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Another Item For Obama’s In-Box: The Culture War

November 22, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under DSPQ, Obama administration, Richard Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate 

William Ayers:

I’m not making a blanket apology because, actually, I think what we did was measured in response to things that were going on in the rest of the world. How do you respond to thousands of people who were being murdered in your name?

The quote’s from his book tour, as reported by the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page. Ayers says that planting bombs that could’ve killed innocent people and planning bombings that probably would have done so were appropriate responses to U.S. government actions in Indochina. It’s the same argument made by Osama bin Laden and those who bombed abortion clinics and killed abortion doctors — the argument terrorists always make.

You may say that bin Laden did a lot more damage than Ayers. If so, then the self-justifying anti-abortion terrorist is the one with sheer numbers on his side — 45 million since 1973, assuming one processes that as lost lives. Big assumption, I know. But just how many Mozarts, fathers, mothers, sports coaches were never born? How many cancer researchers and cellists, stamp collectors and scout leaders?

Neither bin Laden nor a physician-murderer probably would probably have as easy a time as Ayers is having on his book tour. But it’s not because of the arithmetic. It’s because of the Zeitgeist.

NPR’s Terry Gross was, according to this account, cool and probing. When she asked Ayers for an apology, he gave an answer not unlike the one above. She also asked if being in the Weather Underground was a youthful indiscretion. With all due respect to Gross, it was a silly question. Many if not most political extremists and terrorists are young. Suicide bombers are almost all young. Of course Ayers has become less reckless. He probably has mutual funds and people who take care of his book royalties. He isn’t even tough enough to handle a Fox News reporter without calling the police.

The better question is why he gets a respectful hearing when almost all other unapologetic terrorists wouldn’t, notwithstanding their ages or latter-day accomplishments. I can’t think of anything beyond this answer from last April:

Though it was, as Sen. Obama has said, detestable that the Weathermen set bombs and planned to murder innocent people in police stations and at dances, many people couldn’t and evidently still can’t bring themselves to be as angry at Ayers as they would at someone who planned to murder people in abortion clinics. For all of us, it takes exquisite discernment and self-awareness to be completely objective in our moral judgments about the means and tactics used to achieve any outcomes we passionately desire. So if you ask how Obama can get away with an association with a terrorist Weatherman, the answer is that within the generation that fought in or and opposed the Vietnam war and whose political and cultural temperament was molded by it, there are those who believe Ayers is evil and others who are tempted by the idea that his extremism was justifiable.

Indeed it would be interesting if Obama would say, the next time he’s asked about Ayers, “You say he’s a terrorist? Perhaps you’d like to show me some evidence, especially since he was never charged with it.” See, there’s the whole “innocent until proven guilty” concept — which also applies to a certain President who resigned his office prior to impeachment, thus shortening the nation’s trauma but depriving himself of the right to offer a detailed, comprehensive defense against charges that were dramatically amplified by his opponents’ anger over his Vietnam policies. Serving him in one way or another for nearly 30 years, I’ve learned that passion over Vietnam often drives his harshest critics. Plenty have written to The New Nixon saying that he doesn’t deserve a blog, or a library, or a friendly biography, or a kind word. How could you associate with that war criminal — how you could defend him? Sound familiar, Messrs. Obama, Ayers, and Hannity?

I used to think that it would take years for Americans of a certain age to settle their argument with one another about Vietnam. I’m beginning to think that we’re going to take it to our graves.

The PE has promised to help us past this. He’s spoken of the weird plots hatched on college campuses back in the sixties. All power to him. We await the speech.



Comments

2 Responses to “Another Item For Obama’s In-Box: The Culture War”

  1. Maarja Krusten on November 24th, 2008 5:10 am

    Did you see what I posted about Stanley Kurtz and Stanley Kutler under Jonathan Movroydis’s November 12 essay about Jack Pitney’s comments? I quoted from an archivist at UIC who described violent and threatening phone calls received this past summer by the Library which holds in its Chicago Annenberg Challenge collection some records related to Ayers’s later activities. That this should have happened with records related to Ayers is especially interesting. But did anyone here react to my revelation about the archivist’s reference to violent and threatening phone calls? Of course not, it usually doesn’t work that way.

    As to why people often respond in a relativistic manner, Shankar Vedantam noted in a WaPo column on July 9, 2007 that “Psychologists once conducted a simple experiment with far-reaching implications: They asked people to describe an instance in their lives when they had hurt someone and another instance when they had been hurt by someone else.” The experiment looked at similar acts, whether the people were the perpetrators or the victims. The psychologists found that people tended to explain away acts they took as perpetrators (couldn’t be helped, were justified) but viewed the same types of acts when taken against themselves as immoral, inexplicable, and unjustified.

    Vedantam explained that:

    “The different perceptions of victims and perpetrators in Baumeister’s experiment are a result of a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, Tavris and Aronson argue in a new book titled “Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me).” When we do something that hurts others, there is a part of us that recognizes our action as despicable. But that comes into conflict — into dissonance — with our belief that we are good people. The solution? We reinterpret our hurtful actions to minimize our responsibility and downplay the pain we have caused.

    When we are victims, on the other hand, it would feel dissonant to empathize with our wrongdoers. No, it is much easier to see their actions as inexplicable and immoral.”

    This reportedly happens on a subconscious level. Vedantam also discussed how this ok if I do it, bad if they do it works in the political world.

    In another column, Vedantam discussed actor-observer bias and how people view actions as situational or dispositional. He wrote

    “Where a Republican might say that another Republican who failed had a hard job to do, Democrats would be likely to conclude the person was incompetent — we choose situational explanations to justify the errors of our allies, and we choose dispositional explanations to judge the errors of our opponents.

    Our psychological perceptions get flipped when our allies and opponents do the right thing. Republicans are likely to see the success of other Republicans as dispositional — reflecting the innate nature of Republicans. But Democrats are likely to see the success of a Republican as situational — thus depriving their opponents of credit.”

    I find his columns on “the Department of Human Behavior” to be very interesting but I rarely see the things he discusses mentioned on political blogs. However, I do believe that some political issues benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach in the virtual world.

    Best regards,

    Maarja

  2. John H. Taylor on November 24th, 2008 8:55 am

    Fascinating stuff. I saw a study not long ago that showed how people usually don’t think they’ve been as harsh or violent as the victim does. It must all be in the DNA — something to be struggled against.

    I didn’t see your response to Jonathan. Calls to the library such as you describe would be terrible — evidence of the by-any-means-necessary ethic that grips people in the heat of political conflict, I guess.

    I’ve never been interested in the specific nature of the relationship between Sen. Obama and Mr. Ayers, only in the ambiguous nature of people’s reaction to it.

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