Now about those friends of Obama...

[fpb]

To me, the most curious and interesting thing about William Ayers is this: how does one parlay an adult life experience that can be summed up in twenty years hiding on a demonstrably criminal and murderous cause, then a few more getting a degree in education from a very minor New York City college - how does one parlay this into a full professorship in education at The University of Chicago - probably the most prestigious American university outside the Ivy League - and a permanent place among the great and the good of America's third city? I'd really like to know. Because, you know, I rather fancy an academic career, and I don't think that my CV is any worse than that of Professor Ayers when he set out on his.

Another point: how does one get away, like his consort Bernardine Dohrn did, with completely refusing to cooperate with a criminal trial into the violent death of two policemen and a guard, in spite of serious grounds for suspicion; and why should a judge then send her free even from a measly sentence for contempt of court?

These two things cannot be explained unless the Dohrn-Ayers couple had pretty serious friends somewhere in the very "Amerikkan" establishment that they as terrorists planned to destroy. And that certainly makes Obama's friends as interesting as Obama himself.

P.S.: Obama was also an admirer of the execrable Edward Said, who was a professor at Columbia at the same time as Obama was a student. There is a photograph, I gather, of the two of them together. To anyone who remembers what I think of Edward Said, this is another interesting friendshiop.

Comments

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Ayers is not at the University of Chicago (my alma mater). He lives in Hyde Park, the U of C's neighborhood, but he's a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a member of the Chicago establishment, basically by inheritance. Ayers' dad Thomas was head of Commonwealth Edison and a friend of Mayor Daley (Daley pere, that is), a pillar of the Chicago elite. I haven't looked up the legal details of his and his wife's trials.

So yeah, friends in high places -- and the Chicago establishment has an order of magnitude more tolerance for criminality than the American establishment as a whole. Usually just graft and corruption rather than unrepentant terrorism, but apparently they'll let you in as long as you stop with the actual violence.

I've never seen you comment on Edward Said, but somehow I find no difficulty figuring out your thoughts about him.

[luckymarty.livejournal.com]

Oops, should have read the comments first -- well, the stuff about his father is new, anyway. A local columnist explains the same sort of things, in a longer context, here and here.