Acts of War
The great accomplishment of Ayers’s new memoir, Fugitive Days: On the Run in America, is to make each step coherent. Where he went as a member of the Weather Underground doesn’t appall him, though what he became might. Years later he watched himself in a documentary made at the time, Underground. “I thought the politics…held up remarkably well,” he writes. “I was embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.” What Ayers is describing has a lot to do with why the Weathermen were widely thought, even on the left, to be nuts. Egoism blinded them to the fact that the masses they hoped to sway–and I include myself in these masses–they repelled.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
He asks me to remember. “There are two things you can say about the late 60s. We were confronted with a hellish reality–two hellish realities. One was the murder of black revolutionaries. COINTELPRO was not something imagined. The targeting of black messiahs [such as Chicago’s Black Panther leader Fred Hampton] was happening in our faces. It’s very hard to understand what we did without the context of that murderous assault going on in front of us. And secondly, the Vietnam War. The largest antiwar movement of the century, internationally, was underway, and yet we couldn’t stop the war.
The book is organized around the calamity that probably saved his life. In March of 1970 a huge nail bomb exploded in a town house in Greenwich Village. Annihilated by the blast were three members of the Weather Underground, one of them the bomb’s designer and another Diana Oughton, a Quaker who a few years earlier had been teaching Mayan children in Guatemala. By the government’s lights, only criminals died.
He tells me, “What I’ve tried to do is situate what we did in a larger context. One of the oddest things that’s happened was the Bob Kerrey revelations. It’s amazing that the Kerrey thing surfaced and disappeared. I know him personally, and he’s a nice guy and a decent guy, but he committed this act. They killed civilians and committed gross human-rights violations, and they not only didn’t pay for it but got medals for it.”
“A troubling portent,” said A.E. Eyre.
We decriminalize drug possession at our peril, I said.
