Public Enemy (21 page)

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.

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!

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.”