Posted on 10/15/2008 7:30:59 AM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee
Edited on 10/15/2008 7:49:56 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
I read occasionally of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both now not only accepted, despite their bombing campaign against America in the 1960s and 70s, but successful , establishment educators whose opinions on social issues are taken seriously. Every time I see Ayers’ name I shudder with fear and rage and realize that I will never be able to erase the mark he left on my life one evening 40 years ago.
It was at the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan on a Friday night in November 1965. I was a sophomore and was living in a sorority house -- Alpha Epsilon Phi. I was walking down the stairs to leave the library. Billy Ayers was standing on the first floor and started talking to me.
I thought he was cute. There seemed to be jovial kind of instant connection between us. As I am writing this now I think he must have noticed me before , boys were attracted to me in those days , and planned to try to pick me up. As we struck up a conversation, Ayers told me very quickly about his leftist activism as if he knew this would intrigue me. In fact, I had made attempts to join SDS and the anti Vietnam War Movement on campus during my freshman year but had been put off by what hustlers the young male “activists” were. They talked in lofty ideological abstractions, but they also used their political sophistication as a lure for young women who wanted to be on the right side of the great social issues of the day. I picked up on that cynicism early and so spent much of my freshman year at Michigan trying to figure out how to act. I was politically idealistic back then and believed in Tikkun Olam -- that we had to do something to make the world better.
My freshman year at Michigan I attended the Teach-Ins and the campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and studied hard for my Chemistry exams once a month. At the same time, I decided to pledge a sorority, partially just to prove I could and partially because young women’s options for campus living arrangements were still quite limited in those years.
Despite the caution I’d learned about young ideologues on the make, I was charmed by Bill Ayers and by his savvy talk of politics and the children’s school he was involved with. He asked me to go to a party with him and I did. I have a vague memory of the house where the party was and the people there. I think he got quite drunk and I suppose I drank too. I remember walking home with him. He was very open about himself and told me he was one of 5 children and that he was from Chicago and that his father was rich.
I felt comfortable with Bill. Throughout my life I had always had a friendly buddy-kind of connection with certain boys and felt that I was developing such a connection with him.
I remember going back to his attic apartment -- he describes it in his book Fugitive Days. He had a roommate -- a black man who was 23 and married with children. There was a couch, a table, a stereo and a sink in the room. There were two beds – Ayers’ and his roommate’s on each side of the attic wall. I slept with him there.
I came there a few times afterward to talk and to listen to his LPs. I especially loved Glen Yarbough’s album Come Share My Life. I met Bill’s roommate who also worked at the children’s school. I also met Bill’s younger brother Rick. Bill was a year older than I and his brother was a year younger. He spent a lot of time at Bill’s apartment.
Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings -- maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.
At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me
I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he f***** me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger f*** me angrily while I hated myself.
After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to ***** me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill ***** me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.
I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term “date rape” yet in our political vocabulary. The notion of a psychological rape was not on the table.
I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time.
I graduated in 1968 and went to Europe for the summer and came back right before the Democratic Convention. I worked for McCarthy in the Indiana primary. Wherever I went over the next few years, I carried with me the shame and guilt with me. I felt it had been my fault for not putting up more of a struggle against Ayers.
I started a PhD program in clinical psych at Yeshiva University in 1969. I was also working part time for a branch of the University of Chicago Institute for Social Research which was in the same building. I was there in a room with other employees one day sitting around a big table and coding questionnaires for a research study on Head Start when we heard a huge explosion. Soon after we discovered that it was a bomb that went off in the brown stone on 10th street which killed three buddies of Bill Ayers, who was now one of the leaders of the WeatherUnderground, a terrorist cult. One of the victims was Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time. I had known her: a kind soul who had worked at the Fresh Air Camp for troubled kids before she got mixed up with ever so persuasive Bill and the other Weatherman terrorists. When I found out she had been blown up, I thought how like him to send his girlfriend to make the bomb rather than do it himself.
I eventually moved to Israel, married and had a family. But for a long time I felt as if I existed in a time warp in relation to events in the US that were a continuation of the 1960s. In 1994 I returned to the States for my 30-year Mumford High School reunion. I was in NYC visiting a friend and asked about the Weathermen. He told me that Billy and Bernardine Dohrn had come up from the underground and resumed middle class life - including the radical politics - without being prosecuted for their crimes.
