Bill Ayers

Editor’s Note: Bill Ayers is a different man depending whom you ask. To the left, he’s an anti-war hero and an education reformer. To the 2008 McCain-Palin ticket, he remains America’s “domestic terrorist,” whose connection to then-Senator Barack Obama proved useful fodder for a smear campaign. Here, and in his most recent memoir Public Enemy, Ayers reflects on the bizarre, out-of-body experience of having to reconcile his personal life with the warped public image latched onto by the media.

It was a mid-April evening, the last light reluctantly giving way outside the front window as seminar ended and a dozen of my graduate students pitched in to clean-up and a self-described “political junkie” clicked on the TV and flipped to the presidential primary debate, well underway by now, between Hillary Clinton and the young upstart from Chicago, Barack Obama. All the promise of new life was in the air.

At that moment the moderator, echoing a dramatic narrative spun by everyone running against Senator Obama, turned to him and said, “On this…general theme of patriotism in your relationships…” The story always involved Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose impassioned statements about racism and the American government (“God damn America!”) had been widely disseminated and discussed, but soon the moderator switched direction:  “A gentleman named William Ayers…He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon… He’s never apologized for that…Your campaign has said you are ‘friendly.’ Can you explain that relationship for the voters…?”

I thought Obama looked slightly stricken, temporarily off-balance and uncharacteristically tongue-tied — I was probably projecting because I felt suddenly dizzy, off-balance and tongue-tied myself — and my students were thunderstruck. Their heads snapped in my direction as Obama replied: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know… [T]he notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense, George.”

An explosion of laughter ricocheted around the room, everyone clamoring to make sense of the bombshell that had just dropped into our little seminar and by extension reverberating around the country and the world. One student turned to me and said, “Oh my God, that guy has the same name as yours,” and another explained to her excitedly that that’s because we were indeed the same guy — “Bill’s the guy, and we’re in the neighborhood George is talking about!”

I think for some of my students there was an abrupt awareness that while they’d known me quite well a few minutes before, they had suddenly ceased to know me at all, and that made sense to me too because for a moment I wondered who I was as well. Most were super-considerate, asking what I needed and attending to me as if I’d been hit by a truck, which was a bit how I felt myself. When they finally trickled out, some still shaking their heads in marvelous disbelief, others smiling in wonder, each offered a hug or a hand-shake.

The evening was entirely surreal, and I was struggling to regain my balance and come to terms with the sudden sense that this cartoon character — Bill Ayers — looked exactly like me and was about to become a punching bag in a presidential campaign, a character who might actually have an impact on the outcome of a national election. It felt altogether too big and all-in-all too strange.

I thought about pitiable Gregor Samsa who awoke one morning after disturbing dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into an enormous cockroach. The metamorphosis was of course incomplete because Gregor was still Gregor inside — same mind, same memories, same consciousness — and he remained painfully aware of the revulsion he induced in others. And I thought about the professor in Don DeLillo’s White Noise who experienced the shock of a major toxic event engulfing his small town, the panic spreading as a poisonous chemical cloud drifted overhead and the people were forced to evacuate, and the weird dislocation when he was proclaimed officially, statistically dead in spite of being very much alive. What could he say to explain himself? How could he adequately grasp his situation, split at the core of his being and stumbling through a familiar landscape unexpectedly made strange? I knew that I didn’t want to be that professor; I knew I didn’t want to become a Kafkaesque character flailing for a hundred years to set the record straight.

Massive school closings, epic teacher layoffs. Chicago Public Schools officials had plenty to answer for in 2013. So much that their decision in the spring to yank Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel/memoir “Persepolis” out of schools and libraries because of a complaint (about a single image of torture) became something of a cultural blip. But what a blip: The banning led students at Lane Tech to rally against censorship in the rain outside their school. Which led to the news spreading internationally, the irony of the banned selection particularly poignant. (The 13-year-old book tells the story of Satrapi’s childhood in culturally repressive Iran.) Which gave 451 Degrees, an obscure student book club at Lane Tech that reads only banned books, a popularity it couldn’t have achieved on its own. Six months later — long after the outcry led to CPS telling its principals to reinstate “Persepolis” — 451 Degrees, founded by 16-year-old senior Levi Todd, was given the Illinois Library Association’s prestigious Intellectual Freedom Award.

