Some of Nothing

We're All Terrorists Now
Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Even lowly booksellers:

It occurred to me, reading the news today, that if Barack Obama is a terrorist by association with Bill Ayers, then I, too, am a terrorist, or at least a terrorist by association. I took money from him, money which later paid my paycheck -- I profited from this connection! I smiled at him, and treated him like any other customer -- and much more respectfully than some of the Nobel Prize winners (to be fair to me, there are so many). Besides just working there, I was -- and remain -- a member of that co-op bookstore; we are members and shareholders together, and the profits from the store (if ever there are any) are distributed among each shareholder. I've certainly spoken to him more frequently in the last year than Barack Obama did; the senator was barely in Hyde Park this year. And I had that Tolerance class in high school, the mandatory Holocaust education in my public middle school: to be a bystander to evil is the same, morally speaking, as the evil itself. By selling a known domestic terrorist books, I became a known associate. Forget that it was forty years ago, over ten years before my parents had ever met; there's no expiration date on acts like that. They stay with you 'til G-d judges you.

This is, of course, a fun sort of sophistry, a joke I told my father (who didn't find it funny), something I told earnest Republicans worried about Obama's character and connections: I'd met the man, both men. Barack Obama's a good guy, really, he bought an extra copy of Harry Potter 7 because of a promise, and he laughed at my joke. Bill Ayers is nothing to be worried about today, just another guy who's grown older and more capitalist.

Nothing New byslag at 12:31 PM