Bill Ayers

No to NATO:

 https://www.change.org/petitions/say-no-to-nato

The day after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration took dozens of extreme, transformative actions, including invoking Article 5, the right to collective self-defense, of NATO’s founding charter—a first in NATO’s 50-year history.

This marked the fateful expansion of NATO’s mission into new geographical regions (such as Afghanistan) and novel functions, such as the initiation and rationalization of the use of pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states. All of this was codified and consolidated over the next months in support of the US “war on terror:” crimes committed by non-nation state actors were reframed as “acts of war,” and NATO nations were now expected to join together and respond in kind, opening a door onto war without end, world-wide conflict, and the “long war.” This is why groups of citizens in virtually every NATO nation have come together to press their governments to leave this deadly enterprise.

NATO has become part of the background noise that over time and with repetition we simply take for granted, an unexamined but passively accepted part of the given world: “NATO forces…” “NATO bombings…” “NATO casualties…” NATO becomes a familiar and entirely opaque presence in our lives. In reality NATO is anything but benign, and exposing the reality behind the mask is an urgent responsibility.

NATO is not a mutual self-defense organization; it is now plainly a global military alliance designed to engage in aggressive invasions and pre-emptive wars. A 2004 communiqué declared that “Defense against terrorism may include activities by NATO’s military forces, based on decisions by the North Atlantic Council [not the UN Security Council] to deter, disrupt, defend and protect against terrorist attacks, or threat of attacks, directed from abroad, against populations, territory, infrastructure and forces of any member state, including by acting against these terrorists and those who harbour them.”

NATO has collaborated with the US CIA in a wide range of illegal activities, including detainee transfer operations called “renditions,” blanket over-flight clearances, and access to airfields for CIA operations—in effect acting as partners in torture, abduction, and indefinite detention. Under cover of NATO, the US has created an entirely unaccountable framework that enables it to evade both national and international law.

NATO has refused to address civilian casualties resulting from NATO bombings and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. The US continues to dominate NATO military strategy and weaponry, accounting for virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles dropped or fired on Libya.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 prohibits nuclear weapon states from transferring nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, and conversely prohibits non-nuclear states from receiving nuclear weapons from nuclear states.  All NATO members are parties to the NPT. The five non-nuclear countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey) that maintain US nuclear weapons on their territory, and the US itself, are all in violation of the NPT.

The new NATO is a secretive and costly instrument of war and aggression. It makes its own rules and confirms its own authority. As a tool of global intervention NATO undermines democracy and constricts citizen participation on issues of war and peace. It has no place in a democracy, and an authentic democracy should have no business with NATO.

It’s important to make a distinction between personal virtue—be honest, do your work, show up on time—and social or community ethics.  Personal virtue is an undisputed good in almost every society, but we would be hard-pressed to say a slave owner who paid his bills and was kind to his wife was an ethical person.  We need to think about how we behave collectively, how our society behaves, how the contexts of politics and economics, for example, interact with what we hold to be good.  Most of us, after all, most of the time follow the conventions of our cultures—most Spartans act like Spartans, most Athenians like Athenians, most Americans like Americans.  To be a person of moral character in an unjust social order requires us to work to change society, to resist.

A young soldier is taken to a VA facility missing both of his legs and his face.  Shall I make a reservation for dinner and a show?  Two more prisoners commit suicide at Guantanamo.  Shall I get that new phone and camera I’d been wanting?  Four million people are refugees or internally displaced because of the U.S. war in Iraq.  Shall I send a contribution to one of the rascals revving up their political ambitions? 

Classroom ethics is a down-to-earth, practical affair worked out on the ground by ordinary people.  Universals can certainly help—Love Your Neighbor; Don’t Lie or Steal—because universal principles, as Susan Sontag has noted, “invite us to clean up our act… to turn away from compromise, cowardice, blindness.”  Principles might encourage us to look critically at the way things are, which is too often hypocritical, “deficient, inconsistent, inferior.”  Universals can act as our sign posts, even though they can’t settle each and every particular as it emerges.

