[Vision2020] Fw: [liberty_list] Bill Ayers --What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been -- Bill Ayers (fwd)

[Sue Hovey]

Interesting.  Another side to Ayers, if someone cares to look.  Or maybe this is all there is now.  That's interesting, too.

Sue H.  



> NOVEMBER 7, 2008
> 
> What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been
> Looking back on a surreal campaign season
> 
> By BILL AYERS
> 
> 
> On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a
> prop, a
> cartoon character created to be pummeled.
> SHARE Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine
> 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.
> 
> In years past, I would now and then-often unpredictably-appear in the
> newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my
> 2001
> memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the
> 
> American war in Vietnam. It was a time when the world was in flames,
> revolution
> was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted
> our
> utopian dreams.
> 
> These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some
> extravagant and
> fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I
> 
> probably believe now.
> 
> It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to
> reassure
> the "base," sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
> McCain
> was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months,
> and so
> Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant "terrorist," he
> explained,
> "On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing
> our
> Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police
> headquarters. ...
> He said, 'I regret not doing more.' "
> 
> McCain couldn't believe it.
> 
> Neither could I.
> 
> On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a
> prop, a
> cartoon character created to be pummeled.
> 
> When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a
> 
> now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was "pallin' around with
> terrorists." (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)
> 
> The crowd began chanting, "Kill him!" "Kill him!" It was downhill from
> there.
> 
> My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men,
> all
> venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: "Watch out!"
> and
> "You deserve to be shot." And some e-mails, like this one I got from
> satan at hell.com: "I'm coming to get you and when I do, I'll water-board
> you."
> 
> The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned
> that he
> hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was
> going
> to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then
> shot.
> (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to investigate
> threats made
> against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assistant professor at the
> University of Illinois at Chicago.)
> 
> The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name,
> they lost
> a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama was now
> poking
> holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship.
> 
> That '60s show
> 
> On Aug. 28, Stephen Colbert, the faux right-wing commentator from Comedy
> 
> Central who channels Bill O'Reilly on steroids, observed:
> 
> To this day, when our country holds a presidential election, we judge
> the
> candidates through the lens of the 1960s. ... We all know Obama is cozy
> with
> William Ayers a '60s radical who planted a bomb in the capital building
> and
> then later went on to even more heinous crimes by becoming a college
> professor.
> ... Let us keep fighting the culture wars of our grandparents. The '60s
> are a
> political gift that keeps on giving.
> It was inevitable. McCain would bet the house on a dishonest and largely
> 
> discredited vision of the '60s, which was the defining decade for him.
> He
> built his political career on being a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
> 
> The '60s-as myth and symbol-is much abused: the downfall of civilization
> 
> in one account, a time of defeat and humiliation in a second, and a
> perfect
> moment of righteous opposition, peace and love in a third.
> 
> The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American
> political life
> that the '60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one
> hand,
> let's get over the nostalgia and move on. On the other, the lessons we
> might
> have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance
> against
> the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require
> that we
> face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.
> 
> The war in Vietnam was an illegal invasion and occupation, much of it
> conducted
> as a war of terror against the civilian population. The U.S. military
> killed
> millions of Vietnamese in air raids-like the one conducted by McCain-and
> 
> entire areas of the country were designated free-fire zones, where
> American
> pilots indiscriminately dropped surplus ordinance-an immoral enterprise
> by
> any measure.
> 
> What is really important
> 
> McCain and Palin-or as our late friend Studs Terkel put it, "Joe
> McCarthy
> in drag"-would like to bury the '60s. The '60s, after all, was a time
> of rejecting obedience and conformity in favor of initiative and
> courage. The
> '60s pushed us to a deeper appreciation of the humanity of every human
> being.
> And that is the threat it poses to the right wing, hence the attacks and
> all
> the guilt by association.
> 
> McCain and Palin demanded to "know the full extent" of the Obama-Ayers
> "relationship" so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, "is
> telling the truth to the American people or not."
> 
> This is just plain stupid.
> 
> Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at
> 
> democracy's heart: the importance of talking to as many people as
> possible in
> this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the
> possibility
> of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of
> persuading
> or influencing others.
> 
> The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they
> also
> assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a
> conversation.
> 
> On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who "see America as
> the
> greatest force for good in this world" and as a "beacon of light and
> hope
> for others who seek freedom and democracy." But Obama, she said, "Is not
> a
> man who sees America as you see it and how I see America." In other
> words,
> there are "real" Americans - and then there are the rest of us.
> 
> In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders-and all of
> us-ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or
> even
> radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to
> question
> authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow
> human
> beings today.
> 
> Maybe we could welcome our current situation-torn by another illegal
> war, as
> it was in the '60s-as an opportunity to search for the new.
> 
> Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics
> but as
> fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various
> efforts
> now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our
> movement-in-the-making.
> 
> We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation
> worldwide.
> Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and
> prison
> abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of
> working
> people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people
> courageously
> pressing for full recognition.
> 
> Yet hope-my hope, our hope-resides in a simple self-evident truth: the
> future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.
> 
> History is always in the making. It's up to us. It is up to me and to
> you.
> Nothing is predetermined. That makes our moment on this earth both
> hopeful and
> all the more urgent-we must find ways to become real actors, to become
> authentic subjects in our own history.
> 
> We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit
> idly
> for a movement to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.
> 
> We have to agitate for democracy and egalitarianism, press harder for
> human
> rights, learn to build a new society through our self-transformations
> and our
> limited everyday struggles.
> 
> At the turn of the last century, Eugene Debs, the great Socialist Party
> leader
> from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of workers in Chicago, "If I could
> lead
> you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because someone else
> would come
> along and lead you out."
> 
> 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.
> 
> (c) All Rights Reserved
> Bill Ayers is a Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior
> University
> Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of
> Fugitive
> Days (Beacon) and co-author, with Bernardine Dohrn, of Race Course:
> Against
> White Supremacy (Third World Press).
> 
> 
> 
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