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Research Notes: WIlliam Ayers in 'Fugitive Days' - Part III

Here's an excellent review of the book "Fugitive Days",written on September 30th 2001.

The author of the review makes the case that Ayers is a "spinner of tales". To me, it will represent a stylistic marker for his writing that should show itself in either of the two Obama "autobiographies" in question.

snip:

"The story of Oughton's struggle is poignant, whether or not it's true. But elsewhere in ''Fugitive Days'' the task of choosing among the true, the near true and the untrue is frustrating. Ayers reminds us often that he can't tell everything without endangering people involved in the story. But his partial retelling reaches fraudulence when he writes, ''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' then backs and fills, saying that he bombed it, not literally but metaphorically, as part of the Weathermen group in charge of the operation. He says that he needed to ''claim'' the explosion in order to write about it, and he adds later that he is not ashamed of any of the bombings and would not rule out planting another bomb someday; ''I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility.''

In Ayers's hands, a career in terrorism becomes a harmless episode out of a John le Carré novel, in which our hero lives on the run, steals explosives, sets off explosions using ''tradecraft,'' as the flap copy puts it -- as if the Weathermen were characters in ''Smiley's People.'' But the Weathermen game was never really a game. Nor was it ever noble, or even moral. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, readers will find this playacting with violence very difficult to forgive. "

end snip.

Well, most of us would find it hard to forgive. Yet, the man who is potentially the next President of the United States seems to have found the task quite easy.

Posted @ October 14, 2008 08:14 PM | Current Affairs

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