What I Learned On My Date With Bill Ayers

I didn’t cry the night Obama won.  I didn’t dance, I didn’t sing, I didn’t run out into the streets and howl at the moon.  Friends called me up the next day saying, ‘You must be happy” but I wasn’t.  The night Obama won, I didn’t even feel relieved.

Like most Americans, I had spent the last five years in perpetual shock at the unceasing disaster in Iraq, but I had a particularly bad case.   I flirted with the idea of militant action – real militant action – as it became apparent that traditional activism was effectively useless.  I started innocently enough by tagging recruiting stations with such revolutionary phrases as “NO WAR” and “TROOPS HOME NOW”.  When that failed to bring about peace in the Middle East, I decided that more drastic action was necessary but was unsure what form it should take. So of course, I looked to Bill Ayers.

I can’t remember the first time I heard about the Weather Underground, but I watched a film about the famed college-students-turned-revolutionaries (or was it the other way around?) on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2006.  I was struck by their passion, their resolve, and also by the courageousness of their “war” on the largest military-industrial complex the world had ever seen.  The 2002 documentary tells their story in a voice laden with remorse, but Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, seem proud to have stood up for their beliefs.  And why not?  In America, few people have ever had the pluck to fight – literally – for a cause, but those that do have often earned a place in history:  Martin Luther King, Jr., John Brown, and George Washington are among the brave elite.  When the film ended, the room of present-day college students discussed the Weather Underground with disdain.  I disagreed.  “What good is non-violent action if it lets the perpetrators continue their war?”  I asked.  No one had an answer, but no one agreed with me, either.

In March of 2006 I offered to write a piece on anti-war activism for my college’s student-produced magazine.  That month’s issue commemorated the third anniversary of the Iraq War, and the Weather Underground was still fresh in my brain.  I found Bill Ayers’ email address listed publicly – as it still is – on the University of Illinois website, and sent him a long-winded and exaggerated request for a phone interview.  He sent back a three word reply and his number.  I called him before the week was out.

Ayers was lucid and well-spoken.  He chastised me for not reading his book, Fugitive Days, but was cooperative and accommodating. He pontificated about the merits of non-violent action, his latest and preferred modus operandi, and decried the present-day use of violence, advising would-be imitators to “find another way”.  He spoke with the wisdom of a man who had seen all this before, but with the outrage of someone who thought it was over. He said at the time (though he denies it now) that every successful social movement involves a mass of people in motion and an armed resistance.  That hit me hard.  In my article, I wrote that “Ayers declined to mention that since the Vietnam war ended and the Weather Underground disbanded, the US has had neither.”

Though I admired his bravery in the past, I didn’t look to Ayers for leadership in these dark times.  I looked instead to young people, my fellow college students, in the hopes that they would wake up to the vast ineffectiveness of standard non-violent protest and the dire need for more direct methods.  As more symbolic actions across the nation led to more symbolic resolutions in the Capitol, my frustrations grew.  My belief in the need for militancy matched it.

Governments must be responsive to the people.  Our government clearly wasn’t, I argued, and so it came to us, the people, to make it responsive.  To shirk this responsibility would make us just as liable as those that wielded power.  The real problem wasn’t Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld; it was the 300 million people who were too complicit, too complacent, too cowardly to stand up to them, to make them fear ignoring the will of the people.  The real problem was leadership, as the anti-war movement was dysfunctional, rudderless, and largely reactionary. The real problem was the Democrats, who month after month approved legislation that made the war possible, with nary a ‘No’ vote in defiance. The real problem was the Democrats, who continued to speak in one direction, vote in the other, and collect money from both.  The real perpetrators were the Democrats, who were either too craven to stand up for their beliefs or too corrupt to believe in the things for which they ostensibly stood.  The congressional Democrats and their supporters effectively retarded the anti-war movement, diverting it into a cove of irrelevance that we might today call a “Free Speech Zone,” some place far enough away from the action to be ignored and small enough to be trampled.  I came to a conclusion that ironically would have pleased that great anti-war activist Ronald Reagan: Democrats were not the solution to our problems, Democrats were the problem.

And so it came as no surprise when Pelosi took impeachment off the table and Barack and Hillary voted to renew the Patriot Act.  It wasn’t a surprise when the newly Democrat-controlled congress voted – yet again – to approve funding for the war.  In fact, the only surprise in the days after the Democratic take-over was Bush’s announcement that he was expanding the war in Iraq (with a “surge” of troops!).  Perhaps some recruiting stations in Rochester, NY were surprised the next day, too, to find their windows were tagged…or broken.

The US in 2006 lacked the movement to produce the militancy that existed in 1969, and so my capacity to imitate Bill Ayers was non-existent from the start.  My fascination with his story, however, continued.  In 2008, after being side-tracked by a number of other projects, I began work on a film exploring the use of force in past social movements.  I hoped to broaden the vocabulary of activism, to re-discover a turbulent history that has been cruelly and disgustingly white-washed to make it palatable to middle America.  In that Disney-fied history, revolutionary figures like John Brown, Malcolm X, and King are diminished, ignored, and castrated.  So of course, I looked to Bill Ayers.