Later I read about Ayers and his book Fugitive Days on the Internet. This was just after the terrorist attack on 9/11 and he was entirely unrepentant for having been a terrorist himself. “I would do it again,” he told the Times when he was asked about having set a bomb in the Pentagon. I also discovered that he was a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago campus. I think that freaked me out more than anything. That a man so cruel and conscienceless could attain such a position enraged me. I contacted him by email through the University’s website. He wrote back that he didn’t remember me.
I was in Detroit in November 2001 and bought his memoir at Book Beat at Lincoln Plaza in Oak Park. I looked to see if there was some hint in it of what had become the defining event of my life. Nothing. But why should he remember me if he has convinced the world to forget, or is it forgive -- that he set out to launch a bombing campaign to blow up America?
You are sliding down the slippery slope that I am condemning. Once she has been kidnapped and imprisoned, every subsequent action is under duress until she is free to walk out in the open air. I don't care whether Ayers "asked" pretty please with sugar on top. It is under duress.
No.
_I_ certainly don’t want a terrorist sympathizer in the White House. _You_ don’t. But I think we all here have to face the reality that this issue simply isn’t catching fire with the voting public.
McCain needs to tell the people how destructive the Obamalama’s economic policies would be to them and their children’s futures. That is what resonates. Not this.
bttt
Two points. First Buckley could be viciously condemnatory of those over whom he took moral umbrage. Go read him extensively.
Second you are misusing the term ad hominem. An ad hominem attack is a rhetorical fallacy defined as substiting name calling for argument on the substance of the issue.
But I am not arguing the substance of this issue, whether Ayers is guilt of rape, false imprisonmnet and kidnapping, according the stated facts. That is clear cut, if the facts are as stated. Furthermore, Ayers is under no legal jeopardy at this point on these facts.
Instead I am arguing that those who forward an arguement that maybe Ayers is innocent because the author was complicit are moral monsters. That is a substantive issue and not an ad hominem even though it is an argument directed against those who would let Ayers out of the vicegrip of what I hope is our collective moral code.
So how many times do I have to repeat this? I agree it was rape. I agree it was under duress. And I have even stated that the episode is only one of many reason that Bill Ayers deserves to (at the very least) spend the rest of his life in prison. The slope I am on ain’t slippery.
But in the words of that most eminent of philosophers, Archie Bunker, “Whatever.”
Correct - he is almost certainly a psychopath according to his actions on many fronts.
Should have been a medical record of this....I wonder if it can be produced.
We are arguing whether it is an ad hominem attack to call moral monsters those who suggest that she was complicit.
Character issues like close pal terrorist bomber Ayers, personal Reverend of Hate Wright, favored club vote and grant fraudster Acorn, bribe giver Rezko-the-Syrian, the Obama-supporting corrupt Chicago machine etc etc are all getting out there, getting repeated, gaining steam.
Character is the issue.
If he were that reprehensible, someone would have no problem disregarding the law.
The statement that Ayers is a terrorist because he set of bombs is not an ad hominem. It is merely definitional.
The claim that a journalist who argues to let Ayers off the hook is a moral monster is not an ad hominem. It is not directed to the substance of whether or not Ayers is a terrorist, but rather at the moral fiber of the journalist trying to justify terrorists and terrorism. Substitute one crime for another and a freeper for the journalist and you have the same argument.
Your problem is that you crawled down into the gutter with your friends and now don’t like it pointed out that your clothing is bespattered.
“Judging from her choice of friends in 1965, I’d say she was still a child in the sixties.”
Her “friends” were even older, and were like her, children of the fifties.
LOL
“... were among the worst with respect to the treatment of women.”
As were the Black Panthers.
You’d be surprised how:
Sometimes a foot in a mans nuts helps to clear his head.
I agree with that, and I like to think I would do that, but as a 19 year old I’m not sure I would have had the courage I have as an old lady (and of course, I’m smart enough not to put myself in that position now either).
But, I think that it must be difficult for men to really grasp how one who is weaker and smaller can be intimidated just by the allusion of force. Even now, I don’t know what I would do in a situation where I could do what someone told me, or risk real physical injury or death. I mean, it’s very easy from the comfort of my computer chair to say, “Yeah, I would fight back” but I cannot second guess someone who is in that actual position.
The totality of the situation could lead to rape and kidnapping charges. If the DA got tough with his brother, his brother would have been forced to offer testimony about the coercion. Testimony that a credible threat was made regarding leaving the room is sufficient grounds for charging one or both people. In the 1960s climate, this incident would never have been prosecuted. In today’s climate, it would be prosecuted if the woman was credible and insisted on prosecution.
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