Authors: Bill Ayers
“Good questions,” Nikki said in her heavily accented but otherwise perfect English. “Everyone I know loves Americans—not your government so much, but Americans themselves—and everyone also thinks you act sometimes as a spoiled child, whether willfully or innocently unaware of others. You’re also famous the world around for being geographically challenged and basically clueless when it comes to history.” I was immediately reminded of a great Motown hit from my youth about the power of teenage love to make the world a wonderful place in spite of not knowing much about history and even less geography. Nikki might have added that we were tone-deaf to languages and cultures—the rock song relishes ignorance about French—but she was being restrained, I think. I loved that Motown song as a kid, and felt all warm inside humming it to myself then, but I had to marvel suddenly about an anthem of my adolescence that was also a joyful and hypnotic celebration of know-nothing narcissism.
One of my grandchildren made a recent drawing—two equal-sized amoebas floating near one another on a large piece of white construction paper, one a squiggly blue, and the other a wobbly red. The red one was labeled “America”; the blue one, “I don’t know.” And so it goes.
I pulled out a couple of world maps from Doctors without Borders that I always carry in my backpack, and we spread them out and gathered around to have a look. Nikki opened her handy map of the whole Mediterranean Sea and showed us her beautiful Cyprus, where, she pointed out, Lazarus died, Saint Peter was flogged and jailed, Shakespeare set
Othello
, and Richard the Lionhearted left his betrothed as he set off to sack the Holy Land. That’s a lot, and it turns out there’s more. One student dug up an old atlas and a globe in a classroom down the hall for closer study and a different perspective. People had at least heard of Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia, but finding them was quite a challenge. And then there were all kinds of new places to discover and marvel at: giant Kazakhstan, medium-sized Uzbekistan, and little Tajikistan. Nikki told us of a study she’d recently read in which a group of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Americans were asked to fill in the names of countries on a blank world map: 80 percent couldn’t find Israel-Palestine, 80 percent missed Iraq and Iran, 50 percent couldn’t recognize Great Britain, and 15 percent could not identify the United States itself. Everyone laughed at that last one because, damn it, we could find the United States, but the laughter became hollow fast when it dawned on us suddenly that anything beyond the United States was pretty much outside our consciousness. Since we were all also teachers, we also realized that buried in that study of young Americans was an indictment of American education and of ourselves—how could we be so blank and so blind?
A couple of years later, I was in Rwanda with Bernardine and her law students at the tenth anniversary of the genocide there. We visited a high school in a refugee camp on a dusty hillside fifty kilometers outside Kigali. When the refugee students learned that we were from Chicago, one fifteen-year-old boy went to his work folder and, smiling broadly, brought Bernardine a colorful painting he’d done of the United States. He pointed to Chicago and said through our translator that he lived on the Great Lakes of central Africa, just as we lived on the Great Lakes of North America. That classroom of the displaced highlighted my own ongoing myopia and abiding ignorance: I didn’t know anything about the Great Lakes of Africa.
Nikki happily helped us lift ourselves up as we searched and sorted previously clouded or entirely unexplored features of our environment. She embraced us with humor, bringing us a silly block of cartoons from the
New Yorker
under the heading: “Americans See the World Anew.” In one, a person looking slightly baffled says, “I just don’t see how they can spell Al Qaeda without a U,” and in another two men are striding confidently down a New York avenue as one says cheerfully to the other, “I just love the sound of it—Jalalabad, Jalalabad.” Seeing the world anew has its limits, of course.
The attacks of September 11 were—no doubt about it—pure terrorism, indiscriminate slaughter, crimes against humanity carried out by reactionary thugs with fundamentalist fantasies dancing wildly in their heads. These right-wing zealots, filled with awe and obedience, were absolutely determined to impose their arid ideology on America and the world. And in the immediate aftermath Americans experienced, of course, grief, confusion, compassion, and solidarity, as well as something quite rare: uncharacteristic soul-searching, questioning, and political openness. But not for long.
There was palpable grief and a shared incredulity in all my classes from the start, and everywhere sudden outbursts of civil-rhetorical patriotism too: flags and signs proliferated, people lined up at blood banks, and pilgrimages were organized to “Ground Zero.” Given the pale American palate, reaching for the flag seemed to mean sympathy and solidarity for most people in those first days.
