Public Enemy (25 page)

I was dropped.

But then I got a note from my old comrade Mike Klonsky, and he included an e-mail thread that cheered me up immeasurably. Mike and I had been friends for decades, first as student militants and SDS officers together. When he returned to graduate school I was one of his professors, and later we’d written on school improvement, edited books, and led a school reform organization together.

Mike had gotten an invitation to keynote an education conference, but the letter included this troubling line: “We had planned to invite Bill Ayers, but concluded that his presence would distract from our work because he’s too controversial and too radical now.” Mike’s note back was written with a flame-thrower: “Shame on you!” he began. “How dare you ask me to scab on Bill Ayers? In fact if you ban Bill, not only will I not give a talk at your gathering, I might picket the place, and I’ll certainly advise everyone to boycott your weak-assed conference.”

Mike’s dad had been a communist organizer, blacklisted during the Red Scare and indicted under the Smith Act; he’d been underground and on the run from the FBI for a time in the 1950s, and Mike instinctively smelled the rats even when heavily scented. I called him to give him some love for being a stand-up guy and a principled friend. “Thanks a lot for defending me,” I said.

“Defending you?” he replied. “I wasn’t defending you. I was defending myself—I was deeply and personally offended when they said that you were
too radical
, and by implication that I wasn’t too radical. I’m as radical as you are, motherfucker.” Well, thanks anyway, Mike.

On the one hand, I felt isolated and invisible, cut off and forced into exile, and I wanted to hide. On the other hand, I was determined to resist, not bending an inch. Since the contradiction was alive and as real as dirt, Bernardine advised me to let both sides breathe: “Don’t try to settle it, because it’s really irresolvable,” she said. “You should just work hard to embrace both sides: hold onto the feeling of wanting to hide; clasp the desire to resist. Keep both feelings close.” Hugging it rather than running away from it or trying to settle it helped.

Over dinner with the Khalidis, Mona said that she thought that all the finger-pointing and criticism was changing me: “You’re more brittle,” she said, “not paranoid exactly, but a bit more sensitive.”

“Leave the poor guy alone,” Rashid said. “He has enough trouble without you piling on.”

“No, no,” Mona replied. “I’m making a compliment—I like it because you’re more receptive and susceptible like this, with a little chink in your confidence. You seem more like me.”

We laughed but I, at least, got her point—I was perhaps a little slowed down, a bit more in touch with a knot of contradictory emotions and a little less relentlessly cheery. I was also perhaps a couple of clicks nearer to her experiences of exile and dispossession as a Palestinian, closer as well to the experiences of Kathy and David and millions of other prisoners and formerly incarcerated people—relentlessly demonized and shunned, struggling to find a way forward in the face of hostility and rejection as ordinary people turn away for fear of being identified with the condemned. My situation was not really comparable in terms of intensity or consequences, but it was perhaps qualitatively closer; everything seemed a little magical—even the trembling paranoia. It became a kind of turning point.

Everyone at the table was supportive—we loved each other, and it was the safest place for me to relax into the insanity forcing itself upon me. I didn’t choose this, but here it was, and I had to choose who to be in the face of it. Bernardine urged complexity and a human response, Mona vulnerability, Rashid courage. They were all right: what I did—one way or the other—would have consequences, would carry forward. Words and actions would have their unpredictable impact every day and throughout time.

I’d been invited to give a named lecture on urban education at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. When I got a call from a dean there, I was sure we were about to have the same old well-worn conversation regarding opposition, security, “Hope you agree,” “so, so sorry,” “blah blah blah.” But she surprised me: “We are all outraged by the manufactured turmoil that’s engulfed us in the wake of the announcement of your upcoming lecture,” she began. She was calling to arrange a conference-call between me and a half-dozen top officials to discuss how to respond to the craziness, and even how to “make the controversy a teachable moment.”

The conversation a few days later was the most thoughtful and principled I’d known throughout all the crying frenzy. The administration was determined to host me in a safe and orderly environment and hold all scheduled events—informal conversations with small groups of students and alums, a planned semiformal dinner to honor the funder, and the campus-wide lecture—and determined as well to defend academic freedom and give their students and the public a lesson in intellectual courage. The officials assured me that defending the lecture was not a burden to them, but rather it was their duty and their honor. “It’s not about you personally,” one said. “It’s about the mission and the meaning of the university.” They then reviewed a letter written to the campus community by the university president, Francine G. McNairy, an African American woman, outlining the purpose of the lecture and the reason it would not be canceled. She wrote, in part:

The head of campus police reviewed some of the threats they’d received, many directed at me, of course, and plenty aimed personally and with vile specificity at President McNairy, and outlined a complicated plan that seemed overly elaborate to me, but I figured that they knew better than I, and what the hell.

I was told I’d be picked up at the Harrisburg airport, and as I walked toward baggage claim I searched for my name on one of the little signs held by various drivers. One driver nodded insistently and smiled, and so I nodded and smiled back, but his sign read: “Mr. Bellamy.” He gestured in my direction, pushing the sign toward me, and said in a whisper, “Mr. Bellamy, Mr. Bellamy.” “I’m not Mr. Bellamy,” I said, as he took my elbow, glancing around surreptitiously, and steered me away, speaking softly. “Didn’t you get the e-mail?” he asked. “You’re Mr. Bellamy.” Ah, spycraft, of course!

He dropped me at a hotel they’d reserved, telling me that the room was reserved for “Mr. Bellamy.” The clerk who registered me at the front desk asked me to sign in—“Mr. Bellamy”—and then asked for a credit card to put on file for incidentals. Suddenly I was underground again, and I had no ID for “Mr. Bellamy” and no idea what to do—all my ancient underground skills vanished.

I froze.

