Public Enemy Read online

  The consensus from them, in line with Bernardine’s steady and consistent basic instinct, was that whatever happened on the web or in the press, we should simply turn away. No comment, no elaboration, no clarification, no response. “Be completely quiet,” they said, “and stay calm.” “It’s harder than it sounds,” Zayd added, looking right at me, “especially for you.” True, too true: I tend to have a lot on my mind—who doesn’t?—and I’m genetically wired to speak up and speak out, and not always with considered judgment. My default position, no matter what, is to say something. My dad used to tease us for what he claimed was a genetic trait we all shared: “Often wrong, but never in doubt; routinely embarrassing, but seldom shy.” And Bernardine liked to tell people that one of the reasons we’d survived more than a decade on the run was that she’d never actually spelled out for me that we were underground: “He can’t keep a secret and he talks too much, so we just kept him in the dark about our predicament.” She was kidding—I think.

  “You’ll get flattened,” they now said in unison. “There’s simply no sensible path to being heard in the teeth of the howling gale of a presidential campaign.”

  “I’m not really worried,” I said.

  Chesa responded, “Whether you’re worried or not is beside the point; you’re not a worrier, and so you’re not the best judge about what to be bothered about. But look: here’s this enormous, ravenous electoral creature with neither a heart nor a brain, and when it comes after you, it’ll scoop up a lot of other people for no good reason.”

  “OK, OK. I give up.”

  We left that summer in full agreement, and over the next months, my brother Rick and several of our closest friends and comrades deepened and extended the conversation, and underlined the basic conclusion: YO, BILL! SHUT THE FUCK UP!

  I agreed, truly I did, and I pretty much thought that I’d gotten the message. I felt it unlikely, for example, that I could say anything substantive about the things I cared most deeply about and have it honestly reported—about the continuing American wars of invasion and occupation, for example, or about the racist injustices defining our increasingly barricaded society—but even here they saw backsliding. “Not unlikely, Pops,” Malik said. “Impossible. Try to keep it straight.” He was patronizing me again, but, hell, he was also right, because I was being an idiot and keeping everything clear was exhausting me. Everyone—even me—sensed that if the Obama campaign ever got a real head of steam, I’d need some help to hang on to our agreement, and everyone seemed to agree that it would take a village.

  After the ABC “debate” and the George Stephanopoulos moment, I got messages from all three guys: “Holy shit, Pops! You’re under the bus!” (Malik); “I loved Obama calling you an ‘English’ professor—brilliant! It’s about to get weirder!” (Chesa); “Just hang in there, man—the longer you say nothing, the calmer your world will become. You can do this!” (Zayd).

  When I talked with Zayd on the phone the next day, he predicted not only that I would settle into and embrace a practice of quiet reflection, meditation at the eye of the storm, but that all the noise swirling around me would become even more frenzied and more frantic, more incoherent and more out of control, shriller and nuttier. “You’ll be sane, and all around you they will be going crazy,” he said. He began to sound like my own personal Buddhist advisor, my all-seeing and extra-wise Bodhisattva: “Remember: You’re watching the roller coaster. Don’t get on the roller coaster.” Om.

  Over the next several days I stayed close to my routine—up before 5:00 a.m., strong coffee, and at least three hours of early morning writing at the big table before the noise of the wider world made its claims on my attention. But some things were beginning to shift without a doubt. I now avoided looking at the media altogether, even the sites that Zayd had recommended—I found the desire to respond and correct the record just too overwhelming, and I wanted to resist that terrible impulse. That was probably on balance a positive thing, but even better, each of our kids now called me at least once every day, “just checking in.” We’d always been in regular contact, but this was another bonus, and it had its desired effect. I felt propped up and supported where it counted, and I loved it.