George Packer, one of my most helpful mentors and teachers from my days as an MFA student at Bennington College, published a piece in the
New York
Times
called “Recapturing the Flag” in which he claimed that the terrorist attacks “made it safe for liberals to be patriots.” I wrote and asked him pointedly when it was unsafe (and where was the threat coming from?) for liberals to be patriots. Where was there any evidence of
that?
In the piece, he went on to say that the assault “woke us up to the fact that we are part of a national community” and that “patriotism has nothing to do with blindly following leaders.” I disagreed noisily: Couldn’t the attacks have awakened us just as easily to the fact that we are part of an
international
community? Isn’t patriotism typically a space where nationalists manipulate their neighbors into seeing events or actions like torture and bombing civilians as good or bad, not on their merits, but exclusively according to who commits them? Wasn’t he imposing a kind of imperative patriotism that demanded mindless conformity?
George is an accomplished writer—his long-form journalism and personal essays and thick descriptions of people and events have been widely praised—and I admired his accounts of his work in the Peace Corps and teaching in Togo. Whenever I read a newly published piece by George, I’d send a note or a letter congratulating him, sometimes adding just a word of criticism, and he almost always responded.
His political commentary was a different matter altogether, because no matter the subject, it was always framed by an exacting liberal ideology that could as easily blind him to evidence or actual argument as any other totalizing dogma—“communism,” say, or “Freudianism” or “neuroscience.” “Recapturing the Flag” was a case in point. George was a leader of the so-called “liberal hawks,” a loose collection of New York academics and writers who were social democrats and often identified as “doves” by day, but who could in a burst of patriotic fervor be rather easily enlisted in a nationalistic war effort when the sun went down. The Socialist Party shamefully supported the United States in World War I, and socialists like Michael Harrington and Hendrik Hertzberg had justified the US invasion and occupation of Viet Nam for years because Ho Chi Minh was a “Stalinist,” the greater evil.
After the attacks, George proclaimed that the United States was at war, and he feverishly promoted the invasion of Afghanistan. When I said that 9/11 was a crime against humanity and that a crime required a criminal justice response, not a war response, George responded, “Are you saying we should send the Chicago police after Bin Laden, or maybe the Keystone Cops?” I said that a criminal justice reaction might be forced by circumstances to mobilize an army, but that the goal would be to solve a crime and bring a perpetrator to justice, not to occupy a country and overthrow a government. I pointed out what to me seemed obvious: it was always easier to start a war than to end one, and that the “war on terror”—or, as the BBC called it helpfully, “this
so-called
war on terror”—was a metaphorical war: how would anyone know which nations the United States was fighting against or how much was enough, or when the goals were reached? When you unloosed the dogs of war, I said, it was almost impossible to rein them in. Our argumentative correspondence spooled forward for months. “You’re either being deceptive or you’re delusional and dangerously naïve,” he wrote.
During the years of my student activism, George had been a youngster growing up in Palo Alto. His dad was a dean and then provost at Stanford when students took over the campus there to protest the war; he’d suffered a devastating stroke a few days into the occupation and committed suicide a few years later. The excesses of the radicals and the blood of the liberals were themes etched deeply into George’s heart—and who couldn’t understand that? As his student, whenever I wrote anything for him that veered toward politics—and most everything did—George’s red pencil was wielded like a sword, and his markings bled all over the page. He challenged me to rely on evidence, not opinion; on solid argument and not easy belief. I was grateful: George had been a terrific writing teacher for me precisely because he was an ideological (as opposed to a knee-jerk or default or vaguely multi-culti) liberal. His ideas were firm and well-formed, and his political outlook fierce. He was generous and yet tough—I couldn’t get away with a thing—and George was exactly the teacher I needed.
I ran into George years after 9/11 at a bookstore in Manhattan, and he had all but forgotten his strident advocacy for the failed invasion of Afghanistan. We went out for a beer, and I reminded him that we had corresponded about it for several months and that he had feverishly promoted the invasion of Afghanistan as a moral imperative, as well as the price of the ticket for even the cheapest seats in the national community. He’d led a chorus insisting on agreement with the Bush-Cheney team, but war unity proved to be weak and wobbly, as it often does, hobbling along on broken legs and slippery ground, and it didn’t last.