Nourishing a stronger moral imagination—How does the other person feel?—is also a good idea.  But neither universal principle nor vivid imagination is sufficient to settle every possible issue for all time, for moral decision-making always involves fundamental choices in which no system or rule or guru can ever fully deliver the answer.  Nothing and no one can be made into the Court of Last Resort.  Because we are free, our moral reasoning requires that we at least try to see the bigger picture, that we struggle toward wide-awakeness and always new awarenesses, and still our ethical decisions are lonely, often intuitive, filled with despair and, finally, courage.

* * *

The British film “Dirty Pretty Things” by Stephen Frears offers a compelling example of ethics-in-action.  Two illegal immigrants, Okway and Shineye, try to live decent, purposeful lives while they negotiate the subterranean worlds of modern London.  Like other poor immigrants, they do the dirty work for the privileged, and they remain in large part anonymous and invisible to their overlords.  They carry with them the weight of dislocation, the scars of all that they have encountered and endured, and they carry, as well, the hope that their uprootedness, their exile, will bear some sweet fruit some day, perhaps in the lives of their children.

The story turns on an impossibly complex set of choices Okway and Shineye will each have to make, choices between painful alternatives without any guarantees whatsoever—the law will be broken no matter what they do, people will be wounded one way or another, and each will be changed in some fundamental ways.  This is not a Column A/Column B kind of ethics: Abortion… bad.  Death penalty… good.  Lying… bad.  Rather it is ethical choice—resistant and absorptive, anguished, unsettling, turbulent, and restless—in the swirl and chaos of real life as people must actually live it.  Their eyes are open, they must choose, but for them there will be no easy retreat to the comfortable dining room to enjoy the roast beef at the end of the day. 

Choices can be difficult and ethics is a daunting text any way you look at it—the principles of right and wrong, a discipline dealing with good and evil, a branch of philosophy stretching back to antiquity, a manual for right living, and on and on… Ethics intimidates. 

Moreover, to presume to talk of ethics isn’t just abstract, high-minded, and dense, it also implies a rectitude nobody can sustain and very few—certainly not me—want even to aspire to.  It gestures, then, toward self-righteousness.  Is my life so damned exemplary?  Am I in any position to pronounce moralizing judgments, to strike an authoritative pose, to condescend and to scold?  Am I really so good?…  Ethics terrorizes. 

Ethics edges as well toward the religious and the political, where it is hotly declaimed and jealously guarded.  Sermons on right living are the purview of preachers and, increasingly, of politicians, most often in the form of one-liners for easy listening.  We feel our eyes getting heavy, our brains being packed up with cotton wool…  Ethics anesthetizes.

But teachers must somehow move through that cotton packing, confront the intimidation and overcome it if they are to resist successfully the reduction of teaching to the instrumental, the merely serviceable, which commands so much easy attention.  For at the base of teaching, at its most fundamental, profound, and primitive core, all teaching is indeed ethical work.  Teachers, whether they know it or not, are moral actors, and teaching always demands moral commitment and ethical action.

The words “moral” and “ethical” both point to principles of right and wrong, to standards of good and bad behavior.  Some people stipulate one as having to do with rules and duty, the other as more embedded, pointing to normative choices in practice, but I usually don’t.  In everyday conversation the words are interchangeable; to the extent that I make a distinction it will be this: “moral” implies the personal, the question of reason and thought, reflection and commitment; “ethical” gestures toward action within a group or community.