  I biked from Hyde Park to the university still, but one day I decided to ride the path along Lake Michigan instead of my usual dash through the South Side, and it instantly became my preferred route. The bike path took a little longer, true, but slowing down was precisely what won me over—the lake was breathtaking and the approaching skyline beautiful, the wind refreshing, the sun on my face warming. As I moved along, breathing in the good air, I began to feel the frenzy outside falling away as a deep tranquility settled in, and I arrived at work filled with calm and inner peace. Several graduate students were cued up to talk to me about their dissertations and class papers during my office hours. Outside was all thunder and lightning, anxiety and challenge, and I felt as if I’d just meditated. It was the end of the world as we know it, and I felt fine.

  If somebody had to be thrown into the path of the dark and onrushing train at that moment—if the locomotive of the Lord was set to run someone down—I was in many ways as good a prospect as any, and in better shape than most. True, I’d tried to make a revolution, I had a dubious and hazardous history, and I’d “committed detestable acts forty years ago,” as Obama had so delicately put it, which was, after all, kind of the point of the whole messy muddle. But I wasn’t overly jumpy or all OCD about it, and I’d lived on. I’d dealt with the legal problems associated with the disorder decades before, and I’d publicly accounted for those dicey times in books and articles and interviews. I’d come under withering media attention and a sustained attack, complete with death threats, seven years earlier. And yet none of that captured how I actually experienced my life, and here I was, still standing, still happily putting one foot in front of the other.

  I’d become an unlikely academic at a research university, written about teaching and learning and the requirements of education in a democracy, published several scholarly articles and monographs and books—all the things professors are expected to do—and been recognized, promoted, and steadily rewarded. I was a lot older now, and while my political views were still radical and my activist enthusiasm undiminished, I felt that I’d learned something of the perils of political passion and dedication without either withdrawing my commitments or making idiotic counter-commitments. These were different times with new responsibilities and unique demands, to be sure. But I had a good job and work to do that I thought was important, and I was deeply connected with a sturdy network of brilliant students and a huge community of agitators, activists, dissidents, and outcasts—lepers in a metaphorical sense, or at least folks who’d been forced out of the camp for “having issues”—as well as organizers and engaged colleagues. I had a cast of heroes, sheroes, weirdoes, and queeroes in my life, I knew who my friends were, and I knew I wasn’t alone. So under the bus or tied to the railroad tracks, I was feeling OK—pretty great in fact. The best in the world, as my dad would have said.

  I was also still trying—with many, many others—to be conscious of and true to that challenge I’d first heard from Paul Potter back at the University of Michigan: Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values. I didn’t take that to mean I could simply memorize a set of rules or make a list and carry it around in my back pocket for a lifetime, sleepwalking step by dogmatic step free of the inconvenience of thinking about what I was doing or rethinking anything I’d done. I took it to be a dynamic test and a living guide, something that I could never achieve nor fully satisfy once and for all, but rather a compass for a complicated world, a standard to be reached for, something to be worked out again and again in the messy process of living.

  So I was devoted to leaping out of bed each day determined to work in some small way toward a new world of balance, peace, joy, and justice, knowing that I would end each day having fallen painfully, horribly short. Next day, as dawn spread her rosy red fingers i
n the dim sky, I’d spring from bed again with my mind reset on freedom. On and on, forever, I guessed.

  I was still trying to understand the parameters of a public and engaged person’s obligations in troubled times—as well as my own obligations in those specific times—and I was still trying to fight the good fight, whatever that meant, in whatever ways I could.

  I still thought of myself as a revolutionary, but if the test was to have a fully worked-out and internally consistent argument, as well as a set of concrete action steps that could take us from here to there—there being some vibrant and viable future characterized by peace and love and joy and justice—then I admittedly and most certainly failed the exam. I had no plan. I did have a lot of tolerance for confusion and contingency, a deep belief in dialogue and open debate, a love of experimentation and spontaneity, a fascination with particularity, an instinct for action, a willingness to dance the dialectic with some abandon, and an abiding faith in ordinary people as agents, actors, and history makers. If a revolutionary is someone who lives with a sense of perpetual uncertainty that typically accompanies social learning, someone trying to make a purposeful and activist life battling the murderous system of oppression and exploitation and opening spaces for more participatory democracy, more peace, and more fair dealing in large and small matters—well, then, OK: I was still a revolutionary.

