Public Enemy (3 page)

The fourth and final e-mail was sent after she’d had “a good night’s sleep” and was just this, in full: “I let John come off the couch and back to bed. Hope you’re OK.”

Ah, love: I was at that moment happily beyond OK. All the attacks that had come, all the nonsense hovering just beyond the horizon, seemed for that moment a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reunion and the many blissful years ahead beckoning to Espie and John.

But when I returned to Chicago, I found that things had changed for the worse. The university had received hundreds of messages, mostly criticisms for having a public enemy in its midst, and heated threats to rectify the situation with vigilante justice as soon as possible. This was not the first time my notoriety had surfaced and stirred some creepy reactions, but it was more forceful and frenzied than ever before. My university assigned a campus police officer to stay close whenever I taught or had office hours. Officer Muhammad (true—his parents had been Black Nationalists and close to the Panthers back in the day) was a good guy with a happy heart and an open mind, and while he always wanted to walk with me on campus, he was never a heavy or a menacing presence.

The threats poured in, and I would dutifully turn them over to Muhammad. Eventually, he had a pretty fat file in his desk drawer. Once when he came by I’d gathered two gruesome notes that had just arrived into a folder. The first was signed by “The Waco Justice League,” who said they would be in Chicago soon—they planned to grab me, take me to an undisclosed location (“already in operation”), and water-board me, the infamous torture technique employed by US forces at Guantanamo Bay and military bases abroad that painfully simulated the experience of drowning for its victims. The second, from the “Avenger,” announced that I was already in his sights (my home address was listed as authentication) and that soon I would be “blasted front and back—dead before you hit the ground you piece of shit.” Muhammad read them slowly, shook his head thoughtfully, and as he tucked them away put a friendly hand on my shoulder. He joked, “I hope the Avenger gets here first, Bill—you don’t want to be water-boarded by the Waco Justice League in that undisclosed location, only to come home and get shot. Better to get shot first.” I, of course, agreed.

Muhammad sometimes followed me home in the evenings, and the police kept a car close by on the street. One morning I came out quite early, and a cop I didn’t know was under my car with a flashlight. Years earlier, he might have been planting a surveillance device, or worse. But now he stood up, smiled, and shook my hand. “Just checking,” he said.

Smoke and fire blazed up from decades earlier, ancient embers that had never been fully extinguished. For my students this was mostly vague and ancient history, but my road to becoming a public enemy in 2008 had begun when I was just about their age.

As the American-made catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition in the mid-sixties, I was arrested with thirty-seven other University of Michigan students and one fabulous professor—my first defiant act of civil disobedience—for a militant, nonviolent sit-in at the Ann Arbor draft board. We had seized the ordinary looking office with its tidy files and typical clerks and standard procedures, because to us it had become an odious accomplice to war, issuing its toxic warrants to kill and to die in plain manila envelopes, bit by bit and day by day. When the police ordered us to disperse, we refused and locked arms, and the cops hauled us roughly down the stairs and into the police wagons one by one.

I’d returned to school from the Merchant Marines months earlier and had attended the first-ever teach-in against the war. I’d heard Paul Potter, then president of Students for a Democratic Society, end a talk on the necessity of agitation and dissent by issuing a challenge that echoes in my head to this day: “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” I was twenty years old, and I signed up on the spot.

My brother Rick was a freshman, and we met up in the student union every day between classes to discuss life and love and politics with kids from all over the country and the planet—a rolling seminar fueled by coffee and cigarettes with a unity based mostly on frank questions and open argument, uninhibited analysis, solidarity, and rebellion. Most nights Rick would stop by my ramshackle rented garret to do homework, read, and talk some more. Leading up to the draft board sit-in, we focused urgently on whether we should participate, and we turned the idea over and over. It felt somehow necessary, but also in some sense way beyond our capacity. Was either of us really prepared for such a thing? And how did you prepare anyway? Was it too risky? The questions hung in the air until the morning of the action itself, when we met for an early coffee—I had decided to plunge in, and Rick got the tougher assignment: call our uncomprehending parents, defend and explain my arrest, and get me out of jail as soon as possible.

Rick and I had grown up in a place of privilege and prosperity, of instant gratification and seemingly endless superficial pleasures, of conformity and obedience and a kind of willful ignorance about anything that might exist beyond our neatly trimmed hedges. We were all anesthetized to one degree or another, all insistently sleeping the deep, deep American sleep of denial, but Rick, though a year and a half younger, was on to things early, and he had introduced me to the Beat poets and
Mad
magazine, for starters. My next steps were improbable, perhaps, but true.

Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Rick and I felt that we were defending not our short-term present privileges but our long-term future interests—a world free of the degradation of social classes. Like them, we were from bourgeois backgrounds, and like them we wanted to risk our privilege, or at least deploy it in the fight for liberation and justice. Too lofty? Well, that’s where the similarities end, but we took heart as we abandoned our entitled standpoints—race traitors to Dinesh D’Souza, class traitors to Mike Royko—to place ourselves alongside Third World liberation, Black Power militants, workers, women, indigenous folks, the marginalized, the despised, and queers of all kinds. We went in search of a radically egalitarian world.

The war further illuminated everything: my country stood on the wrong side of an exploding world revolution, the hopes and dreams of people everywhere—for peace and bread and worthwhile work to do, for a world free of nuclear threat, for independence and self-determination, for dignity and recognition and justice—contested in every corner of every continent. The Black civil rights movement was the clearest expression of the world revolution inside the United States, and my own government was the command center of the counter-revolution both at home and abroad.

