My daughter undresses Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn:
Ayers wore the uniform of an aging professor whose grasp on hipness is as thin and worn as the knees of his jeans. A sport coat nods to professionalism, while his T-shirt bespeaks authenticity. Thanks to a media blitz during the presidential campaign last year highlighting Ayers’s connections to his Chicago neighbor Barack Obama, Dohrn–who outranked her husband both in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in felony convictions–has been reduced to sidekick status, waiting to deliver her opening remarks after his and praising his jokes, which she’s “still laughing at after all these years.”
She has traded the leather boots and mini-skirts of her militant days for the blousy, granola-professor look, the small red flower in her gray hair a wry accessory for a woman who found no power in flowers during the late ’60s, when she deemed the nonviolence they symbolized weak and passé.
