So, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn finally surfaced (again!). Apparently, according to Good Morning America, they were "family friends" with the Obamas; according to Democracy Now! (which I actually watched), they were more like part of a large circle of friendlies. Big whoop. The whole Obama relationship or non-relationship or casual relationship or whatever doesn't get me fired up one way or another, for reasons I'll explain.
But it did start some water boiling in my mind about the Sixties, and how this decade from the middle of the last century keeps winding up being a focal point for our politics. Seems to me the last forty-fifty years have lead to some strange bedfellows, and the sort of multi-generational hate that's kept Middle East morticians in business for millenium.
OK, follow me, anybody who gives a rat's ass what I'm thinking about....
Let's dispose of the Obama/Ayers relationship; I don't want it cluttering my mind, cause I think it's unimportant, and here's why.
First off, Obama (who is three months and fifteen days older than I am, by the way) was a pre-pubescent child during the Weather Underground's heyday. I think it's unfair to tye a forty-seven year old man to acts that happened before he could even ejaculate. By the time Barack started to unfurl his public life, Ayers and Dohrn were just a couple of professionals with admittedly shady pasts. As were my first couple of bosses, and about half the people I play music with.
Secondly, if one is to hold Obama accountable for his association with Ayers, one also has to hold McCain (and of course all of the last five Republican administrations) accountable for their associations with:
G. Gordon Liddy
Chuck Colson
Orlando Busch
Scooter Libby
Ollie North
Note that these are just the convicted Republicans, most of whom are still warmly embraced by high-ranking Republicans (i.e., presidents and presidential candidates). Ayers, for what it's worth, was never convicted, although the right-wing consensus is that he was let off on a technicality.
And, let me state for the record, that however respectable the Ayers are now, I think they were, at best, guilty of the same kind of moral-twisting self-mind-fuck that animates the entire right-wing. I'll explain shortly.
OK. Enough of that. What I really wanted to write about was some issues about the sixties that came to mind when I saw Ayers and Dorhn on Democracy Now!
Ayers and Dorhn both spoke eloquently about the context of the times that gave birth to the Weather Underground. Now, like Obama, I was a kid while all this was going on. But I was kind of a weird kid, and watched the news on TV, paid attention, and asked questions. One of my earliest memories was watching the coverage of MLK's assassination. At the time, my sisters and I were living with an aunt & uncle who were, as was not atypical of Oklahomans of the time, unquestioning authoritarian racists. So, really, my initial spin of the sixties came from both this aunt & uncle, and from my sisters, who were nearly teenagers at the time, & who did do a lovely job of trying to detoxify my brain.
My remembrance of the times, then, were of a world that had gone insane. Shortly after we were returned to our Mom (later in the summer of 68), I started reading more broadly: Time, Life, Look magazines; the NY Times (yeah, told you I was a weird kid). And I spent a lot of time viewing the world through the eyes of my wonderful older sisters, who in turn had older friends, who explained what was going on from a more lefty viewpoint.
It's important to remember this: at the time, correctly or in-, there was a commonly-held view in lefty circles that the full power of the government of the United States was turned on its own citizens. There's a lot of evidence to support this (and I will document this in a future post), in particular that the War in Vietnam was no more and no less than a meat-grinder that not only needlessly killed our solders by the bucketful, but also was killing innocent people in Vietnam by the acre.
Remember this, too: Under J. Edgar Hoover and other corrupt law enforcement leaders, various law enforcement agencies were in fact murdering Black leaders as a matter of policy.
These beliefs were unquestioned in large segments of the population in the late sixties & early seventies. I have seen enough evidence to believe it to a high degree of certainty. But we don't even need to stipulate that it's true to state with fact that that was what a huge number of people believed.
If one is to live up to one's morals, one must do all that one can morally do to stop such situations. This too I treat as a given. But it's also the last point at which I agree with the principles of such militant groups as the Weather Underground. Or the PLO, or the Likud goverment of Israel, or the Neocons, or the IRA, or Al Quaida, or those states that allow execution.
If the magnet in your moral compass points to axioms such as:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
or
Thou shall love thy neighbors as thyselves
...can you justify murdering others in order to stop other murders?
The Weather Undergound (and the PLO, and the IRA, and the Likudniks, etc.) went one direction in answering this question. I, on the other hand, stand with Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK, and say, not just no but fuck no.
Which is why I'm a little confused by all the right-wing hatred of the Ayers of the world. Don't they both believe that one must do what is right, by force if necessary? Don't they both believe that the end justifies the means? How can you stand for "enhanced interrogation" of prisoners, on the one hand, yet denounce the destruction of property on the other (and let's remember that the Weather Underground's tactics were to bomb only property, not people, although the fact that they fucked
that up doesn't mean it was an OK tactic in principle).
It's useful to remember that a large chunk of today's Neocons were lefties in the sixties (Horowitz most immediately comes to mind, but a lot of the Neocons are reformed Trotskiites). It's also useful to remember that all they've changed is the targets of their destruction, not their tactics.
The right wing can believe all they want to that the sixties divided the world into hippies vs. straights. But those of us that remember, remember that it was in fact divided into people of peace vs. people of violence. And whether you thought we needed to bomb Vietnam, or you thought we needed to bomb the people who wanted to bomb Vietnam, you were on the wrong side. And all those who wanted to bomb the bombers then, but want to bomb Iran now, are still on the wrong side.