Bill Ayers Weighs in on Democracy, Selfhood and His "Unrepentant Terrorist" Alter-Ego

[marmar]

Bill Ayers Weighs in on Democracy, Selfhood and His "Unrepentant Terrorist" Alter-Ego

Monday, 11 November 2013 09:15
By Maya Schenwar, Truthout | News


Upon the release of Bill Ayers' new memoir, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident, I attended his reading in an assembly hall in Hyde Park, Chicago, not far from the homes of both Ayers and Barack Obama. As soon as the Q&A segment was declared, a well-groomed, loud-voiced person who clearly had been preparing his question for quite some time inquired grandly, "Do you think a violent, right-wing radical could've become a professor and successful scholar, like you did as a left-wing Weather Underground radical? Could that happen?"

After a few "minor" corrections from Ayers, who is indeed a renowned education scholar - "just to clarify, we didn't actually injure any people" - Bernardine Dohrn, an accomplished law professor as well as Ayers' former Weather Underground comrade and current wife, stepped up to the mic.

"The academy is filled with right-wing people who've committed massive acts of violence," Dohrn said, calmly. She went on to explain that many academics have killed vast numbers of people in foreign wars, some directly through the military, some through designing the weapons that make those acts of killing possible. Professors have designed interrogation programs, overseen torture, strategized murderous attacks and mounted tragic wars. Dohrn concluded, "It happens all the time."

Ayers' and Dohrn's responses were elegant - and, perhaps, readied; they'd no doubt heard this question before. Public Enemy chronicles the explosion of scorching personal attacks on Ayers during Obama's first campaign for the presidency, when the then-candidate was accused of "palling around with terrorists," i.e. Ayers and friends. The memoir also reaches back to similar past eruptions of vicious publicity, tracing the construction of Ayers as a "cartoon character," the product of "a kind of weird political cage fighting, a bloody performance art." ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/19903-bill-ayers-weighs-in-on-democracy-selfhood-and-his-unrepentant-terrorist-alter-ego

[scarletwoman]

1. Kick & Rec.

I'm grateful that Ayers and Dohrn are still among us.

[Laelth]

2. k&r for the truth. n/t

-Laelth