Public Enemy (26 page)

As the dinner was ending, Rooster offered a toast with his water glass: “To a great evening,” he said. “You’re a good guy, Bill. Why do they write such shit about you?”

“I can only guess,” I said as I toasted the anarchist tendencies of the Angels, “but then why do they write all that bullshit about you?”

“Good point—I never believe the crap in the papers anyhow.”

Ming Fang toasted Rose, “my new Georgia flower and sister,” and insisted on taking the check, treating us all to what she judged to be “the most interesting academic session of all time!”

As the 2008 election careened toward the home stretch, the pressure-cooker that was, after all, our lives got steamier, the shrieking 24/7 whistle grew ever louder, and my head became even dizzier. The Palin-McCain campaign ratcheted up the rhetoric, doubling down on the bet that the Obama-Wright-Khalidi-Ayers connection would destroy the rising superstar, and the Republicans launched multimillion-dollar ad campaigns featuring one or several of the Obama “pals” across the country. The Looney Tune Right stepped up its freelance dealing, and the hate kept escalating.

Fox News ran pictures night after night of our front door with the address prominently displayed. In a couple of weeks’ time I got a mountain of identically printed cards in the mail with postmarks from California to New York, each accusing me of murdering a police officer and predicting that “justice” would be served. While the wave of postcards lacked spontaneity—I wondered what kind of far-flung franchise operation ginned up this whole deal—it had its effect. I was weirdly disconcerted and preoccupied, wondering uneasily several times a day about what I might find at home later, and then peering anxiously into my mailbox every afternoon. But the cards—and nothing heavier—kept coming, some with little personalized notes: “Your blasphemy has been noted.” “You’ve rejected Jesus at your eternal peril.”

Our house was under siege—reporters from around the country and the world periodically set up camp in the park across the street, trampled the bushes as they occupied our little front yard, interviewed our neighbors, marked our comings and goings, and occasionally rushed up to ask one more unanswerable question. Bernardine ran the gauntlet every day to get to and from work, but I was mostly hunkered down inside working at the dining room table on a comic-book edition of my book
To Teach
with my collaborator, Ryan Alexander-Tanner, the brilliant young Oregon cartoonist who was crashing on our top floor—some version of house arrest but with a resonance. Ryan and I made ourselves focus on the work, and we stayed blissfully unaware of most of what was going on outside except when we ventured out for pizza and candy or coffee to fuel our efforts. Then we would blink our eyes and catch our collective breath as the craziness pushed forward.

For three days, a crew from
The O’Reilly Factor
followed us to the supermarket and the coffee shop, recording our every move. When I gave a talk one night at Shimer College, a tiny local school organized around a Great Books curriculum, they captured the full hour and a half on tape. I was pretty sure they would do something on air with the footage since my lecture hit topics that might provide fodder for their hack attack—democracy and education, the importance of active engagement in civic life, the difficulties of making moral decisions in immoral societies—but I was wrong. A quiet address from me was apparently not the proper optic for them, even if the themes were inherently incendiary and the students led an animated conversation. They needed conflict, they longed for confrontation, they sought red meat. And so every step outside the house invited three of them—camera man, sound man, eager on-air correspondent—to rush urgently toward me, shouting and gesturing as if something of real importance had just occurred that very moment and I was the one person on earth who needed to say something that could make sense of it all. “Mr. Ayers! Professor! One minute! Please! Can you tell us, sir . . . ?” I tried to stay cool, to align my movement with my breath, to meditate on classic silent films, and to go about my business—shopping, scoring the coffee—and avoid ducking my head like a guilty perp or appearing terrified like a turkey at Thanksgiving or bursting into tears like a lost child. “What are you trying to hide?” In that scene and that context, just walking on looks so wrong—seriously, try to stay dignified with the scrum in your face and you’ll see how tough it can be.

One day Ryan and I were taking a break from writing, chilling out in the living room, when we heard the crackle of a microphone, and looked out to see a Chicago tour bus idling in front, the tour guide pointing our way and the tourists snapping photos. We were on the tour!

