Public Enemy (22 page)

It was inevitable that McCain would bet the house on his dishonest and largely discredited vision of the sixties. He’d built his political career on being a prisoner of war in Viet Nam after being shot down in a bombing mission over Hanoi. I was a convenient prop on so many levels: an imagined “terrorist” to begin, an unapologetic radical, and a representative of subversive antiwar forces, in sharp contrast to the heroes like McCain who selflessly gave their all to defend the homeland in wartime.

McCain and Palin demanded to “know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers relationship so that they could root out whether Obama, as Palin put it, “is telling the truth to the American people or not.”

In the wake of 9/11, even the left-leaning
Nation
magazine had bent over backwards—sometimes comically, and other times in cringe-worthy ways—to paint themselves as the “good radicals” as opposed to those crazies of the Left (whoever and wherever they might be), who were routinely condemned, demonized, and mostly just ignored. As crude and uncomradely as this tendency always struck me, it mostly warranted a smile or a yawn.

But then they published a piece condemning the dangerous tactics of the Right in the 2008 presidential campaign and managed a bizarre reversal by asserting that the attacks were all “an attempt to make [Obama] appear too radical by calling attention to his tenuous associations with an angry black minister, an un-American education professor and foreign-born Muslims.” The tie to Jeremiah Wright was only tenuous if activities like presiding at the wedding of Barack and Michelle, baptizing their kids, sharing a stage at the victory rally when Obama won his senate seat, and providing the title to his last book are all bits of fluff and nonsense; Rashid Khalidi was born to a secular Palestinian family in New York; and I am a radical, true, but I’m not un-American. They surely meant to protect Obama, and they were certainly correct when they noted that Barack Obama was no radical—but if they’d thought about it they might have gone a step further, endorsing McCain or better yet putting themselves out of business, thereby inoculating their candidate from the charge that the liberal-ish
Nation
liked him at all. I was stunned at first that they accepted the manufactured clichés and the received wisdom about Obama, as well as the outright dishonesty of it all, but insanity was becoming routine. Why not simply say, Wright and Obama were once close—so what? Get over it!

I objected, and the
Nation
published a “clarification” in the back of a later issue addressed to “the irony-impaired”—presumably, that was me. Later, a friend at the
Nation
told me that it was all the fault of a copy editor who’d inadvertently failed to put quotation marks around “un-American” in the first place.

But speaking of irony, while the liberals at the
Nation
and elsewhere were bowing deeply to the nonsense, the independent but irreverent conservative Stanley Fish was firing away, thoughtful and eloquent in resistance. Stanley had left UIC for Florida International University, and I missed our once-frequent campus encounters. But in the midst of the latest flurry, I bumped into him at O’Hare Airport, and we had a chance to get a coffee and catch up.

“Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?” he asked as we waited for our coffee. I didn’t, no. “A terrorist can still change his mind.”

Stanley had followed “the bullshit campaign” against Bernardine and me, and he thought our unwillingness to respond to the attacks was probably wise. “But aren’t you bursting to shout something from the top of a tower somewhere?” he asked. “I go back and forth,” I said. “Mostly it’s just a great comfort to know that I won’t have to pick through the wreckage and figure out a sensible response.” “I love picking through the wreckage,” he said, which was true. “And I’m quite incapable of being quiet.” And that was a good thing, too.

A week later Stanley published a piece in the
New York
Times
pointing out that the attacks on Senator Obama had resurrected McCarthyism and mixed in a dose of its more recent descendant, swiftboating. The spear point of McCarthyism was always “guilt by association,” a term coined by Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas to describe the dangerous and repugnant practice of digging deep into a person’s history for the slightest signs of infidelity to the orthodoxy of the day or any different thinking whatsoever, and then demonizing them for any potentially dangerous thoughts they might harbor.
Swiftboating
was the term used to describe the right-wing attacks on John Kerry’s military record during his run for the presidency four years earlier. The attacks never tried to document any wrongdoing whatsoever (since there was none) but were aimed rather at “covering the victim with slime enough to cast doubt on his or her integrity,” as Stanley wrote. The combination of McCarthyism and swiftboating was, Stanley asserted, “particularly lethal”—witch-hunting in the modern age.

