaccuracies in the book an attempt at “sanitization.” The book, he says, represents a “landmark” in a drive by “veterans of Weather (as well as some fans)… to rehabilitate, cleanse, and perhaps revive it—not necessarily as a new organization, but rather as an ideological component of present and future movements. There have been signs of such a sanitization and romanticization for some time.” If so, these folks are, to revert to an old expression, out of it.
Lemisch would include in these neo-Weathermen, Ayers’ wife and fellow fugitive Weather radical Bernardine Dohrn. Lemisch picks up a recent quote from her: “I have not met with such intense curiosity from the young about our experience since I came overground [sic] at the end of the seventies. If we were to take an anti-imperialist show on the road, we would sell out.” Ah, the flame still burns. And where, one wonders, would Ayers and Dohrn take us now?
When Ayers and Dohrn came out of hiding, they escaped any serious legal consequences for their game playing. Ayers now is a scholar, having been named by the University of Illinois at Chicago as a “distinguished professor of education.” Dohrn is clinical associate law professor and founder/director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University—a far cry from the mini-skirted and booted radical who once occupied the FBI‘s 10 Most Wanted List and who, in 1969, reportedly said of the horrific Manson Family murders: “Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.” She now says she was only mocking American violence. Or something.
How fevered minds can rise to prestigious positions in the world of higher education is an entirely another, but interesting, question. But as a young journalist while they were on the lam, I found the fugitive couple’s travails uninteresting and unimportant. After reading Ayers’ swashbuckling account, I deem it even less interesting and important.
For all the plotting and disrupting and splitting the couple did while underground, for all the safe houses and secret calls made from phone booths, for all the aliases and close encounters with the law, it amounted to a hill of beans. Joe and Rose, as they called themselves, might have felt like they were on everyone’s mind as the objects of a frenzied nation-wide manhunt, but truth is, the blowing up a bathroom or two did nothing to end the Vietnam War quicker or raise class consciousness, or, in the Marxian terms that that Ayers employed, pass even the smallest portion of the “the means of production” into the hands of the working class.
Obama’s association with the two, scant as it might be, doesn’t suggest that he advocates terrorism or anything like it. It only calls into question whether he values his association with a pair whose early years were such a laughable waste.
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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board.