Ayers Followup: Sympathy for the Devil

Regarding the Bill Ayers op-ed I noted yesterday …

Yes, there are plenty of squawks emanating from Wingnuttia, as predicted, but there are also some coming from the reality-based community. hilzoy has a thoughtful response that's worth reading.

She's better informed, if not flat-out smarter, than I am, so I'm not going to dispute her post at length. I agree with her that Ayers's piece self-servingly spins the facts to some degree, and we're on the same page in deploring violence and irresponsible statements.

I guess I just have a more tolerant view regarding things one might have said and done back in the full flower of sophomore-hood. I would not like to be held to account for every rallying cry I might have let loose back when I was in my early twenties and feeling my oats, and I certainly didn't have the Vietnam War dominating my consciousness. And while I didn't do anything as bad as setting off bombs back in my wilder days, there is no shortage of things that I did do that I'd undo if I could.

I also think hilzoy is being a bit unreasonable to take Ayers to task for the ineffectiveness of his tactics back then, even if a more mature person might be able to predict (especially with the luxury of hindsight) that planting bombs wasn't going to cause peace to break out all over. What Ayers has said (in the op-ed, and in two interviews that I've also noted) is that he felt utterly frustrated that nothing else was working to stop the war. I can understand frustration. I am not prepared to say that I wouldn't have gone down the same path if I were his age at the time; it might well have appealed before the reality of blown-apart bodies hit me in the face.

In the end, I like that Bill Ayers remains somewhat ambiguous about his regrets. I don't know, of course, but I believe that he may be playing this aspect up a little on purpose, to make the point that the scale of carnage being created every day by the American government is orders of magnitude larger than anything done by some punk kid. That was true back then; it remains true today. This is not to excuse his actions, nor is it to advocate further violence, but the point still stands. We are awfully shielded from the reality of what is going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere by a refusal of our MSM to print gory pictures of what the powers that be like to call collateral damage. Our PR-conscious military planners choose approaches that minimize casualties among American soldiers, at the cost of killing and maiming many, many more non-American civilians.

So, I'm just saying, and maybe not all that well: Don't be so quick to dismiss Bill Ayers. Don't be so quick to call for him to shut up and go away. Yes, his past actions were wrong, and yes, he may still come off as a sanctimonious blowhard at times. But what he has to say is not worthless.