Public Enemy Read online

  The New York Times piece with its off-kilter headline was on newsstands and porches around the country as the buildings fell, and through that bizarre coincidence of timing I became linked in the minds of some to the overwhelming event itself. The calls and e-mails, letters and messages, threats and warnings escalated wildly over the next several days, and I was accused of being one of the evil ones, a mass murderer, and a terrorist. One e-mail said, “I admire your tactics, and I plan to show you exactly how much.” Another said simply, “Hide . . .” Bernardine was often mentioned and singled out for threats of sexual violence—vile, vivid, disgusting stuff. “Screw you, cunt!” and “Fuck you and die, Bitch” were pretty typical.

  The hate mail rolled in:

  Are you an American?

  You get rich spewing hatred of America, and then live the high life which for you is obviously the whole point.

  You’re a traitor and a terrorist in spite of your accomplishments and good qualities.

  You should be shot for treason.

  Go live in Russia.

  You should be jailed and hanged for using your American freedom to undermine that freedom, and then you will rot in hell you filthy bitch.

  My eighty-six-year-old dad got anonymous calls, too, from men who berated him for raising me. “I just listen calmly,” he told me later, “and when they run out of steam I say, ‘You’re wrong,’ and I hang up on them.” Good old Dad—I felt rotten that he had to go through all this. Florence—such a lovely person, and caring for Bernardine’s mother, Dorothy, so creatively—left meticulous messages on the little island in our kitchen: “Bill, Someone called at 8:40 and told me you are a murderer and deserve to die, but he didn’t leave a name or a number. Love, Florence.” No name or number? How can I call him back to thank him? And what did poor Florence make of this entire tumult and hullabaloo? I felt terrible for her, too.

  An editor from Newsday called to ask if I could write an op-ed about terrorism. “Why me?” I asked. “You know, just write something about terrorism.” No thanks. Then a Chicago paper wanted me to do a story about life underground. Nope. Before long I was besieged by reporters and editors wanting my take on Al Qaeda, on the psychology of fanaticism, on wanton violence. I declined every one. I don’t have any particular insight or information about that, I explained.

  History was shuddering in front of our eyes, pain and suffering falling from the sky and etched into the landscape, US military power thrashing wildly out of control. The pettiness of my personal challenge was fully illuminated, the fate of my little book—which had been my focus and my obsession on September 10—suddenly and definitively overshadowed by the fate of the earth. Thousands of people were dead; rumors of war were in the air; troops were mustering, battleships and warplanes converging; US flags were rolling out of the mills in record numbers. The absurdity of launching a book tour at that moment added to the surreal shroud that enveloped me.

  Yalah! Let’s go!

  We hurried into the car, reluctantly dropped Malik back at the airport where he would return to college and his eclectic cohort, happy no doubt to be away from our stifling obsession with the news, turned north, and jetted toward Minneapolis for one night just to have a quick sighting of Sim Sim, to take him out to dinner and then breakfast, and to hang out together on a road trip. I brought all the newspapers I could gather, Bernardine and Rashid brought books mainly, and Mona schlepped the food—olives, cheeses, tangerines, and Khubz Arabi for the road, a massive emergency Palestinian care package of manaeesh, lemony lentils, white rice with olive oil and small broken strips of sautéed vermicelli, olives, cheeses, ful muddamas, labneh, and mouloukhiyeh for “poor Sim Sim.”

  Labneh is thickened yoghurt strained in a paper towel overnight, and ful are simply fava beans, cooked and mashed with lemon, garlic, and olive oil; mouloukhiyeh, or “green slime,” as Zayd called it at first sight years before because of its deep forest-green color and wondrously thick and saucy texture, is a vegetable “you find only on Sixty-third Street from the nice Arab grocer”; and manaeesh is a flat and flaky biscuit slathered with olive oil and sprinkled heavily with zaatar, a seasoning similarly available “only from the nice Arab.” Mona’s magic got a special lift from Sixty-third Street.