“Which side are you on?” began a traditional freedom song. I belted it out as I joined the movement—I wanted to usher in an era of racial justice and world peace, to end a war and demolish Jim Crow, and soon enough, I wanted to end the system that I figured made war and racism so predictable and so agonizingly inevitable.

When I was arrested that first time, the war was broadly accepted and even popular. We’d happily raised the banner of refusal, noisily urging all within our reach to join in, and we had the active support of hundreds of other students. But we had opposition from many more: Americans overwhelmingly supported the US invasion at the outset, and even on campus we were massively outnumbered.

So we got busy and invented a thousand different ways to organize and educate. War resistance mustered mothers and students, lawyers, returning veterans and union workers, churchgoers, teachers and nurses, and whole communities. Sites of protest included draft boards and induction centers, coffeehouses set up outside of military bases, ROTC offices on campuses, institutes conducting secret war research, Dow Chemical headquarters, the Pentagon, and appearances by every politician associated with the administration. The iconic images of the time are true—I took to the streets, marched and picketed and demonstrated and clashed with the authorities, who mobilized to put us down—but they were only a part of the story and a fraction of the action. Being arrested, beaten up, and tossed into jail quickly became a commonplace for me and for a lot of other activists, and I felt I could do it all standing on my head.

But there was so much more to do: we drew up fact sheets, created teach-ins, made spontaneous pop-up theatre, circulated petitions, and embraced music, dance, murals, and agitprop. I was in Detroit for two years with “Vietnam Summer,” a concerted effort to knock on every door in working-class neighborhoods across America and meet people face to face in order to engage in a dialogue about peace. In a single day, Rick and I were called traitors three times, spit on and threatened with physical violence once, and invited in for coffee or cookies four times. One young woman burst into tears and came outside to sit on the front steps with us: her cousin Kenny, who’d grown up with her, had been killed a month earlier near Hue, and the family was still trying to understand all the specifics of his death and come to terms with their immeasurable loss. She talked, cried, and told us stories about Kenny for almost an hour.

Those front-door encounters were the most difficult and exhilarating thing I’d ever done. The more I tried to teach others, the more I learned—about the real circumstances of people’s lives, and mostly about myself. Step by step, I became more and more radical, conscious of the connections between foreign war and domestic racism to start, between capitalist economic hierarchies and the hollowing-out of democracy, between the sexual exploitation of women in war zones to service the military and violence against women at home. Eventually I thought of myself as a revolutionary, committed to overturning the whole system of empire, and that was a decidedly two-edged sword: as an organizer I was learning to listen as well as to shout, but as a newly committed activist I was fired up and brimming with urgency.

The peace movement geared up to end the American invasion and occupation of Viet Nam, but as more and more people joined the effort, it seemed possible that we might not only end that single, despicable war but that we could prevent other such adventures—the invasion of Santo Domingo, for example, which was happening right before our eyes. At a certain point, it seemed to me that African Americans and the working class and, indeed, the majority of the American people stood in direct and deep conflict with the US government—a contradiction that could only be resolved in a second American revolution, a massive popular upheaval. It was a grandiose dream, to be sure, and a wildly passionate vision. The war enraged me—its brutality and horror—but the resistance to it inspired me—the sacrifices and steady victories of the Vietnamese; the courage of the anticolonial forces in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau; the audacity of the guerrillas from Cuba and all over Latin America. Live like Che!

Was it naïve? Of course it was naïve; the Tupamaros in Uruguay were naïve as well, and Che, too.

Did I misinterpret the conditions and the possibilities? Indeed, but who can gauge what’s really possible in the moment?

Utopia beckoned, and we heeded her call—it was a Time of the Impossible, and the horizons of my imagination were expanding like crazy. I thought the violence of the world could be dramatically diminished, even if it took a fiery outburst from below to begin, and I held tight to the romance that ordinary people through their own self-activity have the capacity to eliminate the agony of exploitation and the intolerable suffering of the poor and despised—to achieve justice in the public square and establish a beloved community. It seemed it was all there within our reach—the revolution demanded everything of me and it offered everything to me. Much later, I cracked up at Mike Tyson’s sharp observation: “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

By 1968 people had turned massively against the war, and at the end of March, President Johnson abruptly stepped aside. I was both surprised and overjoyed.
The war is over!
A million deaths, true and terrible, but at last it would end. I didn’t stay hopeful for long. Five days later the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and two months further along Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. Soon enough, a new Nixon/Kissinger administration doubled down, expanding and extending the war indefinitely.

And so it did not end, and it was back to the front, back to work, and back to the streets, but now with a determination edged with despair. Every week that the war dragged on, six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia.
Every week
—
six thousand lives extinguished
—with no end in sight. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death—napalm and carpet bombing, strategic hamlets and tiger cages, My Lai and mass murder. We had tried everything, and everything had proved to be inadequate; the war was lost, but the terror continued. Everything added to the crazy sense that we were falling into the abyss.

None of us knew precisely how to proceed, for we’d done what we’d set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any surefire way to stop the killing. Millions mobilized for peace, and still the war slogged along into its murky and unacceptable future, trailing devastation and death in its wake. The political class had no answers to the wide expression of popular will, and the ensuing crisis of democracy became a profound turning point for the peace movement as well—the antiwar forces splintered.

Some activists (including one of my brothers) joined the Democratic Party in order to build a peace wing within it. Some fled to Europe or Africa, while others migrated “back to the land” and built rural communes and intentional utopian communities to escape the madness. Some created tiny but humane and hopeful organizing projects, from women’s health clinics to alternative newspapers, from gay pride marches to environmental action, from street theatre to underground comics—all of which would, surprisingly, change the culture. A few went into the factories in the industrial heartland to radicalize the unions, create a workers’ party, and build toward a general strike to transform the country. And I took a different path altogether.