Moral decisions involve choosing between alternatives, all equally possible.  Jean-Paul Sartre tells the story of one of his students who had come to him for advice about a decision he was wrestling with—Should I, he asks, stay at home to care for my aged and ill mother, or should I redeem the family honor in light of my collaborationist father by joining the Resistance to Nazi occupation?  He is on difficult ground here, for simply being a conventional young man will no longer do—he can no longer simply feel himself a good person; he must act for the good, whatever that might be.  He is forced into an ethical choice simply because he sees the alternatives and can’t turn away.  After carefully listening to the reasoning of his student, Sartre’s answer was this:  You must decide for yourself.  The student, then, is fully and finally responsible for his decision, without the benefit of blaming or crediting someone else.  His eyes are open, and he must choose.  Something will be lost, and something else gained.  This, of course, feels dreadful—nothing is as clear or clean or absolutely certain as he would like.  Frustrated and in urgent pursuit of higher authority, the student angrily denounces Sartre and says that if the great philosopher won’t help him, he’ll go to a priest for advice.  Very well, replies Sartre, and which priest will you choose?  The choice belongs to the student; he can object and insist and curse his mentor and his predicament, but in the end he will make up his own mind, and with that choice he will dive into the wreckage with all the good and terrible consequences to follow.  Choosing his priest is still choosing, even if it appears noncommittal and neutral. 

My battered SDS membership card is emblazoned with the lovely opening line from the Port Huron Statement: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort…looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

Fifty years on, Port Huron can be read in a thousand ways, but its vitality lies in its self-description—“an agenda for a generation”—taking “generation” at its most generous: production and reproduction, development and genesis. More call-to-arms than manifesto, more a provocation than a program, more opening than point of arrival, Port Huron is an invitation to create.

“The 60’s,” thoroughly commodified now and sold back to us as myth and symbol, has been till recently an annoying brake on activism. It was neither as brilliant and ecstatic as some would have it, nor the devil’s own workshop as others insist. Whatever it was, it remains prelude to the necessary changes and fundamental upheavals just ahead. The self-appointed Board Members of “The Sixties Incorporated,” looking nostalgically at a ship that’s already left the shore, are mostly missing the point. We’re still living, still of this generation.

Enter Occupy!

Once again more labor than delivery, Occupy is a movement-in-the-making, shifting the frame and connecting the issues, expanding the public square, defining a moment, creating hope. Like every movement before it, Occupy was impossible before it happened, and inevitable the next day. Power responded in familiar fashion: they ignored it and then mocked it, they tried to co-opt it and then beat the shit out of it—repeating as necessary.

In this time of rising expectations and new beginnings it’s even more pressing that we embrace the urgency embodied in the last words of the Port Huron Statement: If we appear to seek the unattainable…we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

Occupy the Future!

A note on the 50th Anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society:

As the American-made catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition in the mid 60’s, I was arrested with thirty-seven other students and one marvelous professor for occupying the Ann Arbor draft board in a militant, non-violent sit-in. Earlier I’d returned to school from the Merchant Marines and attended the first-ever teach-in against the war; I’d Paul Potter, then president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), end a talk on the necessity of agitation 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.

I still have my battered membership card emblazoned with the lovely opening line from the Port Huron Statement: We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. That, too, still seems entirely relevant to me.

Fifty years on, Port Huron can be read in a thousand ways, but for me its vitality lies in its self-description—“an agenda for a generation”—taking “generation” at its broadest and most generous: production and reproduction, development and genesis. In that sense it’s much more a call-to-arms than a manifesto, more provocation than program, more opening than point of arrival. The Port Huron Statement is an invitation to create.

I had it in my pocket when I entered the draft board, my first defiant act of civil disobedience. The draft board was an ordinary office with files and clerks and standard procedures, but to us it was an odious and available target: the placid accomplice to war, issuing its toxic warrants to kill and to die in plain manila envelopes, bit by bit and day by day.

I’d grown up in a place of prosperity and privilege —at least modest comfort—sleeping the deep American sleep of denial, a kind of willful, anesthetized ignorance about anything that might exist beyond our neatly trimmed hedges. But I was housed now at the University of Michigan, the Black Freedom Movement was beckoning, war was looming, and the Port Huron Statement was providing necessary insight and analysis. I blinked my eyes open, and awakened to a world in flames.