Stanley mocked “the startling revelation . . . that Barack Obama ate dinner at William Ayers’s house, served with him on a board and was the honored guest at a reception he organized.” He went on to confess to having eaten dinner at our home (on several occasions) and more: “I have had Bill and his wife Bernardine Dohrn to my apartment, was a guest lecturer in a course he taught and joined in a (successful) effort to persuade him to stay at UIC and say no to an offer from Harvard.” Of course, Stanley wasn’t a politician running for office, but, he offered, “I do write for the
New York Times
and, who knows, this association with former fugitive members of the Weathermen might be enough in the eyes of some to get me canned.”

Stanley asked rhetorically:

That cheered me enormously.

McCain-Palin campaign literature proclaimed that I didn’t regret my Weathermen activities, which, Stanley pointed out helpfully, had absolutely nothing to do with Obama, unless political candidates must be held to a standard where they are asked to repudiate things acquaintances of theirs had
not
said. There were assertions that Obama publically admired my 1997 book on the juvenile justice system (true!), and that Obama and I participated on a panel examining the role of intellectuals in public life (there was a photograph of Obama and me seated under an amusing banner that read, “Are Intellectuals Necessary?” Short answer: all humans are intellectuals, so, yes). But it was all the stuff of McCarthyism and swiftboating, the combined slime lapping at every step. “The suggestion,” Stanley wrote, “that something sinister was transpiring on those occasions is backed up by nothing except the four-alarm-bell typography that accompanies this list of entirely innocent, and even praiseworthy, actions.” He concluded that he felt “a little dirty just for having repeated a scurrilous rumor even as I rejected it. Apparently Obama’s . . . opponents have no such qualms and are happily retailing, and wallowing in, the dirt.”

Stanley’s writings calmed my alienated heart.

Malik noted during the presidential campaign that the supercharged fame that had befallen Barack Obama was in a space all its own—a galaxy far, far away. My experiences with little bits of fringe notoriety and small bursts of public recognition or disrepute over the years were one thing, but this was something else entirely. Even the smallest piece of space dust like me that brushed up against the fiery Obama constellation was destined to become a burning taper in the sky, blazing bright for a nanosecond and fated to be burnt to a crisp.

Malik quoted Dave Chappelle: “Fame is amazin’,” he’d said, and Chappelle’s comic riff hinged on the difference between being a famous person like himself versus a full-throttle mega-celebrity like Bill Clinton. If Monica Lewinsky had hooked up with Dave she’d still be a private person, he claimed, but just by getting with Clinton, she’d become a living legend.

I became—not Monica, certainly, but for a parallel reason and with a comparable problem—recognizable. I was in Grand Central Station in New York one morning for an early train to Philadelphia quietly sipping coffee and reading the
Times
when a young man who had walked past me staring and done a double-take minutes before began to point at me from the far side of the room and shout at the top of his voice, “There’s a terrorist in the waiting room! Right there! It’s Bill Ayers, the terrorist! We need help! Terrorist!” I was mortified but also trapped. I tried smiling and shrugging my shoulders, then offering a mildly aggravated but amused look to the other staring passengers, and then shushing him with a friendly don’t-be-an-irritating-asshole gesture. I wanted to flee, but why? Where would I go? I hadn’t done anything (there I went again, claiming an innocence I could never really earn), and what if he chased me through the station, jeering and heckling? A couple of cops showed up, spoke with him quietly, glanced at me, nodded, whispered, checked his ID, and as the older cop steered him away, the younger one came over to me and said with a smile, “Sure, I recognize you. Sorry about that, but it’s New York City. What are you going to do?”

Cab drivers in Washington, Boston, and San Francisco—mostly from Somalia, Ethiopia, or Egypt—were friendly and excited and always wanted to talk, and before we parted insisted on a cell-phone photograph, arm in arm. “I guess I can’t be president now,” each would say with a laugh.

It was bizarro, to say the least, to be caught up in what you could call a world historical event. I could hardly wait for it to end.