I wrote him another long-winded, exaggerated request for an interview, this time on-camera.  He wrote back another characteristically short response, and we set a date a month in advance.  Shortly after we made our plans, I was reminded of Bill Ayers’ other history, that of an education activist and professor, when it was revealed that he was an acquaintance of Barack Obama’s.  Up till then, it had never occurred to me that the politician from Chicago might know the education activist from the Windy City, but it quickly made sense.  Bill Ayers is a patron of the Chicago liberal community, and any politician courting that circle would do well to get in his favor.  I don’t know the extent of the Dorhn/Ayers-Obama connection (how extensive could it be, really?), but I can say that when the rest of America was outraged at the connection, I was kind of impressed…with Obama.

I met Bill Ayers face to face in a New York hotel in the spring of 2008. I didn’t sleep the night before, and spent the four-hour drive from Ithaca with my co-producer, Jon Gerberg, discussing different ways to approach the interview.  By the time Jon and I got to the hotel lobby, I was running on nervous energy alone.

Once again, Ayers was lucid and well-spoken.  By this time I had read Fugitive Days, and brought a copy of the book to prove it.  This time he chastised me for buying a page proof.  He spoke with more arrogance than accommodation, but mostly with passion.  He discussed the ethics of violence, the Vietnam war as a context for his actions, and the limits of a non-violent approach towards social change.  I brought up Obama only twice, but he shrewdly dodged the subject both times, as I expected he would.  The Obama connection wasn’t relevant to the film, anyway, so I dropped it.  We spoke for about two hours.  Near the end, Bill Ayers turned to Jon Gerberg and wryly remarked, “He looks tired.”

I came away from that interview with a diminished respect for Ayers.  Perhaps he was preparing for the inevitable Hannity-led attacks, but there was something defensive and posturing about his words, not unlike those of a politician.  Perhaps he was a sell-out after all.  Or perhaps I was just upset that he wouldn’t admit that the Iraq War was worse than Vietnam, and that – by extension – he should start blowing shit up again.  In any case, Jon and I drove back to Ithaca feeling a little short-changed, but on the whole pretty good.

In the months that followed, I watched as Bill Ayers became a prominent issue in the campaign and marveled at how little context the media provided.  If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed Ayers to be a sadist on the level of the Unabomber.  The truth is that no one in the 60’s or 70’s feared the Weather Underground, unless you think concrete and plaster are people with the ability to fear.  Barack masterfully distanced himself from Ayers, and the anti-war crowd was pleased, for some reason.  I guess they think it was all those peaceful protests that ended the Vietnam war.

The campaign dragged on, and I watched with dismay as the Democrats whittled their choices down to a senator who voted for the war and one who probably would have if he had been in office.  Even after Obama stopped showing love to the progressive crowd by cruelly voting to expand Bush’s wiretapping powers in the middle of the primaries, the head-in-the-sand community refused to reciprocate, instead coalescing around him even more.  Obama sheepishly became the cause célèbre of the anti-war movement, which really should be renamed the “anti-Iraq-War-after-2013-unless-Barack-thinks-it-has-to-go-on-longer-than-that” movement. The nation that had just two years prior reluctantly elected Democrats to Congress to end the war only to find that the Democrats had no intention of ending it once again elected a Democrat and gave him the same mission, but this time he was to try it with “hope”.  And they call this progress.

If someone had told me in 2004 that in just four years, a Democratic congress would be joined by a Democratic president (and a black man, to boot), I would have been overjoyed.  But if someone had told me in 2004 that the war would continue indefinitely, and of all of the lies and disappointments, of the spineless cowering and cowtowing the Democratic party would engage in along the way, the only thing left to be excited about would be the sound of a glass ceiling shattering. And so it was that on Election Night, the only comforting thought I could muster was, “At least he’s black.”

More than 1 million people are expected to descend on Washington for Obama’s inauguration on January 20.  I’m tempted to say that could be a decent anti-war demonstration on January 21, but the last five years (soon to be six) haven’t lacked demonstrations.  They’ve lacked a Step 2, the creative and necessary actions beyond “peaceful” protest.  Lefty blogs and magazines are awash with writings reminding us that “We have to keep the pressure on,” when they should be writing that “We have to learn the definition of the word ‘pressure’”.  It’s “the use of persuasion, influence, or intimidation to make someone do something.” We used up our persuasion and influence when we voted them into office.   Now what?

Hamlet wondered,

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more.

There are those in the anti-war movement who think that it is nobler to limit our own influence, to consign ourselves to “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”  There are those who think, as Bill Ayers did, that this war may only end when we “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”  And perhaps in some barely-foreseeable future, when our hard work and tough choices bring about a real end to the war, and our children ask us why such drastic action was necessary, we can look at them and say, as Bill Ayers does today, “That was a different time.”  And if we do it right, we won’t be lying.

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You can watch clips from my interview with Bill Ayers here.