  I knew for sure that it was my own damn life, and that I had to live it for myself without guarantees. I knew that this was my one and only time on earth, that there would be no possible repeat, no second act once I was gone. I knew I’d do my best to write my own story. I was sure I didn’t want anyone else to write it for me.

  So, come what may, I’d stay quiet and calm, I hoped, do my work and stay close to my loved ones, and just keep on truckin’—like a doo-dah man.

  Bernardine and I were on the Long Island ferry heading to Michael and Eleanora Kennedy’s place for a couple days of needed R and R and R—that last R for reinforcement—when I got a call on my cell phone from Toni Preckwinkle, our city councilperson. “I’m sure you’ve seen the ‘kill him’ videos,” she began. “I’m really sorry about all this mess.” She had talked to Mayor Daley, she said, as well as the police commander in our neighborhood. “Everyone agrees that you should have a little enhanced protection, and with your permission, the Chicago police and the university force will assign patrols to your house.” They all felt that a little prudence could go a long way. I’d always assumed they were watching me, but this was from an oddly different angle of regard. “I don’t take any of it seriously,” I said, “and I don’t intend to hide out in my own house.”

  Actually our street was already pretty snug and sure: beyond Jesse Jackson and Operation Push, beyond the University of Chicago police, the largest private force in the country, and beyond Minister Louis Farrakhan and his elite Fruit of Islam security force—young men with crisp white shirts, skinny bow ties, and close-cropped hair hovering nearby—the Secret Service was just then creating a Green Zone at the Obama residence around the corner. Still, the folks chanting “Kill him!” looked a little dazed, the threats were reaching a fever pitch, and what would it take, after all, to unhinge just one of them? “We’d feel better about it,” Toni said. “Thanks, Toni,” I said.

  Michael and Eleanora provided the perfect retreat for us: long walks on the beach where I picked up tiny specks of sea glass and bleached wood (adding them to the pack of found pennies that I carry with me to repel bad luck); scrumptious, lazy meals on the porch; a constant serenade of breaking waves and ocean breezes. Most important, they provided three days of close friendship and good counsel. They wholeheartedly reinforced the main message: be quiet, turn away from the media, and let things take their own course. “More important,” Michael said late one night, “since there’s no way to manage most things crashing around your head, your assignment is to be responsibly in charge of yourself. Period. Your integrity and your identity depend on what you choose and what you refuse right here, right now, just this.” He was confident that as the madness passed by, our humanity would be rebuilt on having withstood the onslaught without whining or cringing, giving in or backing down.

  A few days after Sarah Palin’s “palling-around-with-terrorists” rally with its “Kill him!” chorus, we were back in Chicago, and I was hanging out—palling around, I suppose—with a couple of Chicago cops at the neighborhood coffee shop on Fifty-third Street. I’d had a casual, friendly relationship with several police officers in Hyde Park stretching back for years, but as my presence in the campaign pushed forward, our encounters became more animated and more intimate. One morning, chatting about the elections at the coffee shop, one of them—a guy in his thirties with a diamond earring and long dreadlocks—said in a neighborly and cordial way, “Bill, you guys did kill cops way back when, right?”

  I thought I’d pass out. “We never had,” I said—but I was jolted by the question and utterly astonished at the cordial way he’d asked it. “No, no. We never killed or hurt anyone,” I said. “A lot of heated rhetoric, some real destructive vandalism, a lot of pissed-off language and some odd posturing, but, no, never killed a cop.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s good. A lot of guys in the station house heard you killed a cop, and a bunch of us are reading Fugitive Days right now. You think we could set up for you to come and talk about the book at the station house one day?”

  “Love to,” I said, amazed at the prospect of a book group at the station house focused on Fugitive Days. I had to pinch myself.

  Over the next several days and weeks, I ran into one cop and then another and another around the neighborhood, and he or she would corner me for a point of clarification on a passage from Fugitive Days. It was utterly surreal for a time.

