Dartblog

Last night it was my good fortune to hear the National Public Radio interview with Bill Ayers, the left-wing radical who was one of the principals of the Weather Underground and, like his less devoted coevals, is now a revered soft-sciences professor at university who makes his living softly putting trivial questions to the weaker undergraduates.

Now that Ayers is no longer a clear and present danger to the Obama campaign, he has become a man of tremendous fascination.

Here is the interview. Terry Gross did as good a job as could have been done given the simpatico between interviewer and subject. There were moments where a right-thinking inquisitor (that is, one who thinks straightly, not necessarily conservatively) would have proved unable to keep from laughing aloud. But one never felt that tension between Gross-Ayers; they were merely cool with one another; one felt it in one’s own gut.

Terry Gross: A lot of people have called you an unrepentant terrorist. I think a lot people want to hear you make a full fledged apology for some of your actions with the Weather Underground, such as bombing the Pentagon. So I want you, now that we have heard a lot of your story, to give us your answer to that.

Bill Ayers: Well you know my answer is that the kind of culture of apology doesn’ t appeal to me. If I had something specific to think about apologizing for I might. But it’s kind of a blanket statement that what we did was so extreme and so wrong that I ought to just say it was crazy.

Who would have called Ayers as someone disdainful of the “culture of apology”? Well, no one. In fact, earlier in the interview he insists that America be put through some sort of internationally confabulated “truth and reconciliation commission” so that it may apologize for and be embarrassed by its alleged crimes. Mr. Ayers loves useless apology.

But of course it gets still sillier when you think about his response. “If I had something specific to think about apologizing for I might,” he says. Terry asks for an apology—well, not really; she asks for Ayers’s “answer to that” request from others—at the very end of a 47-minute interview which covered Ayers’s bombings and vandalism in detail. Those are quite specific as events go. Ayers could have apologized, in front of the microphone and a sympathetic inquisitor, to an empathetic audience; but he elected not to.

One other marvel of the interview was Mrs. Gross’s failure to catch a beg-the-question argument from Mr. Ayers.

Bill Ayers was at pains to claim that his actions could not be described as terrorism. As a reminder, the Weathermen did the following, among other actions:

Bombed the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971; issued a statement saying it was “in protest of the US invasion of Laos.”

Bombed the Pentagon on May 19, 1972; issued a statement saying it was “in retaliation for the US bombing raid in Hanoi.”

Bombed the Department of State on January 29, 1975; issued a statement saying it was “in response to escalation in Vietnam.”

Mr. Ayers insisted that it was wrong of Sarah Palin to describe him as a “domestic terrorist”—despite his deep implication in each of these instances of domestic terrorism—because his targets were military, not civilian. A more thorough questioner would have known that the U.S. Capitol and the State Department are civilian.

But far more importantly, a critical interrogator would have observed that while Mr. Ayers insists that he is entirely innocent because he attacked the military arm of a government he saw as being engaged in terrorism (against the Vietnamese), he must admit that America’s actions, in Vietnam and indeed in Iraq today, are very tidily described as the besieging of military targets for the purpose of removing brutal governments which did as a matter of policy engage in domestic terrorism against their populations. In other words, the logic of Ayers’s defense, absurd though it is as applied to a privileged ’60s hippie who bombed the Pentagon, does inhere in and vindicate American foreign policy as applied against tyrannical and violent governments abroad.

But this was National Public Radio, after all, and the riposte was left unuttered and unthought.