As it happened, I’d spent the evening before reading Ayers’s blog, and lingered over a manifesto he posted in early April, after his friendship with Obama became national news. “I’ve never advocated terrorism,” Ayers wrote, “never participated in it, never defended it. The U.S. government, by contrast, does it routinely and defends the use of it in its own cause consistently.” Capitalism, he went on, “is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution–a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love” and so on.