During Bill Ayers’s pre-debate book talk at one of D.C.’s chain of progressive salons Busboys and Poets, I briefly feared for my life. The unrepentant terrorist seemed to look right at me—a cardigan-clad reactionary in the third row—when he said, “I get bothered by a lot of right wing trolls who follow me around in different venues and places.”
It turned out this was just his lead-in to a story about a piece of mail he’d received, a bumper sticker: “Bill Ayers And His Wife Should Be In Jail,” it read. Well…
Together with his wife Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers spent the late ’60s and early ’70s as a treasonous terrorist and founder of the Weather Underground. The lovely couple bombed the Capitol and the Pentagon and led three impressionable comrades to their untimely deaths—all to further a violent but variously understood anti-government agenda. They never did demolish the national infrastructure and hurl the blindly consumerist American people into anarchy. (In the 1980s, Ayers turned his attention to deprogramming capitalist propaganda from public schools and became a progressive pedagogist in Chicago, where he befriended the Obamas.)
And now in a tragic turn for Weather Underground alumni, the appetite for destruction and attitude of insurgency, that raw pseudo-political id, has wandered over into the political mainstream for the first time in living memory. But in the person of the Republican nominee for president, who just happens to be a Babbitt on steroids (or on something anyway).
Debates, these comrades contend, are “toxic” and the elections “a farce.” (The system, you might say, is “rigged.”) Owner of Busboys and Poets Andy Shallal, two-time mayoral candidate and fond Ayers associate, pulled together a panel after the debate for the room full of Jill Stein supporters and Sanders-loving Clinton converts who’d gathered to watch the cagematch together. Shallal and peacenik panelist Medea Benjamin of the anti-war women’s group CODEPINK praised Trump’s positions on trade—”We have to acknowledge that on that issue he is better,” Benjamin said.
Co-panelist, college professor Jared Ball, scolded the audience for responding “with jocularity” to Hillary Clinton’s jabs. She’s not your friend, he instructed. And Trump is not your enemy. “Trump hasn’t been the one in power all these years. Trump hasn’t been, and his party hasn’t been the one that was in power as all these policies were put in place that led to the mass incarceration and the police violence and the extension of war—most of which we got under Bill Clinton and now under Obama.”
Ayers at one point described finding anarchic common ground with a Hells Angel Tea Partier, and he recalled enjoying the company of Trump supporters at University of Illinois rally he claimed credit for shutting down back in March. There at the Trumpless venue, Ayers met eager witnesses to history and excited young minds. “I left my rally and went and joined the Trump people. Extraordinary. It was absolutely wonderful. And the reason it was wonderful was because I engaged for two hours in conversation with these Trump kids. Eighty percent of them had come in from the suburbs for the spectacle, about ten percent had just read Ayn Rand and they were on fire.” Only the other ten percent, he said, were past the point of no return—irredeemably deplorable, you might say.
In his book Demand the Impossible, Ayers seeks to pass along the baton, or perhaps the pipe bomb, to this new generation, so that they might restore “the fire” real revolution requires. (Demanding the impossible, Ayers at one point implored the audience, “Stop whining. Which I think is great advice for the left.”) Settled into the aging hippie speaking circuit, he calls for us to “unshackle our imaginations”—which is exactly what my high school art teacher used to say. But he takes one hard stance, grown out of years’ reflecting on a significant success of his life’s work, viz., avoiding incarceration: He literally believes, “We have to abolish the prisons.”
A wiry, grey-haired fellow, a committed but disappointed communist, stood up and told Ayers he and his wife Bernadine seem to have faded since 1968 at Columbia: “You had a little more fire at that time,” he said. “It seems that’s been lost.” Ayers admitted he had outgrown his youthful bravado, “Once upon a time I knew exactly how we would take power.” Now, he’s not so sure.
