Public Enemy (31 page)

We were besieged by friends clamoring to come to dinner—“I’ll serve drinks,” wrote one prominent Chicago lawyer. “Or, if you like, I’ll wear a little tuxedo and park the cars. Please let me come!”

Everyone saw it as theater, but not everyone was delighted with the impending show. A few friends called to tell us that Carlson and company were “scum” and “vipers,” arguing that we should never talk to people like them, ever. We disagreed; talk can be good, we said. Others began distancing themselves from us, wringing their hands the moment they saw themselves mentioned on the right-wing blogs, and instantly, almost instinctively, assuming a defensive crouch.

Things quickly got weirder. Two board members resigned from the IHC—I’m shocked! Shocked! Round up the usual suspects! They complained that the organization was now affiliated with people who “advocate violence,” presumably Bernardine and me, not Tucker Carlson or his friends, not the mayor, the governor, the state legislature, the cabinet, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The paid stenographers at the
Chicago
Tribune
duly reported the two resignations, quoting the outraged quitters and leaving it at that.

In early January the IHC folks suggested I figure things out with Tucker directly from now on—no need to have them act as intermediary: “It’s your dinner, and our involvement at this point just complicates things.” That seemed sensible to me. We’d scheduled a meeting with top staff and board members, but since the IHC was stepping away, that became irrelevant, and the meeting was canceled.

They’d dissociated formally, but it soon became clear that behind-the-scenes bickering and back channel kibitzing, emergency meetings and heated exchanges continued apace. Some winced and stooped a little deeper, and apparently few were moved to speak up publicly to defend the idea of dialogue and conversation as essential to the culture of democracy generally and to the vitality of the humanities specifically. No one condemned the most knee-jerk instances of demonization and far-fetched guilt by association.

Dinner with Tucker seemed cheery and worthwhile compared to counseling a bunch of cringing liberals. Where is the backbone or the principle? No wonder the tiny group of right-wing flame-throwers with a couple of e-mail accounts feels so disproportionately powerful—liberals seem forever willing to police themselves to the point of forming an orderly line right off a cliff.

I wrote Tucker a quick letter telling him we looked forward to seeing him for dinner in Chicago and what we assumed would be a spirited and enlightening conversation. I saluted him for making such a generous contribution to the Public Square, a tiny program that works mightily to promote public dialogue as an essential way forward.

I mentioned that I’d heard him on the radio kidding around about the dinner with Dennis Miller and saying with a laugh, “When I hear the word ‘humanities,’ I draw my gun.” It was a joke, of course, but I urged him to leave his guns at home.

He promised he would.

A few days later Tucker sent the guest list: Jamie Weinstein, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Labash, Audrey Lowe, and Buckley Carlson. “Entertaining, civil people all of them, guaranteed,” he concluded.

Jamie and Matt were his young associates at the
Daily Caller
, Buckley his brother, and Audrey was a random reader who had won the privilege in some kind of contest Tucker had held online. Andrew Breitbart was a founder of
The Huffington Post
and an apostate from the liberal camp—I can picture Arianna Huffington and Andrew passing in the hallway, her fleeing her right-wing past, him retreating from the liberals. He was a self-described “media mogul,” the founder of several conservative websites and a practitioner of right-wing guerrilla theater, always playing the role of the grinning and menacing bomb-thrower. His record included active assistance in the demise of ACORN, efforts to damage Planned Parenthood, and the deeply dishonest discrediting of Shirley Sherrod at the Agriculture Department, which led to her being fired (followed by an administration apology and her reinstatement). Breitbart had several screws loose or missing, I thought, but we’d see soon enough, up close and personal. Entertaining and civil! Guaranteed!

A couple of nights before the dinner I was hosting a meet-and-greet coffee at home for a young friend and former student running for the Illinois Senate. (True: he told me he too had aspirations to be president someday—the first Mexican American in the White House—and a coffee at our house seemed like the perfect launching pad!) Bernardine was away for work, so I was on my own. As the event wound down and people began to drift away, an old and dear friend took me aside and told me it was foolish of me to have offered the dinner to the Public Square in the first place—an act of “left adventurism,” she called it—and going through with it now would be provocative and stupid.