The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

http://www.biographile.com/bill-ayers-on-the-metamorphosis-from-private-citizen-to-public-enemy/26424/?Ref=exsyn_corp_bio-beacon

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/December-2013/Bill-Ayers-Talks-Obama-Nelson-Mandela-and-Toni-Preckwinkle/

Life is going to present to you a series of transformations. And the point of education should be to transform you. To teach you how to be transformed so you can ride the waves as they come. But today, the point of education is not education. It’s accreditation. The more accreditation you have, the more money you make. That’s the instrumental logic of neoliberalism. And this instrumental logic comes wrapped in an envelope of fear. And my Ivy League, my MIT students are the same. All I feel coming off of my students is fear. That if you slip up in school, if you get one bad grade, if you make one fucking mistake, the great train of wealth will leave you behind. And that’s the logic of accreditation. If you’re at Yale, you’re in the smartest 1% in the world. […] And the brightest students in the world are learning in fear. I feel it rolling off of you in waves. But you can’t learn when you’re afraid. You cannot be transformed when you are afraid.

If Nelson Mandela were a God or a Saint (an image heavily promoted in certain precincts of power) then we mortals have nothing whatsoever to learn from him or his life. But if Mandiba was a living human being, a person who dove into the wreckage of this world with courage and hope, a man who made his way through the vortex of history without any guarantees, well, then we have a solid curriculum for a lifetime: an understanding that social movements (not isolated actors) change the world, the key role of organizing in movement-building, the power of principle, the importance of tactical flexibility, the necessity to balance anger and outrage with generosity and love in our quest for social justice—and a lot else.
Live like him!

Nelson Mandela was referred to as a “civil rights leader” on NPR, and the NY Times called him an “emblem of peaceful resistance.” At the passing today of this good and great man, the “Revise-All-History-to-Your-Liking-Festivities” is set into high gear.

Nelson Mandela was a fierce freedom fighter and a loving revolutionary who led the wide popular movement that toppled apartheid and inspired the exploited and oppressed, the marginalized and down-trodden everywhere. He never called himself a “civil rights leader” nor “an emblem of peaceful resistance.” As a movement maker and a collective builder, he would never endorse President Obama’s statement that his life proved the power of one man with courage and vision to change the world.

Mandela was officially a “terrorist” according to the US government until long after the fight for freedom had been won. And as usual, those who opposed him and refused support when it would have counted, will invent a safe story of his life—one palatable to easy-listening Americans who want to be good, but not if it takes too much effort—and love that story to death.

If interested in the real reason Nelson Mandel went to jail for those many years, read his opening statement at the Rivonia Trial (Google it!)

In 2003 Bernardine and I found ourselves in the Press Room at the Sundance Film Festival facing journalists, critics, editors, and columnists in a series of radio interviews, TV spots, and brief Q and A dialogues. Minutes before “The Weather Underground” documentary had screened for the first time to a warm response—this was Park City, Utah after all, on the eve of the unpopular US invasion and occupation of Iraq—and a thumbs-up and a wink from Robert Redford who was sitting near the front of the theater. The two young film makers who’d mid-wifed the project for years were rapturous, a tidal wave of relief sweeping through them, cleansing and joyful and over-the-moon. Their baby was finally born, and all the labor, sweat, and tears seemed worth it after all. But ambitions were now expanding and expectations naturally rising; getting into Sundance was great news and reward enough a few months before, but now a commercial release, financing for their next project, maybe an Academy Award loomed on the horizon. The sky’s the limit! BillSiegel and Sam Greene had invited us to join them and their families and crew at Sundance, and now they looked to be on the far-side of giddy—happy-exhausted, adrenalin-fueled, and bouncing blissfully off the walls.

When her turn came around a young entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked a couple of questions about our lives and experiences underground—how had we stayed together for over three decades with all the chaos and madness in our lives, and did we really think a revolution was possible in America?—and then she said, “You seem so everyday normal, and I wonder why you didn’t follow the non-violent path of King and Gandhi and Mandela.” We were always asked about violence, an obvious and essential question when it came to anything Weather, but her question had an interesting twist. Mandela? Bernadine and I asked in unison. “Yes,” she repeated, “King and Gandhi and Mandela.”