Next day the campus was locked down—state troopers with bomb-sniffing dogs, sheriff’s deputies patrolling with unholstered weapons, city and campus police checking IDs and monitoring the scene. The talk was piped into an overflow auditorium, and while it went off without a hitch, I think Millersville will stay away from radical speakers for a while.

The campaign to demonize and blacklist me was nationally organized, and so picket lines were arranged at every talk I gave. Some were small and sociable, like the one in the tiny town of Arcata, California, where I posed arm in arm with a smiling protestor and her bold red sign “Bill Ayers is a TERRORIST!” And some were large and angry, like the one outside St. Mary’s College near Oakland, where Bill O’Reilly had orchestrated and stirred the mob from his perch at Fox News. “There are enemies in our midst,” he’d insisted, and I was public enemy number one. St. Mary’s was special because Larry Grathwohl, a paid police informant who hung around SDS briefly back in the day, was going to address the crowd. Larry had written a book about the Weather Underground claiming that our apocalyptic plans were to “eliminate 25 million die-hard capitalists.” In light of all the fresh publicity and renewed interest in all-things Weather, Larry was dragging himself out of retirement and rebooting his career as a right-wing warrior with several embellishments, including the double fiction that he had once been an “FBI agent” and that he had infiltrated the Weather Underground. Neither was true.

At St. Mary’s a man waving an oversized copy of the St. James bible above his head with both hands and quoting the Gospel at the top of his voice rushed toward the podium where I was speaking; in Springfield a couple of people threw tomatoes and eggs; and in Oregon someone was stopped by campus police just short of smacking me in the head with a hard-bound copy of
Atlas Shrugged
. But mostly folks were as friendly as they could be.

In Fresno I had half an hour before I was scheduled to speak to a church group, so I went out to chat with the Tea Party picketers and invited them in. The first two guys I met carried signs saying “Ayers Go Home!” I introduced myself and asked what they had against me. “Oh, nothing,” one of them replied gently. “We heard you were friends with Obama, and we can’t stand Obama.” “Whoa,” I said. “That’s not fair—guilt by association.”

At another event I suggested to a picketer wearing a Ron Paul T-shirt that he and I likely had more in common than he imagined.

“Like what?” he said.

“Like full GLBTQ rights,” I said.

“OK, full gay rights—agreed.”

“Including the right to marry,” I continued.

“No,” he said. “The state has no place in the marriage business—none. If for some reason people want to get married, don’t ask me why anyone would, well then leave it to their church or magic circle or cult or commune—and keep the government entirely out of it.”

I enthusiastically agreed—you’ve convinced me! “No state-sanctioned marriage whatsoever, gay or straight,” I said, “and full equality.”

We shook hands, and before I could make a pitch for Medicare for all, a fellow picketer stepped up looking distressed. He was wearing a large wooden cross and carrying a sign that said “Ayers/Obama—The Devil’s Workshop,” and told my new comrade, “Homosexuality is an abomination!” I urged them to work out their differences on queer rights while I went back inside to speak.

At Georgia Southern University—invited, canceled, and finally rescheduled—there was a huge police presence and a crazy meandering route through basement tunnels to the stage. As I stepped to the podium, a large contingent of Hell’s Angels in full regalia and with Tea Party Patriot patches prominently displayed on their arms shambled in and took the first two rows, scowling up at me. I paused as they settled in, welcomed them, and began.

After forty minutes the floor was opened for questions, and first to the microphone was the leader of the Angels, a bony Viet Nam–era vet named Rooster with faded tattoos covering his arms. “I’m surprised to tell you that I agreed with most of what you said,” he growled. “But I worry that you’re a big-government guy.” Rooster wasn’t sure why he thought that, but he was concerned. I tried to reassure him. “The main function of any government anywhere is to tax and spend,” I said, “and so the only real question is who do you want to tax, how much, and what and where do you want to spend the money? You rode up here on a government-built highway; some of you might even say you took the socialist road. Maybe you thought to yourself as you rolled over those bridges and passed the libraries and sewerage treatment plants and the fresh water canals that that was all money well spent. I know I do. When Mayor Daley sold the Chicago Skyway to a profit-making corporation, the tolls skyrocketed and the profiteers still got public money and tax breaks, and most Chicagoans were pretty pissed off. What’s so great about profit and greed? Give us back our Skyway!”

“I like that,” Rooster said chuckling.

“But,” I went on, “maybe as a small-government guy you’ll agree with me that we should immediately close down the Pentagon—save a trillion dollars in one stroke.” There was a burst of applause.

“Not the Pentagon,” Rooster objected.

“So now
you’re
the big-government guy,” I pointed out.

After I’d signed a bunch of books and the event was officially over, I left the auditorium with my friend and host, the incomparable Professor Ming Fang He, education scholar, survivor of the Cultural Revolution, and self-described “Chinese redneck” (“because I am a sun-burned peasant too”). We found Rooster and his girlfriend, Rose, and a dozen more Hell’s Angels waiting for us in the parking lot. I thought they were going to kick the shit out of me, but instead they just wanted to keep talking.

Ming Fang called her friend Min Chuan Yu, chef and owner at Shui Wah Chinese Cuisine, a dim sum place in downtown Statesboro, and wondered if she would be willing to stay open to accommodate some out-of-town scholars. “Come soon,” she urged, and we jumped in Ming Fang’s car and led the noisy motorcycle gang into town. Perhaps Min Chuan was surprised to see our motley crew file in, but she didn’t blink or give a hint of disapproval, bowing politely and welcoming everyone in turn. Each Hell’s Angel bowed in response—a sight to see—and soon we settled in to a feast of
har gau
, barbecued pork buns, and crispy calamari “fries” dusted with chili powder. Ming Fang took Rose into the kitchen for a tour while the rest of us ate and argued.