The war clarified everything: the US stood on the wrong side of an exploding world revolution; the hopes and dreams of people everywhere—for independence and self-determination, for dignity and justice—were being contested in every corner of every continent, and the US was the command center of the counter-revolution.

“Which side are you on?” began a traditional freedom song. I joined the Movement—I wanted to end a war, and in time the system that made war and racism so inevitable.

When I was arrested that first time, the war was broadly accepted and supported—sampling strategy and tactics from the Civil Rights Movement, we’d 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: 70% of Americans supported the US invasion then, and even on campus we were massively outnumbered.

So we got busy and invented a thousand different ways to organize and educate. Being arrested and jailed became a commonplace, demonstrations and theatre, but there was more: “Vietnam Summer,” was a concerted effort to knock on every door in working-class neighborhoods across America and meet people face-to-face and engage them in a dialogue about peace. I was in Detroit for two summers, these front door encounters the most difficult and exhilarating thing I’d ever done; the more I tried to teach others, the more I learned—about Viet Nam and white supremacy, about the consequences of war and empire, about politics and possibility, and about myself.  By 1968 a majority of the American people had come to oppose the war, and we were certain that our efforts and our sacrifices had paid off.

Another key to the altered reality was the impact of the Freedom Movement: SNCC had issued a statement saying that “No Black man should go 10,000 miles away and fight for a so-called freedom he doesn’t enjoy in Mississippi,” and Muhammad Ali had resisted the draft, proclaiming, “I won’t fight in the white man’s army.” When Martin Luther King, Jr. deplored the war as illegal and immoral, and with some anguish denounced the government and called on America to get on the right side of the world revolution, the country shook to its core.

The decisive last straw was veterans returning home and telling the plain, unvarnished and recognizable truth about all they had seen and been asked to do, exposing the reality of aggression and officially sanctioned terror. They joined the peace movement in droves, bringing renewed urgency and militancy. When veterans lined up and threw their medals down the Capitol steps, it seemed certain the war would end. The US had been defeated militarily, and the government found itself isolated in the world and in profound conflict with its own people.

President Johnson stepped aside at the end of March, 1968, and we went ecstatic: The war is over! A million deaths, true and terrible, but at last it would end.

We didn’t stay happy for long: five days after Johnson’s announcement, Martin Luther King was assassinated; a couple of months later, Robert Kennedy was murdered; and a few months further along the new administration expanded and extended the war indefinitely. (At an organizing meeting recently for the NATO/G8 protests in Chicago, an older comrade cautioned, “Let’s not make the mistakes of 1968…Remember Tom Hayden and Company got Nixon elected.” Far-fetched, of course, but that easy belief—agitation is the generator of all reaction—is never without friends.)

And so the war did not end: every week six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia, and we could not find a way to end it. Every week—six thousand lives wasted. We had tried everything, nothing was adequate, and there was no end in sight. The political class had no answers to the wide expression of popular will, and we could not stop the war—the crisis of democracy was a disaster for the peace movement as well. The anti-war forces splintered—some people (including one of my brothers) joined the Democratic Party in order to build a peace wing within it; others took off to Europe or Africa; one of my brothers deserted the army and fled; some built rural communes to escape the madness, and others went into the factories in the industrial heartland to build a workers’ party to. I and a few others created a clandestine force that would, we hoped, survive the impending —we were sure—American fascism, and that could fight the war-makers by other means.  None of us can claim much, for none of us ended the war; each choice carried its own contradictions.

Steven Colbert, the faux right wing commentator from Comedy Central, announced during the 2008 presidential race that the “Word” for the evening would be “The Sixties.” The bit began with a clip of Barack Obama at a press conference saying “Can’t we just get over the 60s?” Cut to Colbert scolding angrily, “No Senator, we can’t just get over the 60s. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

“The 60’s,” thoroughly commodified and sold back to us as myth and symbol, has been till now a brake on activists. But no one actually lives by decades—no one said on December 31, 1969, “Oh, shit, it’s almost over!” It was neither as brilliant and ecstatic as some would have it, nor the devil’s own workshop as others insist, and whatever it was, it remains prelude to the necessary changes and fundamental upheavals just ahead. We’re still living, still of this generation, and all the self-appointed Board Members of “The Sixties Inc.” looking nostalgically at a ship that’s already left the shore are missing the point.

