Public Enemy by Bill Ayers

Author:Bill Ayers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780807032930
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-12-04T21:00:00+00:00

SIX

Palling Around

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin cried out to the agitated crowd during a 2008 campaign rally, referring to then-senator Barack Obama. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” This was how “real Americans” saw things, according to Palin. As for Obama, he’s “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country!”

There it was: the punch line that would resonate no matter what else was said or done—palling around. It had a special creepy ring to it, for sure.

When Governor Palin—or, as our late friend Studs Terkel called her, “Joe McCarthy in drag”—uttered it that first time (and ever after) the crowd exploded: “Kill him! Kill him!” I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was me or Senator Obama who was the target of those chants—perhaps both. I’d been designated a public enemy before. I knew the territory pretty well and accepted the consequences with some equanimity, but now poor Barack Obama as well was forced to play Ibsen’s brilliant character, the embattled Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the “enemy of the people.” Stockmann was viciously taunted in the public square by a chorus of townspeople bent on delusion and self-deception: Kill the enemy of the people!

There was no way to prepare for what was about to hit me, of course, and at the outset I could barely glimpse it on the far horizon of my imagination—the great speeding locomotive designed to derail Obama would run me and others down as just some unavoidable debris or collateral damage, the inevitable road kill. No one really knew its shape or its power yet, no one could guess at its velocity. I grasped a couple of small things right away, but my family understood a lot more, and they were in fact already gearing up.

At that time, I’d been a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago for over twenty years and was officially Senior University Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Education—I know, I know, it sounded a bit too lofty to me, too, but I even had official business cards to prove it. I’d written several books—mostly on teaching and learning and education—and I was on the faculty senate and the boards of several national and local organizations. Moving to Chicago from New York in 1987 was a kind of homecoming for us since Bernardine and I had each grown up nearby, and Bernardine had gone to college and law school at the University of Chicago. Hyde Park was the obvious choice for her, and we built our home and raised our three sturdy sons in a little rented coach house there.

When Chesa left home for college and we were on the brink of empty-nesting, Bernardine’s father died, and she brought her mother, well into Alzheimer’s disease, to live with us.

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