Baltimore
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn gave a seminar in shamelessness last week. On the road to promote their new book Race Course Against White Supremacy, the radical couple sat in armchairs on a small stage at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, conducting a "dialogue" instead of the usual book-tour speech.
Ayers wore the uniform of an aging professor whose grasp on hipness is as thin and worn as the knees of his jeans. A sport coat nods to professionalism, while his T-shirt bespeaks authenticity. Thanks to a media blitz during the presidential campaign last year highlighting Ayers's connections to his Chicago neighbor Barack Obama, Dohrn--who outranked her husband both in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in felony convictions--has been reduced to sidekick status, waiting to deliver her opening remarks after his and praising his jokes, which she's "still laughing at after all these years."
She has traded the leather boots and mini-skirts of her militant days for the blousy, granola-professor look, the small red flower in her gray hair a wry accessory for a woman who found no power in flowers during the late '60s, when she deemed the nonviolence they symbolized weak and passé.
Ayers and Dohrn, as the country was reminded during the campaign, founded the Weather Underground-- a terrorist group that splintered from the SDS in favor of fomenting violent revolution during Vietnam. In service of that goal, the group damaged hundreds of thousands of dollars in property and killed at least six people.
You wouldn't know
any of it to hear them speak today. Hawking rewritten history the way Ron Popeil sells a Showtime Rotisserie, Ayers and Dohrn marinated their militancy in self-righteousness, basted their guilt with the glistening mythology of the '60s, and set the thing to roast in the dark, warm halls of academe. They've now emerged on the lecture circuit, "respected" professors grinning ear-to-ear, with a patented recipe for rehabilitation without repentance.
The Weathermen-led riots in Chicago in 1969 and their declaration of war on the United States in 1970?
"Set it and forget it!"
The bombings of the U.S. Capitol (1971), the Pentagon (1972), and the State Department (1975)?
"Set it and forget it!"
The robbery of a Brinks armored truck in New York in 1981, during which two police officers and one guard were murdered?
"Set it and forget it!"
An FBI agent who infiltrated the group believes Ayers and Dohrn were personally involved in the February 1970 pipe bombing of a San Francisco police department, which injured eight and killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell, but they have never been indicted.
Three of the Weathermen, including Ayers's first love, blew themselves up building a nail bomb at a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970. They were preparing the bomb for an attack on an officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J., when their plans for mass murder were derailed by incompetence.
In the intervening years, the bombs and murders have been euphemized with a wink for polite gatherings of leftists, such as the one in Baltimore. Bombings are now referred to as "tactics." The desire to topple American society through violence has become "activism for social justice."
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