“Do you know why Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years?” Bernardine asked.

“Well, for opposing apartheid,” she replied.

“Yes, that’s true,” Bernardine said, “and for organizing and leading an army—armed struggle, sabotage, the whole difficult deal. If you’re really interested, you ought to read his 1964 statement from the dock at the opening of the defense case in the Rivonia Trial where he admitted and defended all of it.”

“I will,” she said.

It made sense to put Nelson Mandela in the front lines of some imaginary League of Justice Heroes—his struggle for freedom throughout his life was exemplary, righteous, brave and laudable. And because he had achieved hero status by then inside the US it made some sense to conflate his work with others and to imagine him a non-violent saint—for Americans the world became less messy if we didn’t have to think too hard about complex choices, and if our heroes were all-good and without contradiction.

At his trial, where he stood as First Accused in a vast conspiracy against the state, Mandela reviewed his biography and the dreadful situation for Blacks in his homeland, and quickly claimed to have been one of the main organizers of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing in the fight against apartheid. He argued that years of non-violent struggle had brought nothing but greater repression and exploitation, and that the people demanded that they answer violence with violence and develop new channels toward liberation. The apartheid state never missed the opportunity to call Mandela and the ANC “terrorists,” even though the Rivonia trial made it crystal clear that “the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism.” Mandela made the case for choosing sabotage on government buildings and other symbols of apartheid as a way to inspire people without injuring or killing anyone. And he freely admitted his attraction to building a classless society, influenced, he said, from reading Marx and from admiring the structures and organization of early African societies—there were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation. The Rivonia speech was required reading for us in the late 1960’s, and I had several passages memorized.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. admired the ideal of a classless society too, and while the mythological King led a boycott, had a dream, won a Nobel, ended racism and made us all better people, the real King was a spirit-based pro-democracy activist and a deep analytical thinker, a loving pastor and an angry pilgrim on a quest for social justice in his times. He evolved and became more radical with every campaign he led, every resistance he encountered, and every step he took. When his journey and his mission led him to link racial justice to economic justice and global justice, he called for an end to the three great evils—racism, militarism, and materialism. He urged activists and creative dissenters to call the nation to a greater expression of humanness, echoing the blunt-talking Fannie Lou Hamer who, asked if she wanted full equality with the white man, responded that she didn’t want to go that low, but sought instead a real democracy and a rebirth of freedom that would lift a newly-enlightened America out of the morass in which it was stuck.

The real King repeatedly condemned the US government as the greatest purveyor of violence on earth—his heated sermons bring Jeremiah Wright into clearer context—and argued within the Movement for non-violent direct action as a principle for him, and as a necessary approach for the struggle as well: “We had neither the resources nor the techniques to win…The question was not whether one should use his gun when his home was attacked, but whether it was tactically wise to use a gun while participating in an organized demonstration.” If anyone looked closely at the photos of King and his family during the legendary bus boycott, they could just make out the background figures of Black men in chairs with shotguns on their laps—the legendary Deacons for Defense of Justice. King’s home was armed; Fannie Lou Hamer, too, let everyone know that she had an adequate arsenal near her bed. There was nothing passive in King’s pacifism, nothing docile or immobile in that non-violence.

None of this detracts in any way from the greatness of these struggles or the power of those lives—if anything reckoning with the contradictions they faced and the activist commitments they embodied made each of them even more admirable to me. Their non-violence showed the power of love and by design exposed the hidden violence lurking in the everyday. But it was their activism, not some vague principles from the armchair, that marked them, and it was the popular movements they inspired and led that defined them—each was part of a massive social upheaval, each took risks and acted in the world without any guarantees, and as the legendary Ella Baker said of King, “Martin didn’t make the Movement, the Movement made Martin.”

Monday, November 25^th

7:00 pm – Harvard Book Store

1256 Massachusetts Ave.

Cambridge, MA

Tuesday, November 26^th

7:00pm – Broadside Bookshop

247 Main Street

Northampton, MA