Once a Wanker . . .

Whether or not you like John Updike’s work, I have always thought one of his talents was accurately describing the underlying moods and societal attitudes of a given point in time.  In Rabbit Run, he completely conveys the 1950’s into early 60’s expectations of conformity and neutrality in all things.  Rabbit’s biggest crime is not that he left his wife, newborn baby and young son to go shack up with Ruth, but that he had the gall to believe he was somehow different from everyone else.  It was this tightly wound societal collective head-up-its- ass-think which lead to the explosion of the “let it all hang out”,  “do your own thing” mentality which followed it, largely triggered by rage over the use of the draft to escalate the already unpopular Vietnam War.  (And no, I’m not calling John Updike a wanker - hop farther down!)

I entered college in 1967 and, in the space of a couple of years, changed from a small town girl believing in the Domino Theory into a radical anti-war, pot smoking, activist.  But even back then I could see that Bill Ayers and his Weatherpals were wankers of the highest category.  I looked up the definition of “wanker” and found “general insult comparable with dick, arse or jerk.”  I agree.  All of the above.  Their protestations that bombing the f**k out of everything they could was an acceptable response to the War rang hollow then and they still do.  They got kicked out of the SDS because, as radical as the SDS was, most of them were pretty damned intelligent and understood the difference between protest and terrorism.

And Ayers is still attempting to defend himself.  He still insists that he was not a terrorist.  In his own words earlier this year:

Terrorism – according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N. – is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten or coerce a population toward some political end.

Ayers, according to Ayers, was not a terrorist because their violence was not random.  In a 2001 interview with the Chicago Tribune Ayers said:

The reason we weren’t terrorists is because we did not commit random acts of terror against people.

OK Wanker, listen up because I’m only going to say this once:  “Random” in this context does not mean the terrorists are randomly flinging bombs.  Virtually every act of terror has been thought out ahead of time by the terrorist.  “Random” means that the acts appear random to the public because they do not know when or where the next act will occur, resulting in a general feeling of terror.  Do you think 9/11 was a “random” happening where the terrorists just happened to wander onto planes and said “dude, wonder what would happen if we highjacked these?”  And just calling your bomb threat in ahead of time does not change anything.  The general public was not privy to those calls.

Ayers has further claimed that he was not a terrorist because he never actually hurt anybody, only property.  That was not for lack of trying.  The tragic Greenwich Village explosion which killed his girlfriend and his best friend, who were constructing a bomb, came about because the group was planning to bomb an NCO officer’s dance at Fort Dix.  This potentially would have caused enormous loss of life.  It took the tragic deaths of two people close to him to make him realize that really killing people was bad.  As Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University put it:

The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don’t know what sort of defense that is.

Bill Ayers’ refusal to accept that he engaged in terrorist activities is almost as disturbing as Sarah Palin’s refusal to admit that bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors and nurses are also terrorist activities.
Now, seeking to coat-tail onto Barack Obama’s election win, Ayers has re-issued his book Fugitive Days:  Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist with a new afterward in which he calls himself a “family friend” of the Obamas.  Then, interviewed by Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America about that claim he backpedals furiously.

Let’s face it.  There is nothing to show that Barack Obama’s relationship with Ayers was anything other than as Obama described it.  And Bill Ayers, for trying to capitalize on his notoriety during the campaign, is still, as he always has been, a first class wanker.

Posted by marindenver on 11/15/08 at 12:04 PM • Permalink

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