Another day the young man on assignment from Fox tried to push his way through our front door, shouting that if I believed in the First Amendment I had to answer his questions. I wanted to pause, pull out the copy of the Constitution I always carried in my back pocket, and patiently explain the Bill of Rights to the kid, but the scene was way too noisy and a bit too pushy. I told him to get the hell off the porch. That night, Bill O’Reilly, focusing a close-up on the black T-shirt I was wearing with its large red star in the center (Communism! Or Macy’s! Or Heineken!), smirked as he said that this well-known socialist (me!) was suddenly a defender of private property (my residence!). I later sent O’Reilly a brief excerpt from Friedrich Engels explaining the difference between personal property and socially produced wealth, but I never heard back.

I increasingly felt the snowballing impact of the public campaign. I was scheduled on the local public radio station regularly for several years, for example, mostly to participate in conversations about education issues, but as the campaign escalated the invitations ceased. After one of my last appearances I hung around for a bit with the host, Steve Edwards, a thoughtful, liberal reporter. He told me that the station got a flood of objections every time I appeared, something he couldn’t understand given the content of my positions, and then asked me, “What’s it like to be so widely hated in the public mind?” He was perfectly serious and genuinely curious, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud.

“Do you really think there’s something out there that could sensibly be called ‘the public mind,’ Steve?” I asked. “And if so, could it possibly be stable or coherent or immutable?”

“No, not really,” he agreed. “And you don’t seem a likely candidate for the post of public enemy, but it must be weird to be you right now.”

“It’s not really how I experience my life,” I said.

There were parallel campaigns on several campuses to purge my books from schools of education—I heard first from folks at Arizona State and Georgia State, and then from faculty across the country. The campaigns were not universally successful, but they were a troubling trend nonetheless. At little Wheaton College, the Evangelical school outside Chicago famously attended by Billy Graham, an ad hoc committee of alumni formed to investigate why education majors were required to read my blasphemous words and to demand that I be completely purged from the curriculum. That one succeeded.

In any case, the non-invitations made a certain sense to the faculty committees, student assemblies, public programming groups, or conference planners charged with choosing who to include. They granted themselves permission to embrace freedom of expression in general—we don’t have any blacklists, they could honestly tell themselves, we don’t want to encourage the censors or organize a repression. But the best way to keep the thought police away, the logic unspooled, and to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-intellectualism and tyranny was to organize a reasonable self-censorship and a moderate self-control. Perhaps they figured that there were “plenty of other respected educators one could invite to speak,” as the governor of Nebraska so considerately clued-up the professors at “his” university. And, of course, it’s true—there are.

I’d instinctively been on the side of demonstrators and dissidents my whole life, habitually with the pickets, but now I suddenly had to cross a picket line or break an order just to hear myself speak. That was weirdly dislocating. The threats and swirling controversy and angry demonstrations seemed upside down. But not wanting to cringe or cower—even when tempted—led me to a new space where all I wanted to do was to engage the demonstrators, an eclectic group of folks whose coherence was largely an illusion orchestrated by a group of billionaires at the top. And once started, I rather loved talking with the Tea Party. Their forces distrusted the government—big deal, so did I. They loved liberty—OK, who doesn’t? They didn’t hate capitalism, not yet, so talking to them became a project and my mission.

Debbie Meier, a friend and colleague for years and Malik’s former New York City elementary school principal, sent me a quick e-mail in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign. “Why not just apologize?” she asked matter-of-factly. “Get it over with.” She’d CC’d several of our school reform pals from around the country.

I immediately hit Reply All: “I’m sorry!”

A few minutes later she wrote a second e-mail: “I don’t actually know what I meant by that, so maybe not.”

Those back-to-back notes summed up at that moment my own conflicted feelings perfectly: I’m sorry; well, wait, what am I sorry for? Maybe I’m not sorry after all.

Exactly! Contradiction is my only hope!

An endlessly repeating epithet had begun to sound—even to me—like a natural part of my given name: “Unrepentant Domestic Terrorist William Ayers.” Who would name their child Unrepentant? And even worse, who would call a kid Unrepentant Ayers, with three middle names? Call me Bill.

