Public Enemy Page 17

  Margaret Mead famously said that one should never doubt that a small group of people can change the world—“Indeed, nothing else ever has.” This adage, while true, could use a modern amendment: never doubt that one idiot with an e-mail account can change the world—or at least disrupt a lot of lives.

  One of my self-appointed tormentors was David Caton, an accountant turned rock-club owner turned memoirist and author of a book about his personal addiction to pornography and ultimate resurrection as a born-again Christian turned right-wing activist as founder, president, and sole employee of the Florida Family Association. While writing me to encourage repentance and a certain path to salvation, he was also waging a one-man jihad against a reality TV show on the Learning Channel called All-American Muslim. Because of his intervention, Lowe’s Home Improvement and Kayak.com canceled sponsorship of the show—and, of course, covered all the bases by simultaneously issuing statements in favor of tolerance and diversity. What a country!

  I’d never actually met anyone face to face from my furiously corresponding Greek chorus. I pictured white, middle-aged loners in terry-cloth robes sitting in Mom’s overheated basement rec room fueling up on rum and Coke and fast food, a collision of cigarette butts mingling in a big glass ashtray—until Michael H. stepped from that imagined homogeneous crowd and approached me, video recorder in hand, to introduce himself after a talk I’d given in Denver. Young and soft-spoken, not frothing incoherently, dressed in khakis and button-down blue shirt rather than a black cape or a robe of any kind, he exploded my settled stereotype of the collective howlers. “You claimed you never killed anyone,” he said quietly, “but what about the millions you’d planned to kill if your revolution had won?” I responded that I’d never planned to kill a single person—not one, and not hundreds or thousands or millions. “OK, thanks,” he said as he slowly swung the camera in a panoramic arc, capturing the entire scene.

  And then one morning a man my own age walked into my office on campus off the street and told me in a trembling voice that I deserved to die. He was sweating and red-faced, his veins popping in his neck and forehead. I was shaken but managed to swallow hard and get my own voice steady enough to ask him if he was threatening me. When he said no, I asked him to please leave. He refused, so I shifted direction and invited him to sit down; once in a chair, he became visibly calmer and looked harmless enough. I was cooler, too, and I told him evenly that I was going to call the police. He raised his voice and turned a deeper red. “Don’t you mean the pigs?” I said he could call them whatever he liked, but to me, in this situation, I’d just call them the police. We chatted for several minutes until the cops arrived. I didn’t want to press any charges, and the police gave him a warning and escorted him off campus.

  Attack ads were running on TV in Florida linking Senator Obama to Rashid Khalidi and demonizing him as an anti-Semite with deep ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization or to Hamas. A reporter interviewed a high official in John McCain’s presidential campaign (no, no—not high like that; well, maybe, but I mean high in the hierarchy!) on national television and challenged the stuttering assertion that Obama was affiliated with a bunch of anti-Semites. “Who are Obama’s anti-Semitic friends?” asked the reporter. “Rashid Khalidi,” said the campaign official. “Who else?” asked the newsman without the slightest impulse to question the assertion that Khalidi was anti-Semitic. “William Ayers,” said the McCain man. And without missing a beat the reporter responded: “Ayers isn’t an anti-Semite,” he said. “He’s the terrorist.”

  Rashid called me, laughing, and wondered if we might change lanes for at least one news cycle. “You be the anti-Semite; I’m sick of it. I’ll be the terrorist.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t try to wriggle free—you’ve got your assigned spot. Stay in your lane!”

  The demonization had its impacts, even if not exactly in the intended ways. A colleague of Chesa’s, a person I’d met several times, told him how sorry she was that I’d been dragged into all this and how unfair it was that I’d become collateral damage of the campaign. She added, “I know Bill killed someone, but that was a long time ago.” But I didn’t!

  As the attacks on me accelerated, Obama’s poll numbers inched upward. Maybe people were just becoming disgusted with the gutter tactics; maybe they saw the desperation. Maybe they thought, as I did, that Barack’s “connections” to other people, no matter who, did not define the man. Or maybe they liked me—OK, not likely, but maybe. The best news came after Senator Obama was subjected to a steady barrage of attacks for being a “socialist,” and a poll discovered that for people under thirty, the word “socialism” had a favorable rating of over 50 percent, while “Republican” garnered less than 40 percent. I imagined some kid in Wyoming hearing the attack ads, Googling “socialism,” and reading up on that central social principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Hey, that sounds reasonable, even biblical. Sweet! Keep the attacks coming!

  Things like this always happen. At the height of the civil rights movement in the South, the White Citizens Council published a notorious photograph of the young Martin Luther King at an activist workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee with the caption: “King at Communist Training School.” Once, when we were reminiscing with Myles Horton, the founder of Highlander, near the end of his life, he told Bernardine and me about a day when he was driving a van load of young people to a demonstration a few hours away when they saw one of these photographs enlarged on a highway billboard. Soon enough they saw another, and as a third billboard loomed in the distance, one of the kids turned to Myles and said, “That’s the dumbest advertisement I’ve ever seen, Myles—it doesn’t even tell you who to call or how to get to the school.”

  When John McCain sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” he was still unaware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months. Hannity filled him in. Ayers was an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained: “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. . . . He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’”

  McCain couldn’t believe it.

  Neither could I.

  But back on the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message, and Stephen Colbert, the faux right-wing commentator from Comedy Central who channels Bill O’Reilly on steroids, followed suit. Colbert ran a clip of Barack Obama at a press conference saying, “Can’t we just get over the sixties?” An outraged Stephen responded, “No, Senator, we can’t just get over the sixties. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. To this day, when our country holds a presidential election, we judge the candidates through the lens of the 1960s; or, for example, the myth that Obama is cozy with William Ayers, a sixties radical who planted a bomb in the Capitol Building and then went on to even more heinous crimes by becoming a college professor.”

  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 tenden
cy 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:

  Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his evasion (for a time) of justice? Not likely, given that at the time of the events that brought Ayers and Dohrn to public attention, I was a supporter of the Vietnam War. I haven’t asked him to absolve me of that sin (of which I have since repented), and he hasn’t asked me to forgive him for his (if he has any).

  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.

  SEVEN

  Talking with the Tea Party

  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 on
e 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.