Public Enemy (18 page)

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 nonviolent direct action as a principle for himself and as a necessary approach for the struggle as well. As he wrote in
Where Do We Go from Here
:

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, and 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 nonviolence.

Gandhi, too, is more difficult to embrace in reality than as the cardboard cut-out we are urged to admire and emulate unquestioningly. Most Westerners who evoke Gandhi are thinking of the activist who led the struggle that brought the British Empire to heel—what’s not to love!?!—not the religious zealot who was willing, by his own account, to let his wife or a child die rather than provide the medically indicated but religiously proscribed food (chicken! milk!) or who said in 1938 that the Jews of Germany should commit collective suicide to alert the people of the world to Hitler’s violence. After the war, Gandhi defended himself, noting that the Jews had died anyway, and that they might have died more significantly. And again, in 1942, he urged nonviolent resistance to a Japanese invasion, conceding that it could cost millions and millions of lives. Gandhi’s orthodoxy—like any dogma—was at least dependable; his consistency, however, was something that few would ever endorse or practice. Most of us who considered ourselves radicals or peace and justice activists struggled for more peace and more freedom at the moment, more democracy and more fairness and more justice
now
—a more human world right here.

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 makes each of them even more admirable to me and to Bernardine. Their nonviolence showed the power of love and by design exposed the hidden violence lurking in the everyday. But it was their activism, not some vague armchair pacifism, that animated 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. As the legendary Ella Baker said of King, “The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement.”

On a beautiful spring day I left home early to catch a flight from Chicago to western Canada, where I was scheduled to give a lecture to a group of teachers at the University of Calgary. Clearing customs, I was directed to Immigration, where a growing line of anxious or impatient arrivals—mostly dark-skinned, mostly young, I, the glaring, gleaming exception—awaited further examination.

This had become a commonplace for me whenever I traveled to Canada—I was always diverted and delayed, always questioned about my anticipated length of stay and the nature of my business, always double-checked. Whenever I’d ask why I was being subjected to this special treatment, the reply was always the same: “Just a routine check.”

It’s struck me as odd, though, since I’d never once warranted a second look entering Beijing or Frankfurt, Cape Town or Cairo, Rio or Taipei. Why was it always Canada? Why me? I was never able to get beyond the bureaucratic diversion.

Now I stood before Immigration Officer 1767—a man in his mid-thirties with a stubbly beard, slumping shoulders, and intense eyes—as he peered at his computer screen. Shortly, he rose and excused himself in order to “look some things up” in a separate back room. When he returned, he had several pages of what looked like a computer printout in his hands. He took his seat in the booth, looked up at me, and said, “What’s Students for a Democratic Society?” Ah, my dossier at last.

I explained that SDS was a student group devoted to peace and participatory democracy. “Are you still a member?” he asked, and, having never actually resigned, I replied that I was.

“You have quite an arrest record,” he went on, and I agreed that, yes, I did, but explained that every arrest was linked to a political demonstration—OK, and one insignificant possession of marijuana charge, but I was innocent!—and that all of my encounters resulted merely in misdemeanors like “disturbing the peace” or “mob action,” vague charges designed to cover a multitude of affirmative acts or sins as the case may be. “Almost all,” he corrected. “But there is a conviction here from 1969 for assault with a deadly weapon—and that’s a felony.”

“It couldn’t be true,” I said. I didn’t have any felony convictions whatsoever, in 1969 or any other time.

“My records say otherwise,” he said.

“It’s a mistake,” I replied.

He consulted a large book of regulations and said, “That conviction would bring a ten-year prison term in Canada. I can’t admit you.”

I began to beg and lobby, plead and beseech, pointing to the Canadian stamps dotting my passport and granting me entry as recently as March, sucking up to national pride and economic self-interest by telling him that I bring my family to Shakespeare at Stratford every year, showing him the publicity flier for my lecture, appealing to what I hoped might be his sense of pity for a sixty-year-old professor stranded at Immigration. “Well,” he began tentatively, and I sensed a chink. “Yes? Yes?” “I could call my supervisor at home, and if he agrees I could grant you temporary residence. . . .” Terrific! “And that would cost you a couple hundred dollars.” What? Why?

This sounded a lot like extortion to me. I didn’t want to pay a bribe or a gift to get into Canada. “All right,” he said. “You won’t be allowed into Canada today.” He handed me a form called “Allowed to Leave Canada” and asked me to sign under, “I hereby voluntarily withdraw my application to enter Canada. . . .” I, of course, refused that too.

After an hour in a holding cell conveniently situated behind Immigration, he fetched me and escorted me back through security and US customs, where agents from both sides of the border shared a collegial laugh. I told him that Canada was always the place I imagined myself escaping
to
if the United States ever plunged into a kind of friendly fascism, and now what would I do? As we made our way to the next plane to the United States, officer 1767 assured me: “I’m not denying entry into Canada on the basis of your membership in Students for a Democratic Society—it’s your arrest record.” I’m innocent, I almost said, and then I thought of the chorus from the great Canadian singer Leonard Cohen’s “The Partisan”: “Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing.”

I was first on the plane, seen to my seat by 1767, and my passport was returned to me. The agent stood in the galley watching me, I suppose to be sure I wouldn’t shout out some blasphemy or bolt and raise a rumpus in Canada, saw that the door was closed and secured, and waved bye-bye, now from the window, as the plane pulled away. The university must have canceled my talk, but the conference went on anyway. I was detained twice more on attempts to cross the northern border, and as of 2013, I still can’t get in to Canada.

