"Kill your parents, that's where it's really at!"

With all this talk of former Weather Underground crackpots Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (see Steve Chapman's column from earlier today), it's perhaps worth revisiting Tim Noah's terrific thrashing of Ayer's embarrassing memoir/apologia for violent revolution, Fugitive Days. It is also worth mentioning that Noah attacked Ayers in August 2001—a few weeks before 9/11—though he revisited the book a few days after his notoriously ill-timed interview with the New York Times, in which he expressed regret for not having bombed more targets in the United States. Noah confessed that he wasn't "sure he's ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days." He also reminds readers of Ayers' level of political and ideological sophistication:

Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.")

Read the whole thing.