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Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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All that said, this is a fast paced, quick trip through the minds of hearts of one sub-set of deadly serious radicals. Ayers is most honest in revealing his youthful fantasies about women, free love and about the attractions of beer, dope and a freewheeling way of life. He faithfully reconstructs the all too rapid, and slippery, path to radicalism taken by himself and his commrades (his term). He takes pride in their ability to live underground and elude the FBI, while planning and carrying out their clandestine actions.
This is a highly useful book for those who lived some measure of adult life in the time period and for those who, coming afterword, might not understand even a small fraction of what happened to the country. He takes us on a fast ride through the malleable minds of youth set on revolution or self destruction, whichever comes first.
Ultimately, however, to me this is a dishonest book by a man who demonstrates little or no growth from the period of his extreme youth and extreme politics. This is a difficult conclusion for me to assert, because I was a sometime active participant in the anti-war movement at about the same time as the author (though, I think, considerably younger than he). I briefly dated the younger sister of one of the main characters in the weatherman psycho-drama mentioned prominently in the book and I was entirely sympathic to their goal of ending the war. Despite the fact that the Weatherman were often times seen as borderline crazies even within the movement, I would like to believe that some good could come from such difficult times. I know that they believed they were out to save our country, in the same way that, a hundred years earlier, those who opposed slavery took on an unpopular, and dangerous, cause. If they had succeded, we might now call them heros.
Ayers, to my eye, explains little or nothing of the historical, social, poltical and personal decisions that led him toward smashing windows, building bombs and fighting hand to hand with the police. It/s as if he woke up one day and found himself to be a radical, one who was, somehow, personally, deeply charged with carrying out radical acts unlike any in American history. While the group was middle class and intelllectually oriented, there is no hint of educated people feeling their way toward difficult conclusions. What about the intervening 25 or so years? Has his thinking changed? Is he agast at his younger self? Aside from saying repeatedly that the weatherman actions were far in front of their abilities, he makes few, if any, apologies.
There is no critical looking back in this book, only an attempt to recreate the borderline insanity of youthful arrogance combined with a strong sense of mission that propelled a small group of people to believe that they could take the world by the tail and shake it till it did what they wanted. At one point in the book, he says he and a fellow radical wondered if their whole generation was doomed. No, Bill, you were doomed. The young people of that era have gone on to do many things, some good, some bad, some wonderful.
This book will do little to help people understand the why of what came very close to being America's second civil war. It is valuable, nonetheless, because it takes us behind the scenes, and, in a cusory fashion, into the brains of one radical group. It clearly demonstrates their dedication and determination to the cause, if not their intelligence. In a purely logical sense, the weatherman, and others, were completely correct in deciding that strong action was required to try to prevent the deaths of several million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of American soliders. They failed to realize, however, that they were completely incapable of taking strong enough actions to reverse the policy of their government and, instead, were entirely capable of turning much of the nation against the anti-war movement. No radical group was capable of action, of the nature envised by Ayers and others, that would have made one whit of difference to the government. A thousand three pound bombs, on a thousand days, was not enough. None should have ever been planted.
While the book is a disappointment, there are truths to be learned. Why did the radicals of that era believe, for example, that everything in life was connected to everything else and that all of life had to be put right in a flash? Where is the well of arrogance from which the belief can be drawn that anyone at anytime in the world could perform such a task? In this respect, the book is something of a desent into madness. We can only be glad that the seventies are long since over. A generation is not to blame for the bad results that occurred, but something deeper in the human condition and in the American need to search for perfection. Ayers doesn't have clue, nor is he looking for one.
Okay: what do we have here with this book? The subtitle identifies it as "A Memoir," but that's not a very good generic fit. How many memoirs have you read wherein the author keeps pestering you every 5 pages with reminders that his account of his own past cannot be trusted or believed. Ayers does this with an interminable succession of italicized passages, each of them a high-flying poetic meditation on the gossamer nature of memory, the impossibility of accurate recall, the slipperiness of subjectivity, etc etc etc.
