Cleverboy
Nov 4, 2008, 06:17 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/11/mr-ayerss-neighborhood.html
“It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.” Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.
As the polling day drew into the late afternoon, the level of security in Hyde Park matched the level of anticipation. Obama’s house, four blocks away, was surrounded.
Ayers said he felt “a lot of sympathy” for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “who was treated grotesquely and unfairly” by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: “Wright’s a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone.” Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of economic equality. “Martin Luther King was not a saint,” Ayers said. “He was an angry pilgrim.” Ayers said that he had commiserated recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right wing in recent weeks.
Across the street, neighborhood kids chanted “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” and “Yes we can!” for the cameras. Ayers smiled, looking a little like a more boomer Fred MacMurray in an episode of “My Three Sons.”
Ayers said that he had never meant to imply, in an interview with the Times, published coincidentally on 9/11, that he somehow wished he and the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence in the old days. Instead, he said, “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more ****.” Ayers said that he had never been responsible for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in Vietnam in which “thousands of people were being killed every week.”
“While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme radicalism against property,” he said. “We killed no one and hurt no one. Three of our people killed themselves.” And yet he was not without regrets. He mocked one of his earlier books, co-written with Dohrn, saying that, while it still is reflective of his radical and activist politics today, he was guilty of “rhetoric that’s juvenile and inflated—it is what it is.”
“I wish I had been wiser,” Ayers said. “I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.” I wonder if there's still time for an attack ad. "William Ayes said on election day... 'I wish we'd bombed more *****'. Barack Obama was Ayer's trusted friend. Obama, too radical for America..."
~ CB
“It’s all guilt by association,” Ayers said. “They made me into a cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life.” Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. “That’s not my world,” he said.
As the polling day drew into the late afternoon, the level of security in Hyde Park matched the level of anticipation. Obama’s house, four blocks away, was surrounded.
Ayers said he felt “a lot of sympathy” for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “who was treated grotesquely and unfairly” by the media. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical than Wright: “Wright’s a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a fiercer tone.” Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of economic equality. “Martin Luther King was not a saint,” Ayers said. “He was an angry pilgrim.” Ayers said that he had commiserated recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right wing in recent weeks.
Across the street, neighborhood kids chanted “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” and “Yes we can!” for the cameras. Ayers smiled, looking a little like a more boomer Fred MacMurray in an episode of “My Three Sons.”
Ayers said that he had never meant to imply, in an interview with the Times, published coincidentally on 9/11, that he somehow wished he and the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence in the old days. Instead, he said, “I wish I had done more, but it doesn’t mean I wish we’d bombed more ****.” Ayers said that he had never been responsible for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in Vietnam in which “thousands of people were being killed every week.”
“While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme radicalism against property,” he said. “We killed no one and hurt no one. Three of our people killed themselves.” And yet he was not without regrets. He mocked one of his earlier books, co-written with Dohrn, saying that, while it still is reflective of his radical and activist politics today, he was guilty of “rhetoric that’s juvenile and inflated—it is what it is.”
“I wish I had been wiser,” Ayers said. “I wish I had been more effective, I wish I’d been more unifying, I wish I’d been more principled.” I wonder if there's still time for an attack ad. "William Ayes said on election day... 'I wish we'd bombed more *****'. Barack Obama was Ayer's trusted friend. Obama, too radical for America..."
~ CB
