Last night, Bill Ayers spoke on NPR’s Fresh Air. Earlier in the day, a lengthy interview with him ran at Salon.com. Both are fascinating, though there’s a lot of overlap between them. Needless to say, he’s not quite the person that the McCain/Palin tried to insinuate he was. His response to the question of why he didn’t try to clear his name during the campaign speaks interestingly to the shameful, shadowy nature of the charges and the media’s tendency to frame news events into narratives. Here’s his explanation to Walter Shapiro at Salon:

Well, what I didn’t want to comment on was the political campaign. I didn’t want to enter into that. The reason is simple: I thought that I was being used as a prop in a very dishonest narrative — and I didn’t want to be part of the narrative and I couldn’t find a way to interrupt it. Anything that I said was going to feed that narrative. So I felt that part of this was the demonization of me — certainly that I’m some kind of toxic agent that has to be feared.

The second thing, and perhaps more important, is that I was being used to try to bring down this promising new leader by the old tactic of guilt by association. The idea that somehow — and this is deep in the American political culture — that if two people share a bus downtown, have a cup of coffee, have several conversations, that somehow means that they share an outlook, a perspective, responsibility for one another’s behavior. And I reject that. That guilt by association is wrong and we shouldn’t buy into it.