Thank god for this Salon interview with Bill Ayers, which is quite possibly the only intelligent thing to come out of the disaster that was the McCain campaign pretending a) that Ayers is currently a terrorist b) that the Weather Underground is any kind of threat to us now c) that the Weather Underground has anything to do with Islamic terrorism d) that Ayers and Obama are best buddies and e) that modern politics should be about endlessly rehashing the 60s. It’s a good interview—-Walter Shapiro and Bill Ayers are able to talk about their differences of opinion on the effects of radical action in the 60s without getting upset, even though it’s obvious this wound is still open and probably won’t heal as long as the people who remember that time are still alive and kicking. Ayers is ambivalent about his participation in the Weather Underground—-obviously they were doing way too many drugs and hadn’t really thought about the ramifications of their behavior. It’s farcical to think that you can set out to destroy property without running the extremely high risk that you’ll kill someone, and I don’t know if he’s really grappled with that fact as much as he should. But he’s also right that their behavior was peaceful and moderate compared to the government’s behavior at the time.
The problem with that, though, is when you start comparing yourself to the people you hate and using them as a benchmark for your behavior, it’s really easy to slip into paranoia and start rationalizing all sorts of fucked up shit. To make it worse for people on the left, people on the right are pretty much in a perpetual projection and rationalization loop, as you have to be when your worldview is fundamentally based on oppression. They don’t really need an excuse to make up all sorts of vile accusations about how evil liberals are, because in order to get to sleep every night, they have to invent an evil that keeps them from looking inside. Homophobia is refashioned as “protecting the children/traditional marriage”. Racism is made a tolerable philosophy by projecting violence, subversion, and sexual perversion onto the targeted group. Sexism is justified by people who claim they’re “saving babies”, and once you have a rationalization like that, turning to violence to enforce your will becomes easier to rationalize as well.