Obama's Friend Bill Ayers Not Sorry

Obama's friend Bill Ayers isn't sorry:

“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.

In some part, apologizing is rejecting, letting to or giving up—conversion. There’s something deeply human at stake, something in both the heart and the head, and intellectual severance, an emotional break. And a broad, general apology may be just too much—I am not now nor have I ever been… Even when true, the words are mortifying. They are the end not only of a dream, but of a life. The apology in general is uttered, and suddenly you die.

On top of that the apology is never enough—to be effective it must be enacted every day, its sincerity proved by ongoing symbolic purges, no one of which is ever adequate. David Horowitz, the poster-boy of 60’s aposty, said that if Bernardine and I were to say we’re sorry for everything and then don sackcloth and ashes it would be inadequate. There’s always more to do.

Naming names during the McCarthy years was the prescribed form of apology for a radical youth. People were coerced into providing information when no information was needed—the rift was long past, the names already known—and to disassociate with a ghost already gone. The ritual was one of expiation, isolation, and realignment. Loyalty and subservience was the rite of passage, the price of growing up.

In my case, my actions were all well-known, I’ve resolved the legal charges, and I’ve faced the consequences. The legal system must of necessity hew to a narrow line—the law’s business is to weigh charges, render judgments, and level punishments, nothing more, nothing less. A central moral question remains—the question of individual responsibility and of the nature of moral judgment. But I still refuse to grow up if the price is to falsely confess a sin I don’t take to be a sin. What is left to do? Those who refused and suffered the lash of McCarthyism, those who “stood on principle”, had a terrible time trying to say what the principle was: Support for the U.S. Communist party? Not exactly. For Stalinism? No, definitely not. Opposition to anything the U.S. government does? The importance of never telling on friends? Free speech? I feel the same bind. What am I defending?

Perhaps it’s simply the importance of defying the ritual abasement and the rewriting of history. I embrace that defiance. Where in all the noise is there any authentic call for a process of truth-telling, a means to reconciliation? Where might we construct an honest chain of culpability?

America is in desperate need to some kind of truth and reconciliation process—not because I want to see Henry Kissinger, for example, wheeled in front of a magistrate and forced to confront his victims. Well…it’s tempting, but not the heart of the matter. We need a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more just future. We need a history of lesson as a guide to teaching. Its really that simple.

I write about memory, about its tricks and deceptions, about its power to create a powerful or a deformed identity. Individual identity, collective identity, generational and national identity are all built on the memories of share experiences. Our national identity is a catastrophic, festering sore.

The victims of violations must have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering; the victimizers must be asked why and how they created that suffering; society must have the opportunity of witnessing all of this in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a set toward putting it behind us. So we need the stories that constitute the truth-telling, and we need the possibility of amnesty in order to move on.

In this truth-telling you can make no convincing moral distinction among victims—suffering is suffering after all. But distinctions are possible, even necessary, among perpetrators: anti-colonial fighters, for example, are struggling for justice against forces of oppression.

Similarly collective guilt and collective punishment are terrible, reactionary ideas whether in the hands of Nazis or French colonialists or Israeli settlers. On the other hand, collective responsibility is an essential and powerful and useful concept. Americans are as a group responsible for war. We must, as a group, do something about it.

So I want to keep it complicated, to defend complexity against the distorting labels that come to us in neat packages and summary forms—apologizing in general is asking too much. As one McCarthy-era resister said: I’d rather be a red to the rats, than a rat to the reds.

The last sentence really says it all.Comrade Ayers is pretty amazing.No word yet from the Obama campaign on this one.