salud
Peter Jennings, back in the day - when a hotshot television reporter could buy a steak dinner for a couple of fire-breathing anti-war activists:
We were in Washington, D.C., now for an antiwar demonstration and Christina was giving us her apartment with a view of the Potomac for a few days while she stayed with her boyfriend, the TV newsman Peter Jennings. It was perfect for us - a quasiclandestine base camp, comfortable and elegant but still entirely guilt-free.
Street-Fighting Chic, Christina teased. That could be the name of your boutique - "Special Sale: Denim shirts and shit-kicking boots. Hair chopped off dramatically free with any purchase." You'd be rich.
Great! Diana said. But you'll have to run it, because I don't have a capitalist bone left in my body.
Whenever we saw Christina over the next few days, Diana's lost hair was never far away. Over dinner she told Peter Jennings how beautiful Diana's hair had been, and they were into it again with heat.
[snip]
That's not the point, Christina was red, angry, and exasperated. You're acting so superior, like you're the only ones who have any ideas about what's right.
Peter Jennings was smiling in a pinched way. He and I had been happily quiet until now, but then Christina turned to me and added, You're both complete elitists. She meant Diana and me, and she was right, of course - we were unbearably arrogant.
Elitist? Here we were with no money, little income, living in a shack and subsisting on rice and beans and each other. In fact, the tenderloin steak I was working on - and putting on Peter's tab - was the first meat I'd had in over a year. We drove an ancient VW van and had one and a half changes of clothes between us, and right now we were cleverly sponging off the rich - Christina and her worldly boyfriend in this case, who were picking up dinner. Was she blind? Christina, I said piously. The rent on your apartment could pay our salaries combined for a year.
--- pgs 109-110, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, by Bill Ayers.
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