There were a couple of omens early on of a gathering storm that would become more troublesome, dark birds circling above my head and perching in the branches nearby, watching, but they were only understandable as harbingers in hindsight. One came in the form of a letter awaiting me when I returned from summer break signed by three colleagues from the University of Colorado. “This is an unusual letter for us to be writing and for you to receive,” they began. They simultaneously informed me that they were organizing a conference to highlight the ideals of progressive education and that because of the troubling and treacherous times we were all enduring, and the disturbing attention focused on me in particular, I would not be welcome at the conference. “We know and deeply respect you and your commitments,” they wrote, but “we have to find ways for the public to see progressive education not as radical and threatening but as nurturing and familiar.” Therefore, they went on, “we cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past.” The letter explained their thinking in some detail and asked that I “understand and possibly appreciate this decision.” I’d likely never have heard about the conference had they not written, but here we were. Oh, shit! I said to myself.

When I showed Bernardine the letter she quoted Phil Ochs’s brilliant anthem, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” which chronicles instance after instance of laissez-faire hypocrisy and leftish narcissism. As a kid I marched and protested, says the narrator, and memorized the old union hymns, but now I’m much older and wiser, and I’ll have to be turning you in!

I wasn’t a liberal—even though I’d earned the dubious honor of being listed by Boycottliberalism.com as one of the “1000 top liberals in America,” and I admired lots and lots of the other putative public enemies on that particular blacklist: Harry Belafonte, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Margaret Cho, Danny Glover, Michael Moore, the Dixie Chicks, and Tim Robbins. And my liberal Colorado colleagues weren’t exactly turning me in either, but I knew that I’d have to refuse to “understand and possibly appreciate” their problem. Beyond stubbornness, I felt motivated and energized by the paralysis of the liberals. I got it—from their perspective, they were uncomfortable with the low-level witch hunt lurking in the corner. They disapproved of it, for sure, but also feared it, for damn good reason. Still, asking me to endorse the view that I was now a pariah was asking just a bit too much. Why didn’t I just kill myself, as lots of my steady stream of hate mail urged?

My own sense of fairness urged resistance. I knew something of the fatal consequences of a compromise like the one they were asking of me, and where it could possibly end. The proverbial slippery slope heaved into view: a new but no less treacherous twist on blacklisting, an unacknowledged banning, a quiet silencing, and the same old guilt by association, no matter how appealingly dressed up. I would remind them of the invitation by Bard College to Salman Rushdie to join their faculty when the fatwa was issued against him, an instance of principle in action and in the moment when it actually mattered, not remorse and regret after it was all over. To hell with it. I knew what I’d done, and I knew why I’d done it. I’d stand up for it all, and I’d stand up for myself as well.

I replied to my colleagues from the University of Colorado that they had, of course, no obligation to include me in their progressive education conference and certainly not in their deliberations about my suitability to attend. I was in fact tempted to say, with apologies to Groucho Marx, that I wouldn’t want to attend any progressive education conference that would have me. But since they’d opened the issue in the way they had, since they’d outlined their thinking on the matter and invited me to understand and possibly appreciate their decision, I felt that I had to respond.

Their desire to position progressive education “not as radical or threatening but as nurturing and familiar,” while tempting, struck me as mostly a fool’s errand. No one argued that the progressive education movement actually threatened students, teachers, or citizens—rather, it held out the hope of realizing a humane and decent education for all within a revitalized politics and a more authentically democratic society. But progressive education, if it meant anything at all, had to embody a powerful and profound threat to the status quo—a direct challenge, for example, to all the policy initiatives that de-skill and hammer teachers into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy, a refusal to bow to all the pressure to reduce teaching to a set of manageable and easily monitored tasks, a rejection of all the imposed labels and all the simple-minded metrics employed to describe student learning and rank youngsters in a hierarchy of winners and losers. It had to be a threat to all that and more. And here was the contradiction laid bare at the heart of the efforts of my Colorado colleagues as well as my own: the humanistic ideal and the democratic injunction insisted that every person was an entire universe, that each could develop as a full and autonomous person engaged with others in a common political and social space and an equality of power; yet the capitalist imperative maintained that profit was at the center of economic, political, and social progress, and developed, then, a culture of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education for democracy would always fail as an adjunct to capitalism, just as an education for capitalism would fall short when it came to building either a democratic ethos or a participatory practice. I told my erstwhile friends and comrades that we would have to find ways to engage, then, in the arena of school and education reform even as we struggled toward a world fit for all children. The two were inseparable.