Enter Occupy!

Occupy, once again more invitation and opening than point of arrival, is a search for the new by actors becoming self-conscious subjects in history. More than a single campaign, Occupy is a movement-in-the-making. And like every movement before it, Occupy was impossible before it happened, and inevitable the day after it occurred. The response of power followed a well-worn pattern: they ignored it and then mocked it, they tried to co-opt it and they beat the shit out of it—repeating as necessary.

But Occupy has already won: it’s shifted the frame and connected the issues, opened a space and defined a moment, expanded the public square and created new hope based in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown and entirely unknowable.  History is always in the making, and we are—each of us—works-in-progress acting largely in the dark with our limited consciousness and our contingent capacities. We may not be able to will a movement into being, but neither can we sit idly by waiting for the movement to spring full-blown, as from the head of Zeus. Occupy agitates for democracy and egalitarianism now, presses for human rights, creates peace and learns to build a new society through self-transformations and limited everyday struggles. No one can predict with any certainty what will come, but surely what we are able to do now matters.

Revolution is possible, democracy and socialism, possible, but barbarism is possible as well. We live leaning forward, pessimists of the head, optimists of the heart; the tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent  thrust—and the rhythm of activism is the same: we open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the world as we find it; we are astonished by the beauty and the suffering all around us; we dive into the wreckage and struggle toward a distant and indistinct shore; we doubt that our efforts make enough difference, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more. If we never doubt we get lost in self-righteousness and political narcissism—been there. If we only doubt we are lost in cynicism and despair.

In this time of rising expectations and new beginnings it is even more pressing that we live out the urgency embodied in the closing words of the Port Huron Statement: If we appear to seek the unattainable…we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

http://www.truthout.org/resistance-builds-natos-threat-permanent-war-and-nuclear-dominance/1332077096

 In December, 2011 a tiny but wondrous Chicago program of the Illinois Humanities Council (IHC) launched an on-line auction to raise needed cash for its public programming. The Public Square was celebrating its Tenth Anniversary, and Bernardine and I had been on its Advisory Board from the start. We kicked in what money we could, and we donated two items to the auction: choice seats at a Cubs game and an afternoon at beautiful Wrigley Field with Bernardine—an ardent and unruly fan—and dinner for six, cooked by team Ayers/Dohrn. We’ve done the dinner thing two dozen times over the years— for a local baseball camp, a law students’ public interest group, alternative spring break, immigrant rights organizing, and a lot of other worthy work—and we’ve typically raised a few hundred dollars. There were many more attractive items on that year’s list: Alex Kotlowitz was available to edit twenty pages of a non-fiction manuscript, Gordon Quinn to discuss documentary film projects over dinner, and Kevin Coval to write and spit an original poem for the highest bidder.

We paid little attention as the online auction launched and then inched onward—a hundred dollars, two hundred, and then three—even when a right-wing blogger picked it up and began flogging the Illinois Humanities Council for “supporting terrorism” by giving tax-payer money to us. He was a little off on the concept, because we were actually donating money and services to them, not the other way around, but this was a rather typical turn for the fact-free, faith-based blogosphere, so onward and upward, no worries.

There was a little button on our dinner item that someone could select and “Buy Instantly” for $2500.00, which seemed absurdly high. But in early December the TV celebrity and self-described conservative bad boy, Tucker Carlson, hit the button, and we were his.

I loved it immediately. Surely he had some frat boy prank up his sleeve—his signature gesture a kind of smug and superior practical joke or an ad homonym put down —but so what? We’d just raised more for the Public Square in one bid than anyone thought would be raised from the entire auction. We won!

