Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Carefully Chosen: Barry And Bomb Boy Billy

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.
The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos.
The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we
discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we
ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our setereos so loud that
the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling
constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were
alienated.
No, to "avoid being mistaken for a sell-out," to achieve the "distance" he
wanted, to show his "solidarity," he'd find someone who'd thrown more than
metaphorical, verbal bombs.

Reading these two paragraphs, one cannot be
at all surprised to learn that almost immediately after the publication of his
first book, Obama eagerly entwined himself with Bill Ayers.
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