  “Sim Sim can find olives and rice in Minneapolis,” Rashid ventured.

  “Not these olives,” Mona shot back.

  We roared out of Chicago on the interstate beyond the airport and on past Madison, the Dells, and the rolling Kettle Moraine, past Eau Claire and the green trees just starting to flame yellow and red as we raced into the land of ten thousand lakes toward the frozen North Country. Rashid was behind the wheel—a demon driver, focused, attentive, and under control but with a heavy foot on the accelerator going fast-fast-fast—talking a mile a minute, zooming toward his son.

  All of us were raw and roiling emotionally, struggling to make sense of all that was unfolding and upon us, looking uneasily at what lay ahead. I was miserable, of course, but everyone was miserable in his or her own way. My misery was miniscule. The fate of Fugitive Days seemed sealed—there was a long article in Publishers Weekly, I think, about several books, including mine, that had had the misfortune of being born into the chaos, a time when the only book that was selling was the Holy Qur’an and no one was reading anyway, everyone, including us, mostly staring at TV screens. And every review of my book post-9/11 echoed a theme from the New York Times: whatever virtues the book might have had, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon, the Weather Underground actions are impossible to forgive. The connection seemed sketchy to me at best, but it stuck. Anyway, it was just a damn book, and on the scale of suffering all around, hardly a blip. I struggled to move on.

  Sim Sim was OK, but we were all super happy to see him in the flesh and pleased we’d made the trip. We rounded up his roommate and another new friend and took them all out to dinner at Babani’s, a family-style Kurdish place. A large homemade sign with a hand-drawn American flag was taped up on the front door of the restaurant: “We are Americans,” it read, practically pleading. Inside were empty tables mostly, and the Babanis, a lovely couple in their fifties, jumped up and greeted us with aching enthusiasm, both of them near tears. That, too, was a sign of the times, and also heart-breaking.

  The book tour was revamped and restarted; I was determined to make every stop and fulfill every commitment, but it was not to be. The first to cancel was the Chicago Public Library, where I was scheduled to speak in a distinguished author series that included Salman Rushdie and Alice Walker. I was told by a top librarian that Mayor Daley himself had called and told the commissioner that I was not to appear under any conditions in light of the raw feelings and reactions following 9/11. The head of the Chicago Humanities Festival called me directly to tell me my talk there had been canceled as well; American Airlines was a key sponsor, she told me, and while she was embarrassed and apologetic, she had to withdraw my invitation or the airline’s funding and sponsorship would cease. I felt wounded. “You have to see the big picture,” she said. I replied that I thought she had a sacred responsibility to the humanities—not to me—to resist the bullying and to call American Airlines on it. “There’s a picture even bigger than the big picture you have in mind,” I said, and she said, “I understand how you feel, and I’m sorry, but my hands are really tied on this.”

  When the skies opened up I was on the first (United!) flight out of Chicago to the West Coast. Everyone was still a little jumpy and tentative, the airport itself eerily empty. The pilot strolled the aisle and spoke to every passenger, reassuring us, thanking us for flying, and repeating “God bless America” over and over.

  I made my way from Seattle down the coast to LA, back to the Midwest, and then to New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, and many points in between. I spoke at universities, on local radio and television programs, and mainly in independent bookstores.

  At a bookstore in Iowa, more
than two hundred people crowded into a space that could comfortably hold thirty. I read briefly and took a few questions: Why did you resort to violence? Was it a reckless or a sensible thing to do politically, and was it in any sense the right thing ethically? Was it effective at all? The conversation turned to the events of 9/11, its consequences and implications, the responsibilities we had as citizens and as human beings. An entire class from a local Quaker high school was there, and the event turned into a two-hour teach-in on politics, peace, the world situation, and the limits and prospects of protest—a teach-in led by the kids. What role does the United States play in the world and what should it be? What is the truth of our history, and how do we learn from it and teach it? Is “American exceptionalism” defensible at all? I was merely a witness and a happy participant.

