RE: The Right wing meme that Ayers is unrepentant

[Emit]

Read "I’M SORRY!!!! i think…." at Ayers' own blog

Ayers is a thinking, complicated man with a complicated history and story that does not fit into the simple 'black-white' thinking of the right wing. Unfortunately, his explanation also does not fit into a 6-second sound bite. But for those who are interested in learning more about what his own response is to claims that he is an unrepentant domestic terrorist, he has written at his own blog.

It's long and complicated, but might help you to understand his position:

I’M SORRY!!!! i think….

The episodic notoriety is upon us again. And always the same demand: Say you’re sorry! Of course there is much to regret in any lived life, much to rethink and redo. But opposing the War in Viet Nam with every fiber is not one of them.

Here was the situation: thousands of people a week were being slaughtered by the US military in a sickening and catastrophic imperial adventure. Those of us who opposed the war had worked to convince people of the wrongness of the war, and soon most agreed. But we could not stop the war. It dragged on for a decade and the human and material costs were incalculable. What to do? Whatever one did in opposition, it wasn’t enough, because we did not stop the war. We didn’t do enough, we weren’t smart enough, brave enough, focused enough, or just enough.

“We did the right thing” was taken again and again to be evidence of an obtuse refusal to apologize, proof that my various wrong-doings had not been adequately recognized. I’ve failed to fess up, I’m told, and my transgressions, then, are enduring, on-going. Without a full-throated confession, whole-hearted and complete, uncomplicated by fact or detail or even by my own interpretations, and then, without the crucial detail, saying the words, “I’m sorry,” something vital is missing.

I feel like I’m in a bit of a trough here, because I hear the demand for a general apology in the context of the media chorus as a howling mob with an impossibly broad demand, and on top of that I’m not sure what exactly I’m expected to apologize for. The ’68 Convention? The Days of Rage? The Pentagon? Every one of these can be unpacked and found to be a complicated mix of good and bad choices, noble and low motives. My attitude? Being born in the suburbs? I feel regret for much—I resonate with Bob Dylan singing of “so many things we never will undo; I know you’re sorry, well I’m sorry too.” But, he goes on, “stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow, things are going to get interesting right about now.” Some read my failure to apologize as arrogance, stupidity, and recalcitrance, or worse, but I think, or I hope, that I’m holding on to a more complex, a truer read and memory of that history.

~snip~

Not only is it apocryphal and demonizing, it’s irrefutable—every attempt to explain, including possibly what I just wrote above, is held up to further ridicule, as deeper dimensions and meanings are slipped into place and attached to the story. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, for example after a three hour conversation, reached over and touched Bernardine’s arm and said, “I just have to ask you about the Manson quote. It’s my duty as a journalist.” I heard Bernardine respond in full, explaining the context, the perverse humor of it, Fred’s murder and all the rest, her own meaning-making and her sense of its meaning to insiders and outsiders alike. It made no difference: Kolbert reported the received story intact without any mention of any part of their exchange, and with this added fiction: “The Manson murders were treated as an inspired political act.” Not true, not even close, a lie on every level.
And two months later Steve Neal of the Chicago Sun-Times, playing off Kolbert, wrote: “…the Weathermen idolized killer Charles Manson and adopted a fork as their symbol…” Not true, not true. But what’s the use? By the end of the year a Time magazine essayist called me an “American terrorist,” and echoing the New York Times, said that “even today he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs.’” It’s all part of the endlessly-repeating official account, the echo that grows and grows as it bounces off the walls. How can it ever be effectively denied?

http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/im-sorry-i-think/

[Emit]

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