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This interview is a reminder of why Salon is so important and, when it's living up to its potential, the magazine is such a vital part of American public discourse.
Walter Shapiro's interview elicits a personal, even intimate, response from Bill Ayers without veering into the mushy territory of irrelevant overdisclosure — and without letting Ayers off the hook without first accounting for his past.
Granted, the (quite salient) parts about Obama aside the interview gives us nothing new that we couldn't already have learned from The Weather Underground. But Ayers' essential insight — that slaughter breeds insanity within any democratic conscience — is extremely important today for two reasons.
First, it helps us get a better handle on the Vietnam era. In this respect Ayers isn't alone — he's joined by the likes of Robert McNamara and John Dean in making the observation that everyone was consumed by the madness of those times. When people today write, "You had to be there to understand," what they mean is the same thing as when someone who is mentally ill says, "You have to have been insane to understand what it's like."
Personally, I don't really want to know, and I don't wish that knowledge on anyone. I'll take their word for it.
But that leads to the other point: we are in a time where, increasingly, we're learning what happens to a democratic conscience in a time of slaughter.
The US military, perhaps alone among all American institutions, actually learned from Vietnam and doesn't (when it has a choice, ahem, Bush) fight its wars the same way. Iraq and Afghanistan will never be Vietnam, despite (with bitter, tragic irony) the doggedly insane efforts of our departing leaders to remake it as such for their own twisted vindication.
Nevertheless, all wars fought under the basis of the kind of imperial delusion which impels our current strategic thinking will inevitably fall into similar patterns, and with similar results both in the theater and at home. We sneer at Bill Ayers' insight at our own peril.