Well, not so fast—this did mean we had to prepare dinner for Tucker plus five, and that could become messy. But, maybe not, and anyway, we argued, it’s just a couple of distasteful hours at most, and, bingo! Cash the check!

Right wing blogs lit up, some writers tickled with Tucker’s entertaining sense of humor, others earnestly saluting his willingness to enter the den of dodgy enemies of the state and sit in close quarters, an unmistakable act of courage and daring in the service of “the cause.” But some took a grimmer view: Don’t do it Tucker, they pled, this will legitimize and humanize “two of America’s greatest traitors.”

Tucker Carlson got a letter from the IHC: “Congratulations,” it began. “You are the winning bidder for The Public Square’s 10th anniversary auction item: Dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Thank you very much for your payment of $2500 for this item.” 

The letter went on to offer ten potential dates for the dinner, and to note that “all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold…” and that “views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.” I imagined the exhausted scrivener bent at his table copying out that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough? How about the governor or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? But then I’m no lawyer.

Tucker chose February 5, Super Bowl Sunday as it happens.

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 Carlson and company “vipers” and argued that we should never talk to people like them, ever. We disagreed; talk can be good. 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, complaining 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.

(Parenthesis here on the art and science of fact-checking: Had the Tribune in fact checked the facts, the fact-checker would have checked the fact that the quitters used the term “advocates violence.” Check. Had he or she dug a little deeper, the fact-checker might have discovered that, yes, we’d been described that way before, even in the pages of the Tribune.  Check. And so it goes in the hermetically-sealed, narcissistic echo chamber—a characterization becomes a fact with enough repetition, check, the fact-checker simply reviews the work of previous fact-checkers with no felt-need to analyze primary sources or inquire up-close or in-person. Check. Presumably another fact-checker did that already, and if not, so what? Oh, and for the record, we don’t advocate violence—we’re not with NATO or G8. Check. End parenthesis)

Some winced and stooped a little deeper; no one was apparently moved to speak up publically to defend the idea of dialogue, controversy and conversation as essential to the culture of democracy and to the vitality of the humanities, and no one condemned the most knee-jerk instance 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 back-bone or the principle? No wonder the tiny group of right-wing flame-throwers with a couple of email accounts feels so disproportionately powerful—liberals seem forever willing to police themselves to the point of forming an orderly line right into the slaughterhouse.

So on January 12, 2012, I wrote Tucker a quick letter:

We’re looking forward to seeing you all for dinner in Chicago on February 5, 2012, and what we assume will be a spirited and enlightening conversation. We salute you for making such a generous contribution to the Public Square, a tiny program that works mightily to promote public dialogue in unlikely places, and bases its efforts on a core belief that in our wildly diverse democracy, talking to strangers is an essential way forward. Our dinner surely fits that bill.

We’ve received lots of messages from friends who can’t quite believe this is happening, and find it surreal at best. Some want to serve drinks or wait tables, but others insist it’s all a silly publicity stunt. We disagree, and point to both the importance of conversation across a variety of orientations, as well as your good comment to the Tribune: “I bought the auction dinner because I support the important work of the Illinois Humanities Council.”

It appears that you’re taking some heat yourself from far-right pundits and bloggers for agreeing to sit down with us at all, and that some of your political allies argue that you are undermining “the until-now-airtight argument that Obama was wrong” to have any associations with people like us who hold quite different political beliefs, or who likely won’t agree on a wide range of issues. We’re glad to see that you disagree with these folks, and that you believe, as we do, that we can all share a dinner, have a lively conversation about the spirit and direction of our country and the world, perhaps learn something from one another, and still maintain the integrity and independence of our own views.

We heard that you were kidding around about the dinner with Dennis Miller on his radio show, and said with a laugh, “When I hear the word ‘humanities’ I draw my gun.” It was a joke, of course, but please leave your guns at home!  

So, this is a note of welcome. Come and dine, enjoy the food, the company, and the exchange, and travel safely with hope in your heart and a good appetite.

