Why Silence?
Last night, Bill Ayers spoke on NPR’s Fresh Air. Earlier in the day, a lengthy interview with him ran at Salon.com. Both are fascinating, though there’s a lot of overlap between them. Needless to say, he’s not quite the person that the McCain/Palin tried to insinuate he was. His response to the question of why he didn’t try to clear his name during the campaign speaks interestingly to the shameful, shadowy nature of the charges and the media’s tendency to frame news events into narratives. Here’s his explanation to Walter Shapiro at Salon:
Well, what I didn’t want to comment on was the political campaign. I didn’t want to enter into that. The reason is simple: I thought that I was being used as a prop in a very dishonest narrative — and I didn’t want to be part of the narrative and I couldn’t find a way to interrupt it. Anything that I said was going to feed that narrative. So I felt that part of this was the demonization of me — certainly that I’m some kind of toxic agent that has to be feared.
The second thing, and perhaps more important, is that I was being used to try to bring down this promising new leader by the old tactic of guilt by association. The idea that somehow — and this is deep in the American political culture — that if two people share a bus downtown, have a cup of coffee, have several conversations, that somehow means that they share an outlook, a perspective, responsibility for one another’s behavior. And I reject that. That guilt by association is wrong and we shouldn’t buy into it.
At the same time, it was hard not to miss how he used the collective nature of the Weathermen to evade responsibility for violent acts, lawyered up his speech when asked directly about those acts and consistently blamed the most inflammatory statements in the press on journalists (such as those at the NYT) misquoting him.
He’s right about the way he was used by McCain/Pallin and how sleazy those tactics were. If only that argument were being made by someone who seemed a little more honest.
Comment by Frolic — November 19, 2008 @ 10:07 am
Hmmm, I didn’t get the collective dodge. I did hear a number of occasions of answering questions with questions concerning what was worse – what the government did to perpetuate the war or what they did to confront it. And I’d be talking out of my ass right now if I tried to make that assessment because I simply don’t know enough. What I know right now comes only from the recent coverage and more-recent counter-coverage.
What fascinated me about this whole issue was the air that the media presented that the Weathermen were so well-known and well-documented a part of American history that of course everybody knows about them and what they did. Since modern anti-government radicalism has rarely been a fascination of the media – and certainly not one that usually received dispassionate scrutiny and reporting – I suspect much of America learned of the Weathermen’s existence during this election. I’d also bet many reporters at the cable news networks similarly found out about them during this election cycle.
Comment by Alex Rawls — November 19, 2008 @ 10:22 am