“What?” I said, my voice rising and cracking. “We’ve done this dozens of times, so how is this particular dinner donation adventurism?”

“Oh, please,” she said, annoyed.

“And we’ve been on their board for a decade,” I continued, “and they asked us to do it, so how is that provocative?”

“But not in this context,” she explained. “They’re vulnerable, and this is not good for them.” I was stunned.

“I’m innocent and I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, but that sounded whiny and ridiculous the moment it left my mouth—I’m not “innocent” in the least, and I do wrong things all the time. Still, this dinner just didn’t seem like one of my many terrible or even tiny transgressions. I felt rattled and alone.

But this all had a clarifying effect as well. Friends came into sharper focus, well-defined and evident, and those who understood the importance of standing on principle—friends or not—on issues like resisting the grotesque demonization of individuals and whole social groups, or fighting the toxic use of guilt by association in political discourse, also became dazzlingly obvious. Those who were confused or confounded, duped or bamboozled, faded into the background. It occurred to me once more that the good liberals I know would surely do the right thing if zealots began burning young girls as witches in Massachusetts, for example, or if the government said, in a time of fear and threat, “We’re rounding up all Japanese Americans and placing them in prison camps.” I’m sure they’d all cheered watching the movie
Spartacus
as every slave who’d been lined up on the field stepped forward in solidarity and said, “I am Spartacus,” and when in
Point of Order
the courageous Joe Walsh stood up to the bullying Joe McCarthy and, in a voice breaking with emotion, uttered the famous line, “Have you no shame, Senator? At long last, have you no shame?” If only we’d lived in that more perfect time.

It’s pretty easy to imagine being a hero from generations gone by—we’re all abolitionists and freedom fighters now, all heroes in retrospect—but that settles nothing for today. Several state legislatures want teachers
right here, right now
to compile lists of students with questionable immigration status. Several people
right here, right now
are being interrogated, persecuted, and jailed for giving money or medical supplies to charities in Palestine disapproved of by the State Department. Citizens are legally barred by the US government
right here, right now
from free travel to a single country in the world, that terrifying island ninety miles from Miami. Where is the outrage, right here and right now? Oh, but these things are quite complicated and so very controversial that it’s hard to know what to do now—it was all so obvious and a little too easy back then. I mean, McCarthy’s name itself was a dead giveaway: McCarthy, McCarthyism . . . who couldn’t see that shit coming a mile away?

I shopped; I cooked; I set up for dinner. But it felt mostly like a heavy slog through thick mud. I was cold; I was lonely; I was tired. Not at all the mood or the tone I’d wanted.

Things got better inside my head when Bernardine returned to Chicago. She went right to work, making the carrot-ginger soup, chilling me out, promising fun, and when a wondrous collection of our closest activist friends from A Movement Reimagining Change (ARC) assembled at a friend’s beautiful home to help out and serve, mostly to be present at the dinner party, I felt fine. We agreed that we would serve a course and then pull up chairs to chat with our guests, jump up and prepare the next course, ferry dishes in and out, and then pull up chairs for a chat again. There was lots of wine and beer, and we set an elegant table with a place cards depicting six different “great Americans”—Rosa Parks, for example, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin—at each place setting, along with a menu printed on card stock they could each keep as a souvenir: Hoisin Ribs and Cucumbers, Carrot-Ginger Soup, White Fish with Black and Red Quinoa, Midwest Farmhouse Cheeses, Apple Pie and Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream Ice Cream. At the bottom of the menu, I’d included two quotations about the humanities: “I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the
humanities
,” from David McCullough (awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush); and “When I hear the word
humanities
, I draw my gun,” from Tucker Carlson (emphasis mine, in both cases). It was, of course, a joke.

I meditated on Rilke:

And then they arrived. Let the rumpus begin!

Spirited greetings and introductions all around, laughter at the improbability of the whole thing, a flurry of separate conversations as wine was poured and glasses lifted. I proposed a toast to Tucker, thanking him for his generous gift to the Public Square and reminding everyone that this was a dinner party, not an interview or a performance (of course, dinner is always a performance, and this one more than most). Then they were seated at the table, first course served.