Tucker responded:

Thanks a lot for this. I’m looking forward to Sunday. Just bought plane tickets and reserved a hotel for myself and one of our reporters, Jamie Weinstein. I haven’t finished the rest of the guest list—I’ve been on the road for these primaries nonstop—but I’ll send you the names as soon as I have them. Where’s dinner? I want to make sure we’re not staying too far away.

We’ll meet up and you’ll be dining be in the proverbial Undisclosed Location—ten minutes by cab from any down town hotel. It’s a lovely home with a perfect kitchen for me to prepare something sensational. Keep me updated on the guests and on any dietary issues. You know, of course, that the Super Bowl begins at 5:20 Chicago time.
On another note: poor you, slogging through those particularly unattractive primaries. I’m eager to hear true stories from the front, Hunter Thompson style if possible!

Undisclosed location? Holy smokes. Are you guys in hiding again?

Nope! We’re open and easily accessible. But if we did meet in the proverbial undisclosed location I like to think we would engage the ghost of Christmas past.
I’ve got a really nice dinner planned, so bring an appetite as well as people who enjoy good food.

That’s a riot. And have no fear: I have an appetite like a golden retriever. 

Raw meat?  Gosh, I was going a cut above Alpo, but maybe I should scale back.

You could probably serve kibble. I’m not very discerning about dinner. 

If I’d been feeling mean-spirited I might have responded that he’s not very discerning about a lot more than dinner, but what the heck?

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

I figured Jamie and Matt were his young associates at the Daily Caller, Buckley his brother, and Audrey his random reader who had won the privilege in some kind of contest Tucker held on-line. Andrew Breitbart, self-described “media mogul,” entertaining perhaps, but not civil, I thought, performed the role of grinning and menacing bomb-thrower of the radical right—Breitbart’s 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 apology).

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 very 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 toward 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 are rounding up all Japanese-Americans, and placing them in prison camps.” I’m sure they 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 in “Point of Order” when 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 be a hero generations gone by—we’re all Abolitionists and Freedom Fighters now, we’re all heroes in retrospect—but that settles nothing for today: several state legislature 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 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, and when a wondrous collection of our closest folks assembled at a friend’s beautiful home to help out and serve, mostly to be present at the dinner party, I felt fine. There was lots of wine and beer, and we set an elegant table with a placecard 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.”—David McCullough (Awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush); and, “When I hear the word humanities, I draw my gun.” —Tucker Carlson. It was, of course, a joke.

I meditated on Rilke:

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.

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 of $2500 to the Public Square, and I reminded 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), and they were at the table, first course served.

Friends had warned us that they would try to create a gotcha moment, but not much happened. We ferried food in and out, pulled up chairs periodically to chat while they ate. Tucker Carlson and Bernardine gazed out the windows for a time at the Chicago skyline, and discovered a shared Swedish background (Christmas cookies!). Jamie Weinstein acting the intrepid cub-reporter, note-book in hand, scribbled the titles of books from the book shelves, questions flying 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 Breitbart had been on the road covering the primaries, 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 example, was a small government paradise.

Tucker told me at one point that his kids went to the same boarding school that he’d attended, and asserted that the only difference between his kids’ school and a failing school in Chicago 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 US should close all foreign military bases immediately, begin to dismantle the Pentagon, and save a trillion dollars a year—a small government proposal if ever there was one. The boys weren’t buying it at all, clamoring for violence here, violence 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, North Korea and China (!)—on humanitarian grounds, of course—while Bernardine, that notorious poster child for violence, steadfastly urged disarmament, peace on earth, good will toward all. It was utterly surreal.

We 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 epigram (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 and 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 “lame-stream” 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. Kicked out by half-time.

http://bankstreet.edu/occasionalpapers/

CHICAGO 2012

May 18-21, 2012

Occupy This/Occupy That!