  Everyone had seen the vicious attacks at the World Trade Center in vivid color, over and over, less illuminating and more deadening with each viewing. There was a dreadful break in the world—we’d seen it all together, a collective image and a shared experience—but over time it was clear that no one had seen the exact same thing. What did it mean? There was an uncharacteristic openness and curiosity for a moment, and it seemed there was a chance that we would search for real answers, all of us, and that America might seize the opportunity to join humanity: the Netherlands and Spain knew atrocities and attacks on their people, after all, Italy and Great Britain, too, and, of course the whole world from Viet Nam and Sudan and El Salvador—on and on—to South Africa and Indonesia and Afghanistan had all been bombed and hurt. Solidarity beckoned. But powerful voices from Washington were taking up a huge part of the available space, shouting through their expanded megaphones and imposing their own self-important narrative everywhere. This is war, plain and simple, they intoned. We are under siege, and we will invade, occupy, and punish at will. Our pain is entirely unique and unprecedented.

  But that fiercely promoted narrative was widely contested and deeply unstable just then. People were clearly eager to gather together, to talk and exchange ideas, to wonder and question in a public space, and just as clearly the sense of urgency was not tied in any way to my book. The book and the event were an excuse to assemble in a public space in order to conduct the business of democracy: dialogue, argument, investigation, exchange. That really moved me, and this became the defining feature for those few months: a voyage into the new and unfinished, a rolling teach-in on politics and the responsibilities of residents fired by an aching desire to meet in a public space, to face one another without masks, and to ask unexpected questions.

  In October, when David Schwartz of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops got a tsunami of calls and letters urging him to cancel my reading in his store, he offered this eloquent defense, the text of which was widely circulated in the publishing world:

  I myself grew up in Wisconsin during the McCarthy era and witnessed firsthand the attack on civil liberties and civic life that crippled America at that time. My father was accused of running a Communist bookshop by many people just because he thought it important to stock and promote books which were unpopular in the political climate of the time. I also was engaged in the movement against the Vietnam War and had some opportunities to view the Weathermen in action. I decided that I was politically and intellectually opposed to their positions on most matters.

  Now to the specific issue of whether or not Bill Ayers should be allowed to be one of the twenty-six authors who will visit our shops in October. It seems to me this is what America is about: listening to many freely expressed viewpoints so we can decide for ourselves the truth. America’s brilliance and enormous distinction from other democracies is that it truly believes in the democratic process. Letting Bill Ayers speak is a part of that process. I hope customers who disagree with Bill Ayers and his views will attend this book reading so you can question him about his ideas. That’s another part of the process.

  And in response to a rabid customer who threatened to boycott his store if he permitted me to speak there, Andy Ross, the president of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, wrote,

  Cody’s has lots of authors with lots of points of view. Frequently they are offensive to one group or another. We have sponsored events for Noam Chomsky which led us to be accused of being dupes for Saddam Hussein. We also had an event for Zev Chafets who was Menachem Begin’s press secretary. We were bombed during the Rushdie Affair. So we are quite sensitive about silencing people’s voices.

  Which is why, as the event ended that night in Iowa, it occurred to me to ask everyone to please buy a book. “Not my book necessarily,” I said, “but please buy any book at all as an act of solidarity and support for this precious little independent bookstore, this uniquely and universally important place that both creates and defends the public square.”

  Everyone I saw in those raw first days was feeling wounded and aggrieved; everyone in my close circle of friends and family was shaky and unsure, each of us unsettled. At that moment I was never so grateful to be a teacher, because teachers, whatever else and no matter what, show up—simple as that. Confident or confused, off-balance or on, prepared or not, I always knew I had a place in the world to be and an appointed time to be there. The days after 9/11 were no different. I made my wobbly way to class on time to meet my students.

