140 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyhis neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility
for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in
other people that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.” Does Ayers plan
to kill again? “I don’t want to discount the possibility. I don’t think you can understand a single
thing we did without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War,” he said, and the fact that “the
enduring scar of racism was fully in flower.” Ayers admits that he finds “a certain eloquence to
bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance.”’ (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of
Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,”’ New York
Times, September 11, 2001) Ayers later claimed that his threats to go back to terrorism were “a
joke.” Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a “whirlpool of violence’ – and, we might
add, criminal insanity. What Ayers is saying is that, from the point of view of his terrorist
controllers and ruling class case officers, it was well worth a few dead cops to be able to break the
back of the protest movements of the 1960s, which is after all the only thing that Ayers and Dohrn
have ever accomplished, apart from some narcissistic preening.
The Weatherman symbol which Ayers bears, depending on how it is depicted, has something in
common with the semi-circle which stands out from the logo of the Obama campaign. According to
his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers bears on his back the Weatherman logo, a rainbow
with a superimposed lightning bolt. The basic form of this logo was a semi-circle; it can be seen on
the dust jacket of the 2001 hardcover edition of Ayers’ book. It has curiously disappeared from the
later paperback edition. The Obama campaign logo was a blue O, with the lower half filled with red
and white stripes. When seen from certain angles and distances, the Obama logo bore a distinct
resemblance to the older Weatherman coat of arms, especially when it was the all-blue version
rather than the full-color one. In heraldry, one would have said that Obama’s escutcheon contained
a reference to the Weatherman crest. One can imagine Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn meeting in 2005
or 2006 and wickedly chortling about the new design, meant to symbolize the final revenge of the
Weather Underground terrorist killers and butchers in the form of the seizure of power in
Washington by a secret disciple of their left CIA belief structure. It was a risky gesture, since it
risked being recognized, denounced, and exposed. Would Americans ever vote to put a crypto-
Weatherman into the White House? Given the importance of emblems in fascism, this should not be
taken lightly.
At the time he was interviewed, Ayers was 56, and was flogging his self-serving
autobiographical cover story entitled Fugitive Days (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). Ayers recounted
how he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol
building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. Is this a confession? No, because Ayers by now has
embraced post-modernism with its categorical denial that any such things as reality and truth exist
or can ever exist: “‘Is this, then, the truth?” he writes. “Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest
to me.... ‘Obviously, the point is it’s a reflection on memory,” he answered. “It’s true as I
remember it.” Ayers remembers much, and then disremembers it: “‘Everything was absolutely ideal
on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: “Even though I didn’t
actually bomb the Pentagon — we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and
claimed it.” He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he
calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was
extensive.’ There is no doubt: Ayers is a post-modernist, a liar. (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a
Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,”’
New York Times, September 11, 2001)