Ayers' first such declaration, on page 7, cannot be quoted here (...). Let us paraphrase it thus: "Memory is an Oedipal coefficient." On a regular basis throughout the book, Ayers renews his license to lie and dissemble with more and more and more of this italicized gibberish: "Memory is a house of mirrors, a land of make believe. . . . a delicate dance of desire and faith, a shadow of a shadow. . . . a way of forgetting, a way of filtering. . . . Memory is a marvel, quick as a monkey and just as silly. . . ." and so on and so forth. A solid 5% of this book is dedicated to rendundant declarations concerning the ineffable elusiveness of memory. [By the by, the above quotations are a fair sample of the cloyingly precious "fine writing" that permeates the book. ] Never for a second would it occur to the author that there are sources of information out there in the world in relation to which the veracity of his unreliable memory can be checked and controlled. It's indicative of the solipsism of Ayers' mind that not a single other work on the 1960s is cited in his self-serving --what shall we call it, autohagiography? Naughtobiography? It's obvious that Ayers feels that these repetitive prose-poems on the unreliability of memory place him and his book in a higher category of honesty than the run-of-the-mill memoirist, who might deny the influence of subjectivity. They don't. There's more accuracy, more honesty in the average "as-told-to" showbiz autobiography than there is here.
Anyway, true to his promise, Ayers omits from his narrative anything that might be of genuine interest or import to an understanding of his life and times. He's clearly gloatingly unrepentingly proud of his past (& especially of all of the Movement babes he shagged --oh boy do we hear a lot about this) but at the same time he evades any actual discussion of the criminal acts that are the basis of his sick claim to fame. Ayers can't actually talk about any of the bombings and robberies and stuff, not just because memory is a blind gerbil in swimming in a sea of cold pea soup or whatever, but because his persisting code of revolutionary omerta forbids it. "In our conflict," writes the tenured tough guy , his intact, " we don't talk; we don't tell. We never confess." Okay, so shut up, already.
There are so many genuinely interesting topics Ayers could have told us about: the internecine sectarian power struggles among various members of the Weather cult. The details about how he used family clout and money to buy himself out of trouble with the law. The process whereby he and alpha Weathergirl Bernadine Dohrn made the transition from the hard-rutting "Smash Monogamy" sexual politics of "the Movement" to bourgeois wedded bliss in Hyde Park. How's that work, Bill? Inquiring minds want to know. And hey, what kind of a family did Bill and Bernadine, erstwhile admirers of the Manson Family, ultimately spawn? On the latter subject, Ayers is characteristically coy: "We had our ways and weirdnesses, but that, too, is another story." More to the point, I'd guess, is that its a story that wouldn't easily accomodate the author's Ace Ventura-like vanity. Don't hold your breath for a more revealing sequel.
Here's what you ultimately get: Ayers' self-assessment of himself as a pretty neat and righteous guy. Oh sure, he admits to a few foibles ---"pride and loftiness"---- but these, he would have us know, should be measured against his many virtues: "confidence, passion, optimism and hope, some humor" (p. 284). Hey, what's a little "loftiness" mixed in with a cornucopia of traits like that? Another big pay-off is this: "We crossed the line and came back" (p. 263). Ayers is talking here about the fact that he and his Weatherpals used to plant bombs, but later they stopped. It would never occur to this egotist that it is not for him to say whether or not he and his accomplices have "come back." Let's ask the family of a certain slain Brink's security guard about that, shall we?
I don't know what else to say about this thoroughly diseased book. I read it with clenched teeth. My reaction had nothing to do with politics, except insofar that Ayers' manifest personality disorder is characteristic of the sectarian left.
Bill Ayers does a good job of taking his readers back to the chaos of that time in the early chapters of his book. And I congratulate him on his unswerving honesty towards himself and his cadre of comrades. But he is such detestable, manipulative, whiny, self-righteous holier-than-thou person that I suddenly see a lot more legitimacy in the words, "Love it or leave it."
I completely lost tolerance for him at the end when he brings up My Lai yet another time in the book and then asks when America will acknowledge the sacrifice Diana made toward ending the war - Diana who blew herself up or was blown up by another in their gang while planning to bomb a target in the US.
I wish I could rate this book zero stars. I wish I could get my money back.