[Vision2020] Mr. Ayers’s Neighborhood

[Chasuk]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/11/mr-ayerss-neighborhood.html

November 4, 2008

Early this morning, the Obama family voted at the Beulah Shoesmith
Elementary School, in Hyde Park. Long after they had gone, the lawn in
front of the school was filled with reporters, mostly Europeans,
filming voters. While I was talking to an eight-year-old kid dressed
as George Washington, my colleague Peter Slevin, of the Washington
Post was across the street, knocking on the door of someone else who
had voted at the Shoesmith School this morning: William Ayers.

Ayers has avoided reporters ever since he became an election talking
point, scratch pole, and general sensation. But now he answered the
door of his three-story row house, and I joined the discussion. Ayers
is sixty-four and has earrings in both ears. He wore jeans and a Riley
T-shirt—Riley the kid from "Boondocks." The day was fall-bright and
50th Street was filled with fallen gold leaves. Ayers waved to
neighbors and kids as they went by on the sidewalk. He was, for the
first time in a long while, in an expansive mood, making clear that,
in all the months his name has been at the forefront of the campaign,
he and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn—ex-leaders of the Weather
Underground and longtime educators and activists in the community—have
been watching a lot of cable television, not least Fox.

One night, Ayers recalled, he and Dohrn were watching Bill O'Reilly,
who was going on about "discovering" Ayers's 1974 manifesto, "Prairie
Fire." "I had to laugh," Ayers said. "No one read it when it was first
issued!" He said that he laughed, too, when he listened to Sarah
Palin's descriptions of Obama "palling around with terrorists." In
fact, Ayers said that he knew Obama only slightly: "I think my
relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others
in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew
him better."

Ayers said that while he hasn't been bothered by the many threats—"and
I'm not complaining"—the calls and e-mails he has received have been
"pretty intense." "I got two threats in one day on the Internet," he
said, referring to an incident that took place last summer when he was
sitting in his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he
has taught education for two decades. "The first one said there was a
posse coming to shoot me, and the second said they were going to
kidnap me and water-board me. This friend of mine, a university cop,
said, 'Gosh, I hope the guy who's coming to shoot you gets here
first.'"

Ayers seemed curiously calm and cheerful about the way he had been
made an issue in the campaign. He seemed unbothered to have been part
of what he called "the Swiftboating" process of the 2008 campaign.

"It's all guilt by association," Ayers said. "They made me into a
cartoon character—they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt
from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama
campaign and I have to run my life." Ayers said that once his name
became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with
the Obama circle. "That's not my world," he said.

As the polling day drew into the late afternoon, the level of security
in Hyde Park matched the level of anticipation. Obama's house, four
blocks away, was surrounded.

Ayers said he felt "a lot of sympathy" for the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, "who was treated grotesquely and unfairly" by the media. He
said that Martin Luther King Jr. was, in his time, far more radical
than Wright: "Wright's a wimp compared to Martin Luther King—he had a
fiercer tone." Ayers was referring to the speeches King gave late in
his life in opposition to the Vietnam War and on the subject of
economic equality. "Martin Luther King was not a saint," Ayers said.
"He was an angry pilgrim." Ayers said that he had commiserated
recently with yet another former Hyde Park neighbor (and fellow Little
League coach), the Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi, now at
Columbia University, who has also been a punching bag of the right
wing in recent weeks.

Across the street, neighborhood kids chanted "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" and
"Yes we can!" for the cameras. Ayers smiled, looking a little like a
more boomer Fred MacMurray in an episode of "My Three Sons."

Ayers said that he had never meant to imply, in an interview with the
Times, published coincidentally on 9/11, that he somehow wished he and
the Weathermen had committed further acts of violence in the old days.
Instead, he said, "I wish I had done more, but it doesn't mean I wish
we'd bombed more shit." Ayers said that he had never been responsible
for violence against other people and was acting to end a war in
Vietnam in which "thousands of people were being killed every week."

"While we did claim several extreme acts, they were acts of extreme
radicalism against property," he said. "We killed no one and hurt no
one. Three of our people killed themselves." And yet he was not
without regrets. He mocked one of his earlier books, co-written with
Dohrn, saying that, while it still is reflective of his radical and
activist politics today, he was guilty of "rhetoric that's juvenile
and inflated—it is what it is."

"I wish I had been wiser," Ayers said. "I wish I had been more
effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more
principled."

Ayers said that his life hasn't been much altered by recent months,
though he decided to postpone the re-release of his memoir, "Fugitive
Days"—"I didn't want it to be put in the meat grinder of this moment."
Two books he co-edited will also be republished soon: "City Kids, City
Schools" and "City Kids, City Teachers."

It was late afternoon, and Ayers was talking about his plans for the
evening: he was heading to Grant Park with some friends for what they
assumed would be a mass victory party. "This is an achingly exciting
moment," he said.

As we were getting ready to go, after an hour of front-stoop
conversation, a neighbor came by and ironically reminded Ayers of the
event that he and his wife held for Obama in 1995 when Obama was
making his run for the Illinois state senate. "Everyone, including
you, wants to have a coffee here," he joked to the neighbor. "I don't
know what the fuck I'm going to do!"