Friends had warned us that they would try to create a
gotcha
moment, but not much happened. Tucker and Bernardine gazed out the windows for a time at the Chicago skyline and discovered a shared Swedish background (Christmas cookies!). Jamie Weinstein acted the intrepid cub reporter, notebook in hand, copying the titles of books from the vast bookshelves (Look, Solzhenitsyn! And Vargas Llosa!), questions flying from him in a steady stream, but perhaps his manic, in-your-face manner was the result of jet lag (“I’m just off the plane from Israel,” he said half a dozen times. “My third trip!”). Carlson and Breit bart had been on the primary campaign trail, and each expressed deep disdain for the Republican candidates seeking the presidency. When Jamie complained that none was a bona fide conservative, I asked him to define “conservative” for me.

“Small government,” he said.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

It certainly makes thinking easier, if not completely beside the point. I pointed out that Somalia, to take an obvious example, was a small-government paradise.

Tucker told me at one point that his kids went to the same boarding school he’d attended, and asserted that the only difference between his kids’ school and a failing Chicago public school was that at the prep school they could fire the bad teachers. I laughed out loud, and he smiled weakly.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Bernardine was saying that the United States should close all its foreign military bases immediately, begin to dismantle the Pentagon, the CIA, and NATO, and save a trillion dollars a year at least—a small-government proposal if ever there was one. The boys weren’t buying it at all, clamoring for invasions here, aggression there, violence (normalized, routine, and taken for granted) practically everywhere. Andrew Breitbart, humid and heating up, argued noisily for US military interventions in Iran and Syria and, then, egging himself on, in North Korea and China (!)—on humanitarian grounds, of course—while Bernardine, that notorious poster child for violence, steadfastly urged nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from occupations, peace on earth, goodwill toward all. It was utterly surreal.

I gave each guest a swag bag with candy kisses and one of my books, autographed. Tucker took my comic book about teaching, and I signed it “To my new best friend!” I had bought his book
Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites
, with an epigraph (returned to again and again in the text) from Larry King: “The trick is to care, but not too much. Give a shit—but not really.” I asked him to please autograph it for me. He wrote: “Thanks for the fantastic ribs! Please read every word of this—the truth lies herein.” Perhaps he was being ironic as well.

As they were leaving, Breitbart told Bernardine that he was thrilled to know her, and he noted that we had at least one thing in common: we were all convenient caricatures in the “lamestream” media.

It was all over in an hour and a half. Andrew Breitbart tweeted from the taxi ferrying them back to their hotel:
Shorthand: Ayers, a gourmand charmer. Dohrn, hot at 70, best behavior. Potemkin dinner. Pampered by
their coterie
.

He elaborated in a long radio interview later that night from his hotel bar: “We were exposed to the two most sophisticated dinner party-throwers in the world. . . . This was their battlefield and they couldn’t have been more charming. . . . I think I’m going to try and reach out to Bill Ayers and try and figure out if I can maybe do a road trip across the country with him—him and me—and he can show me his America, and I can show him my America, and maybe we can film it and let people decide. Because I’ve got to be honest with you, I liked being in the room with him, talking with him.”

That road trip was a fun if unlikely prospect, but a few days after our dinner it became impossible—Andrew Breitbart collapsed and died outside his home at the age of forty-three, too young.

Life—short or long—always ends in the middle of things.

I was invited to give a keynote speech at an anarchist convention in Greece, and while the rebels who’d organized the event assured me that they would cover my airfare and put me up for a few days at one of their squats, I was still a tad skeptical as the plane touched down in Athens: they were
anarchists
, for Christ’s sake. But once I’d cleared customs, all doubt disappeared—two skinny, feral kids, pierced, tattooed, and dressed in vibrant rags with braided and neon-colored hair flying haphazardly from their skulls, bounded toward me wearing big, welcoming smiles. Georges grabbed my backpack and Maria took my arm as we jumped on the bus headed toward one of the dicey districts of Athens.