I rejected outright the “terrorist” label, and I was bewildered by the constant repetition of “unrepentant.” George Stephanopoulos, on that presidential debate night, made a point of saying I’d never apologized for my despicable behavior. Was that even true? I wondered. And if I had apologized, would that have made it all go away? Somehow I doubted it then, and I doubt it even more now.

Why not say you’re sorry? I was; I am.

I was happy to discuss anything, and I was able to openly regret lots of things in a range of settings, but somehow stubbornly unwilling to say a single line: I’m sorry I engaged extreme tactics to oppose the war; I’m sorry I destroyed war materials and government property.

I’m not sorry about that, and I can’t say with any conviction that I am. Opposing the US invasion of Viet Nam with every fiber of my being is simply not one of my regrets. And as I considered it decades later, I wanted to defend it all—every bombing and each bit of vandalism, every disabled warplane and destructive act, every exposed police killing, each discouraged aggressor and all the cringing, barricaded politicians.

“No Regrets”—the repeated headline taken again and again to be proof that my various wrongdoings had not been adequately recognized, that I’d failed to fess up and that my transgressions, then, were enduring and ongoing—was a theme with legs. It was introduction, conclusion, content, and punch line rolled into one, and it had it all: short and memorable, pithy and hard-hitting, vague and entirely unfathomable.

And so I felt a little trapped: the media chorus demanding a statement of remorse felt to me a bit too close to a gathering horde armed with torches and pitchforks, and the repeating demand for a general admission of guilt seemed impossibly broad. What exactly did the mob expect me to apologize for? I made a short list: being a jerk; destroying draft board files; laughing out loud in church; disrupting the military; my manner; driving too fast and rarely getting a speeding ticket; being born; stopping troop trains; exaggerated claims and inflated rhetoric; dozens of defiant demonstrations; fighting the cops in the streets of Chicago and Washington, DC; talking too much; surrounding the Pentagon; 1968; disabling B-52s headed for Viet Nam; smoking dope; jail breaks; my subversive outlook; being way too happy; doing anarchist calisthenics at odd times and in inappropriate venues; oh, and yes, there’s the matter of vandalism and destruction of property, including a series of high-profile bombings of government and corporate buildings, each a symbol of war and empire, oppression and white supremacy, and each accompanied by an explanatory if rhetorically overheated statement or communiqué. And, if that’s not enough, there’s the fact that I was born in the suburbs.

Inclined to apologize—sorry, sorry—it would be tough to know where to begin.
Blanket apology:
Sorry! (It sounds so insincere, even to me).
Specific apology:
Sorry I didn’t vandalize more war materials (I don’t know if that quiets the mob a single decibel).

I read time and again that I was wandering around place to place muttering something incoherent about being “guilty as hell, free as a bird”—unrepentant, triumphant, arrogant. No regrets. What I’d actually written was quite different: “Among my sins—pride and loftiness—a favorite twinkling line . . . guilty as hell, free as a bird.” I’d said “my sins” for God’s sake, and I’m not a bit religious. What do they want already? Still the stuttering mantra: no regrets!

But there are many, many things to regret, of course, and atonement is sometimes appropriate: the wretched years of the American war in Viet Nam, the desolate decade of serial assassinations of Black leaders, the exhilarating upheaval and the sparkling fight for freedom and peace and justice can’t possibly justify everything everywhere. That’s too cheap and altogether too trouble-free. Mistakes were made—no, no, no, scratch that cliché with its evasive passive voice. It’s the caption of a classic Matt Groening cartoon in which a kid with a guilty look sits alone in the midst of his trashed and torn-up room, the refuge of every rascal weaseling away from an honest accounting or some serious reckoning.

I did adopt a hyperpartisan stance within the movement: you’re either with us or you’re with the enemy. Every discussion devolved into a clash of creeds; words lost all liberatory potential as they were forged into crude weapons put down as traps to entangle partisans from different factions or other sects. Dialogue disappeared—speaking became more geared toward posturing and performing than persuading—and was replaced with slogans that concealed much more than they revealed.