Bernardine and I went hand in hand with Sam and Bill and their amazing crew to the Oscars at the Kodak Theatre in weird but hospitable Hollywood.
The Weather Underground
had indeed been nominated for an Academy Award. Unbelievable! When they’d started working on the project years before and had contacted me for an interview, I said, “Sure, of course.” I assumed they were like dozens of others who’d stopped by with a camera and a tape recorder and ten questions scribbled on a yellow pad, mostly kids crafting some sort of earnest or envious school history fair project—“Student Protest Then and Now: From the 1960s to Today,” “1968—Year of Turmoil,” “Antiwar Protest and War Resistance in the United States.” It didn’t really register until deep into the process that they were making an actual grown-up documentary film. But they were and they did, and it wasn’t too bad—not the story I would have told, certainly, but an honest look nonetheless at one instance of what they generically referred to as “hidden history” by a couple of smart and curious guys. And its own curious history—filmed largely before 9/11, edited after 9/11, and released as the government incessantly pounded the drums of war—ensured that it bore a certain conflicted schizophrenia at its heart. But there we all were, at the Oscars, and the ambition to get here was being recalibrated once more: the great news and reward of the nomination, more than bliss a few months before, was replaced with an aching hope for victory!

It was odd and a little creepy seeing myself on the big screen—did I really say that? I must have because there it was, but what was missing? Furthermore, was my acne that bad on one of the days they’d interviewed me? It must have been, but damn it looked out of control on the screen. I reminded myself that I’d written my own version of these events and that this particular story belonged to the filmmakers, not to me and not to Bernardine, and could have as easily been called “Two Smart and Curious Guys Go on an Honest Search for the Weather Underground.” They’d talked with hundreds of folks before they’d even turned on the camera, and the film included interviews with allies and enemies, pursuers and pursued. Todd Gitlin was in the Darth Vader role: the camera dangerously close, the face so tight it was about to burst, the choked words spewing forth in a barely controlled stream of spittle and incoherence comparing us as moral partners with Hitler and Stalin and Mao.

The Weather Underground
had some stiff competition for an Oscar in the documentary category—
The Fog of War
,
Capturing the Friedmans
—but being in Hollywood was huge for them in any case, and they kindly invited us along for the party. Bill and Sam and the crew were still happy-exhausted and adrenaline-fueled, stimulated now with skunk and coca leaf and spirits of all types, and really who knows what medications the near-naked waitron, who looked like a shaman from some mysterious mountain, had stashed in her
porte-monnaie
as she circled our table at the upscale pan-Asian bistro the night before the ceremony. No matter, we ordered huge platters of mushroom-filled dumplings, tofu basil scramble with tomato cucumber salad, urban ramen, and five-spice udon. Bill and Sam were intent on performing their anticipated acceptance speeches before our little stunned and stunning audience. Sam, practiced at showing the film to audiences on campuses for months, planned to say, “Rather than the traditional thank-you speech, let’s go straight to the Q and A . . . Yes?” pointing to and calling on Bernardine. “The woman in the
fabulous
leather pants from Shanghai Tang there in the first balcony . . .” Bill, holding the statue (a bottle of California merlot at our rehearsal dinner) in his right hand high above his head and raising the power fist with his left, planned to rouse the masses by shouting, “The Weather Underground hoped to make a revolution, not a film; we’ve made the film, now let’s join up to make the revolution!”

Security for the ceremony was crazily ramped up—9/11 and the new normal, I suppose. We each got a rainbow of color-coded wristbands and stickers, hang-tags and lanyards, as well as a blizzard of instructions and a map with a rendezvous point and the maze of closed streets we were to follow toward the Kodak. We passed half a dozen checkpoints before our cars were thoroughly sniffed by trained German shepherds—the dogs were exclusively on explosives detail that day it seemed, and hash or bud got nothing more than a happy drip of drool and a barely perceptible doggy smile. Mirrors were passed under the carriages, and valets drove them off to their undisclosed locations. Assembled on the red carpet, I told Bill and Sam that I felt much safer knowing that after all those showy and elaborate precautions security certified Bernardine Dohrn, of all people, as safe and worthy.

We were on the red carpet for only a few minutes when BJ called—for her being on the red carpet was up there with winning the Nobel or the Super Bowl, appearing on Oprah, or getting your Nobel presented by Oprah at the Super Bowl. And suddenly there she was: Oprah!

I thought the red carpet would be the worst kind of celebrity clusterfuck and the cheapest possible celebration of the most superficial crap in our culture—probably all true, but the lights and the cameras, the cheering crowds and enchanted mountain vibe worked its magic on me, and I felt myself give in. Susan Sarandon seemed genuinely happy to see Bernardine, and so did Tim Robbins, and they had a group hug. When Nicole Kidman dropped her handbag right next to me, I swooped down to help her gather up the contents, saying, “Oops, here’s your drugs,” and she laughed and teased and poked me in the arm and said, “Don’t tell!” I swooned like a teenage boy, or like BJ, and I lingered and stalled and hung back some more.

The Fog of War
won the Oscar, and we were all good sports, hugs all around, and clutching our fancy swag bags, we headed back to Chicago.

We did a lot of traveling with the film for a few years and came to admire Bill and Sam more and more. They really wanted their film to raise questions and to provoke discussion, not to be some authoritative last word, and on campuses and in community forums from Maine to California, it did that in spades. Typically a few older people showed up at screenings to reconnect—Grace Paley in New Hampshire, Adrienne Rich in California, Marge Piercy in Massachusetts—or to refight the old battles. But young people couldn’t have cared less. They wanted to talk about the US war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and mass incarceration in the United States. Some even wanted to understand that kind of commitment and sacrifice, the angels and the devils that pushed the Weather Underground, the Panthers, SDS, and the Black student movement forward and roiled all of our lives, the lessons we thought we had learned about activism and social justice work.