  I had a few faithful haters—guys habitually weighing in on my website or e-mailing me, occasionally even sending snail mail to our home—who became as familiar to me as an old pair of sweat socks. Jack Janski was always close at hand, and still is. His recent comments are typical of our long association: “We’re watching you. We know exactly what you are up to, and guess what? We ain’t gonna let it happen.” “Hell is too good for you anti-American skunks.” (I always appreciated Jack for being gender-fair by including Bernardine in most of his rants—thank you.) “You two are dogshit.”

  Mike Adams had written me several times to tell me, for example, that I was “a filthy subhuman terrorist pig,” but he later admitted that “that was a very mean and un-Christian thing to say—even to a terrorist sociopath.” Mike decided to repent of his sins by giving me a Christmas gift: a one-year membership in the National Rifle Association with its accompanying subscription to American Rifleman. “For years liberals have been denying that Ayers is a terrorist while falsely accusing NRA members of being terrorists,” Mike claimed. “Now that Bill’s in the NRA, Leftists will have no choice but to admit the following: Bill Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist!” A contradiction with a sense of humor, Mike claimed that the gift was “money well spent in the spirit of reconciliation.”

  Dan Popa, more rambling than short and snappy Jack, and more humorless than clever Mike, was pretty dependable too: “Don’t go totally gutless on me now that you’re an old washed-up piece of candy-ass shit. You know exactly what you are and you know Obama as well as anyone, you lying fucker.”

  The ad hominem attacks expected no real response, I supposed, but I wrote Dan back anyway, trying to reason with him: “Actually, I don’t know exactly who or what I am,” I said “in part because my self-awareness is as blurry as anyone’s, and beyond that I embody a mass of contradictions that I’m in no hurry to resolve—so I’ll just have to remain ambiguous, undecipherable, and suspended in the middle of things, just like everybody else.”

  I couldn’t resist a bit of provocation. How could he be so sure that I was a candy-ass, for example, and what kind of candy specifically, hard or soft, and how sweet? Was he offering a sly bit of praise, eh? But my reply only enraged him,
and he responded by piling on even more random, happy-go-lucky images: “Your wife has the bad breath of a camel’s ass. Was she a man once? You are a lying gutless puke.”

  “Block those metaphors!” I wrote, and I asked Dan how he knew the smell of a camel’s ass exactly and how did that compare, say, to an elephant’s ass or a giraffe’s? I added that it was difficult to puke without a gut.

  No matter—he kept coming.

  You are so evil and so is your sick wife. You will both be in Hell eventually as the only true path to salvation is Jesus Christ and you mock and spit on him. I’ll say this for you, Maggot. You are patient and you are pretty smart. There is a God. He has lifted His hand away from this country, I think deep down you know that, however, keep this in mind, there will be blowback from all that you have accomplished and done to the kids of this country. You have had a great hand in dumbing them down and indoctrinating them and there will be no forgiveness for you when you are judged by God for you are one of the leaders. It will eventually crumble, and you are taking the good down with you, good people, honest, loving people are going to die. The blood will be on your hands, Obama’s, Congress, the Supreme Court, the unions, the Communists, the haters of all that is good and decent. Fuck you Ayers. There is a place in Hell reserved just for you. You will endure 10,000 times what you bring on others. Enjoy yourself you sick twisted old smelly SOB with your man-looking wife. The light will shine on you cockroaches soon enough.

  There were others, though, who were worrisome to me and not at all funny, partly for what they said but also because they visited only once, expressed their excessive rage, and retreated quickly to the shadows. John D. Levin—“I hope and pray that I will read soon that you were found murdered, dismembered, and had been horribly tortured for days before your slow, painful death. God bless anyone who does it to you.” FBA—“I hope somebody puts a bullet through your head you leftist fuck.” Redwingsfan51—“You should have been executed for treason a long time ago.” Sniper—“Watch your back! Your time is coming!” See what I mean? Sniper sent that letter, postmarked Sacramento, California, to our home and bearing a recent photo of our front door. Yipes!