  Years earlier when I was supervising teachers in an elementary school on the South Side of Chicago, a fire broke out in the kitchen just before lunch. The school was evacuated, the big trucks came, the firefighters in their distinctive peaked hats, long black coats, and big noisy boots raced into the building hauling their rough equipment as we all watched in excitement, and within an hour the fire was out and everyone was back in class. In the afternoon a few teachers tried mightily—and without much luck—to get back “on task,” to return to normal and to the prescribed, planned lessons for the day as if nothing had happened. Most saw the folly in that, since the day could not return to a time before the fire or be made normal in spite of what we all might hope, and many recognized the teachable moment that had so spectacularly presented itself. The kindergarten kids were making pictures and writing stories about the fire and the firefighters, some of which included dramatic rescues on ladders and flames leaping high above the roof—records of meaning-making and fear and imagination way beyond any observable facts on the ground. One third-grade class was writing thank-you notes and generating questions for the firefighters—How did you learn to put out fires? Why did you decide to be a firefighter?—and making plans to deliver them to the firehouse in person. And a group of sixth graders was researching the latest advances in fire safety and fire-fighting equipment and modern techniques for fighting urban fires.

  I had no concrete plan for how to proceed with my graduate students on that First Night after the Fire, and all the more reason to focus on meaning-making and soul-searching. We could draw pictures, write stories, conduct research, and ask questions—just like those schoolkids years ago—and we could recognize this as an unprecedented and extravagant teachable moment, and resist, then, any easy answers or any gestures toward self-righteousness or certainty.

  I wanted students to examine and interrogate the world as it really was and to look beyond the endless mystification and ideological fog that shaped options and put well-policed limits on our imaginative horizons, to shake off what Bertrand Russell called the pervasive cloud of comforting convictions that moved along with each of us wherever we went like flies on a summer day. But I didn’t want the propulsive flash of the newest insight to become its own comfortable and well-lit prison. The burden was always the weight of honesty, and my preferred pedagogical signal mostly dialogue and asking the next question.

  We faced the danger of doctrine and the danger of neutrality in the face of profound human catastrophe, the danger of easy belief and the danger of turning away indifferently in the presence of preventable human suffering. I wanted to be a teacher who pursued the unanswered questions and the unresolved stories, a teacher who was agnostic in some a
reas, skeptical in others, engaged to be sure, but contingent in most things.

  When we were all assembled around the seminar table I suggested that we begin by each drawing a freehand sketch of Central Asia. Only Nikki could do it—and with breathtaking speed and accuracy—but it wasn’t fair since she was European and European children study geography in school. More specifically, she was Cypriot, from Cyprus, which, she pointed out, is the last divided country as well as the easternmost country in Europe (who knew?), hovering around the Middle East and awfully close to Turkey, which borders Iran, which borders Afghanistan. No American came close—so we asked ourselves a bit uncomfortably, “Where in the world are we?” And then, “Who in the world are we?”

  “Good questions,” Nikki said in her heavily accented but otherwise perfect English. “Everyone I know loves Americans—not your government so much, but Americans themselves—and everyone also thinks you act sometimes as a spoiled child, whether willfully or innocently unaware of others. You’re also famous the world around for being geographically challenged and basically clueless when it comes to history.” I was immediately reminded of a great Motown hit from my youth about the power of teenage love to make the world a wonderful place in spite of not knowing much about history and even less geography. Nikki might have added that we were tone-deaf to languages and cultures—the rock song relishes ignorance about French—but she was being restrained, I think. I loved that Motown song as a kid, and felt all warm inside humming it to myself then, but I had to marvel suddenly about an anthem of my adolescence that was also a joyful and hypnotic celebration of know-nothing narcissism.

  One of my grandchildren made a recent drawing—two equal-sized amoebas floating near one another on a large piece of white construction paper, one a squiggly blue, and the other a wobbly red. The red one was labeled “America”; the blue one, “I don’t know.” And so it goes.