“You were proven wrong,” I said. “Admit it.”
“I don’t remember you and I arguing about any of this,” he said.
“Memory is a motherfucker,” I said, even though my recollections are vast and indelible, and we shared a laugh—being a liberal hawk means never having to say you’re sorry.
A headline in the
Onion
got it partly right: “Unsure What to Do, Entire Country Stares Dumbly at Hands.” Actually, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft knew exactly what to do, and they did it—they reached down to the bottom drawers of their desks, pulled out and dusted off their most ambitious plans and began to hurriedly remake the world to their liking, mobilizing a new and unapologetic American empire, suppressing dissent, bailing out the airlines and transferring $20 billion without safeguards or benchmarks from public to private hands in a matter of days with a single no vote in the Senate, scuttling aspects of the law that checked executive power, and delivering the country, in the words of Arthur Miller in his essay “Are You Now Or Were You Ever?,” “into the hands of the radical right, a ministry of free-floating apprehension toward anything that never happens in the middle of Missouri.” Not to be too hard on the middle of Missouri, but I got his point: the ideologues filled up every available space with their fantastic interpretation of events, rode out under the inflamed banner of “American exceptionalism,” donned the mantle of patriotism to defend their every move, and demanded obedient silence, shouting down anyone with the audacity to disagree.
Stanley Fish, my colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the dean of liberal arts at the university, wrote an op-ed in the
New York Times
pointing out that all the popular mantras of the moment—we have seen the face of evil, the clash of civilizations is upon us, we are engaged in a war against terrorism—were not only inaccurate but entirely unhelpful, failing for the lack of shared meanings, coherent definitions across wildly disparate contexts, or mechanisms for settling deep-seated disputes. In other words, they could only make sense to those who already agreed or had drunk the nationalist Kool-Aid. An American exceptionalist could easily embrace the idea of a war on terror—its vagueness evaded by grief and anger and self-referencing platitudes—but anyone else might wonder how the war on terror was like or unlike the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, World War II, or, for that matter, the war on drugs or AIDS. As battles go, how does it compare to a war on anxiety or a war on scheming?
Stanley and I were unlikely friends, but we were friends nonetheless. He’d been a controversial celebrity scholar for decades before UIC recruited his partner, Jane Tompkins, to be a professor in the College of Education and Stanley to be a dean. Bernardine and I had attended gatherings and receptions for Stanley and Jane, and became part of the informal wooing team—our pitch emphasized the impact they could have late in their careers on this amazing urban public university, and the joy and challenge of living in the most exciting city in America. I loved Jane immediately for her romantic spirit and generous heart, and because we shared a deep regard for the humanizing potential of teaching; I admired Stanley for his intellectual courage, his irreverence, and the mischievous smile and bad-boy glint that still sparkled in the corner of his eye. In spite of the ferocious criticism (some of which I made myself) that followed him everywhere, I liked Stanley a lot.
Stanley was a literary theorist, a legal scholar, and a public intellectual widely recognized for his research and writing on John Milton and
Paradise Lost
, but also identified as a central figure in importing French postmodern philosophy to these shores—an honor (or a charge) he rejected. He was pilloried by the Left and the Right for being “unprincipled,” “sinister,” and a “hypocrite,” and for espousing views based on “extreme relativism” and “radical subjectivism.” He wrote books with titles that seemed designed to drive other academics nuts, like
There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . And It’s a Good Thing Too
. And that’s a major reason I liked him: whatever ideas were laying heavy in the halls of the academy, whatever everyone seemed settled on, whether free speech or students’ rights or diversity, Stanley had a way of sticking his finger in its eye, reminding everyone to beware of the new orthodoxies. We went toe to toe on a lot of issues, but he was so much more fun and interesting than colleagues who shared a vague but unexamined agreement on the issues of the day, sleepwalking across the campus. To meet Stanley for the first time created an overwhelming sense of cognitive dissonance for most people—he was mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and elfin: where is the giant monster? That’s him, over there, the little gray-haired guy in the expensive suit, standing next to his Jaguar. Really? Yup, that’s Stanley.