An Open Invitation

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

The tiny fraternity of concentrated wealth and power that calls itself the Group of Eight (G8) is meeting in Chicago in mid-May, overlapping with representatives of history’s largest global military cohort, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the gently self-named military behemoth dominated by the US.

Heads of state, spooks, foreign ministers and generals, cabinet members and secret operatives, advisors and bureaucrats— the 1% of the 1%—plan to gather in barricaded opulent surroundings while coordinating and conspiring to extend and defend their obscene wealth, to exploit the remaining fossil fuels, natural resources, human labor and the living planet to the last drop, and to dominate the people of the global majority.

A 1984-style national security dragnet is descending on the city to attempt to lock Chicago down. Chicago’s Mayor is concocting a culture of fear, suggesting that it is the human resistance to NATO/G8 that represents danger, outside agitators, violence and invasion.  Universities and schools are being urged to close early in May; communities of color are told that this is not their concern; merchants are preparing for assault. In reality, NATO/G8 represents the masters of war; it is they who are the greatest purveyors of violence on this earth.

NATO/G8 will not be alone in Chicago: Occupy’s 99% will gather in a festival of life and peace, joy and justice. Two permitted, family-friendly rallies at the Daley Center and marches for justice, jobs and peace are scheduled on May 18 and 19 (and perhaps another on May 21).  Music, dance, teach-ins and peoples’ tribunals will overflow the parks and theatres.  We will all be there to open Chicago back up. In the spirit of the Arab Spring and Occupy, the Madison labor struggle, the Pelican Bay hunger strikers, teachers and nurses, the Dream youth, returning veterans against the wars, women insisting on reproductive dignity, foreclosure resistance, LGBTQ equality and,many more, Adbusters, CanG8, Code Pink, Portoluz and others have called for people to come from near and far, armed with their spirit and their creativity, pitching their tents and staking their claims.

We’re excited and you’re invited: Come to Chicago, May 18-May 21. Bring a sleeping bag, and if we have room, you can stay with us on the Southside.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it entirely clear that he alone will happily host NATO/G8, but that the 99% are decidedly not welcome.  He has funding to further arm and mobilize the police and militarize the city; he has announced plans to contain and suppress demonstrators; he has pushed through legislation that restricts and criminalizes free speech and assembly, and requires insurance for public demonstrations; he is issuing a steady stream of pronouncements about Chicago-under-siege from ominous and dangerous outside forces.

But Chicago is big enough for all—it is after all a nuclear-free and cease-fire city, cradle of the Haymarket martyrs and the 8-hour day, labor and peace actions, vast civil rights and immigration rights manifestations, home of Ida B. Wells Barnett, Jane Addams, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Studs Terkel. The rich and the powerful do gather here, but Chicago is a public space with historic parks, monuments, neighborhoods and streets for popular mobilizations as well—Chicago belongs to all of us.  We underline the right—the moral duty—to dissent and demonstrate, to resist and to be heard, to participatory (not billionaire paid for) democracy. Mayor Emanuel can still change course, and he should; so far he has obstinately and foolishly chosen to frame mid-May solely in military and security terms.

The mayor, not the popular resistance, is creating conditions—once again—for a police riot in Chicago against people who have every intention and every right to assemble peacefully deploying humor and music, art and play, civil disobedience and imagination to forcefully express rejection of imperial and permanent wars, to challenge racial/ethnic/gender discrimination and hate, to demand justice, education, health care and peace, women and gender dignity, the opportunity for meaningful work and reversing epic income disparities, an end to mass incarceration, and the urgent need to shift course and live differently for the sake of the planet and future generations.

Join us in Chicago in May (or, if you can’t come, act in solidarity—Occupy the suburbs, cities, and communities across the land): stand up for civil and human rights, exercise your voice and be a witness, act up and speak out. Be part of a wave of people power, creative direct non-violent action, and the most vast, determined resistance in memory.

History calls!

Occupy the future!

Another world is possible!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEOTNQVbjGM&feature=youtu.be