About halfway into Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, young writer Chesa Boudin’s new memoir-cum-South-American-travelogue, he describes his experience working for Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government. However, his friend and liaison in the Venezuelan government was making things a bit awkward for him:

Marta had introduced me to her friends as “the son of political prisoners in the United States.” I wasn’t entirely comfortable being introduced this way; certainly it wouldn’t have been one of the first things I told someone about myself. In hindsight, however, I realize that Marta’s approach made sense given the context.

Political prisoners? Boudin’s parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members who participated in the robbery of a Brinks truck with the Black Liberation Army, a militant Marxist Black Panther offshoot. The robbery resulted in the deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Kathy Boudin served 17 years in jail for the crime; Gilbert remains in jail and unrepentant.

In order to understand Boudin’s views, perhaps it would also help to know about his other parents. Because Kathy and David were in jail, he was raised by their comrades-in-arms in the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Indeed, Boudin’s four parents are probably the only reason anyone would care about his thoroughly underwhelming book — and why an otherwise unremarkable academic has been profiled by the New York Times and managed to date Natalie Portman.

Now, you might recall, there was a good deal of controversy about President Obama’s long association with Ayers. While pretty much everyone condemns Ayers’s terrorist actions as a member of the Weather Underground, there is some disagreement as to how repentant Ayers himself is, and as to whether he was reformed by the time Obama was working closely with him.

For what it’s worth, if Gringo is anything to go by, Ayers managed to raise a boy who is thoroughly anti-American and prone to bizarre justifications for the use of violence (or at least, for the use of violence in the service of left-wing causes). These justifications start with his parents — “certainly violence is illegitimate when it targets civilians or intends to cause generalized or widespread fear, but my parents never did either of those” — and permeate his entire worldview.

As it happens, Boudin is studying abroad in Santiago, Chile, on Sept. 11, 2001. September 11 is also the anniversary of Pinochet’s coup in that country, a coincidence that Boudin flogs for all its meaningless significance by recounting the vehement, anti-imperialist, blame-America tirade one of his Chilean professors used to mark the occasion. Of course, even on this day, Boudin recalls his shame at being American.

Boudin observes that Pinochet is responsible for the deaths of over 3,000 political opponents. Pinochet is certainly guilty of any number of atrocities that should not be excused. (Indeed, Boudin’s left-wing professor narrowly escaped death at the hands of Pinochet’s regime.) But Boudin refuses to disentangle these crimes from the policies that American economists promoted in Chile, and when he writes of left-wing regimes, he fails to mention that they’ve committed similar (and worse) atrocities.

Boudin observes, “My guilt by association with the government of my country seemed all the more intense because of the way [Professor] Vitale narrated the history, making explicit the connection between the United States government and Pinochet. Was the eagle on the crest of my navy blue passport the same one crushing peasants in its talons?” Boudin’s professor explains that Pinochet’s regime was awful not just for its torture and killings, but because Pinochet “quickly rewrote the constitution and dismantled the socialist economic policies of his predecessor. There was no more free milk in schools or subsidies for bread.”

First of all, describing Allende’s economic policies in such favorable terms is a bit rich. One of the conditions that fomented Pinochet’s coup was that Allende’s feeble attempts at centralized economic planning had resulted in widespread food shortages.

But more important, it was Pinochet’s economic policies, enacted under the guidance of U.S. economists, that solved this problem — and helped to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and economy after Allende basically destroyed them. And yet, Boudin is ashamed by his professor’s singling him out as a “Chicago Boy.” Boudin is from Chicago, and “Chicago Boys” is the nickname for Milton Friedman and the other University of Chicago economists who turned Chile’s economy around.

Just a few pages earlier, Boudin himself praised the country’s transportation infrastructure: “It was only matter of weeks before I learned to appreciate the country’s travel infrastructure and public transportation system.” Who does he think created this infrastructure?

Meanwhile, Boudin all but brags about his grandfather’s work as a lawyer for Castro’s regime, and about how respected his Marxist-theorist uncle is in Cuba. (Boudin is also the great-nephew of left-wing journalist and Soviet spy I. F. Stone — he’s red-diaper royalty.) Has Boudin ever thought about the fact that Castro’s body count dwarfs Pinochet’s? Or that Castro has impoverished a once-prosperous country for half a century?

But the book’s hardest-to-understand sin is that Boudin whitewashes his own experience, purporting to tell how the other half lives. Boudin sometimes admits the facts of his life in Venezuela — working in Hugo Chávez’s presidential palace, where he helps organize conferences for the country’s distinguished visitors, such as former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and actor Danny Glover. But elsewhere he’s under the impression he’s living “in solidarity with the working class.”

And according to Boudin, it’s too bad that members of the working class don’t seem to know how good they have it. When he first arrives in Guatemala as a teenager, Boudin observes with regret that “many in the town aspired to a consumer lifestyle like the ones they saw on television.” No one who says such a thing disdainfully has logged many hours washing his clothes on a rock, or spent his life eating meat once a week because he can’t afford more.

Boudin also does a great deal of thumbsucking about the other “contradictions” in his life: “Life’s incongruities were not merely between theory and practice. Much of the left-wing politics took root, despite the exclusive networks and institutions, because prisons can be a great equalizer.” Hate to break it to Boudin, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s set foot on an Ivy League campus in the last 50 years that left-wing politics result from time in elite institutions; they don’t occur in spite of it.

Boudin’s book is, frankly, terrible — a fact that even liberal publications such as the New York Times have admitted, to their credit. It illuminates the contemporary thinking in Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn’s household. And the overall interest in Chesa Boudin serves as a depressing reminder that far-left politics, no matter how discredited and repugnant, continue to be romanticized rather than condemned.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.