From the Chicago Trib, via "
On the Metamorphosis from Private Citizen to ‘Public Enemy’
December 13, 2013 |
By Bill Ayers
Editor’s Note: Bill Ayers is a different man depending whom you ask. To the left, he’s an anti-war hero and an education reformer. To the 2008 McCain-Palin ticket, he remains America’s “domestic terrorist,” whose connection to then-Senator Barack Obama proved useful fodder for a smear campaign. Here, and in his most recent memoir Public Enemy, Ayers reflects on the bizarre, out-of-body experience of having to reconcile his personal life with the warped public image latched onto by the media.
It was a mid-April evening, the last light reluctantly giving way outside the front window as seminar ended and a dozen of my graduate students pitched in to clean-up and a self-described “political junkie” clicked on the TV and flipped to the presidential primary debate, well underway by now, between Hillary Clinton and the young upstart from Chicago, Barack Obama. All the promise of new life was in the air.
At that moment the moderator, echoing a dramatic narrative spun by everyone running against Senator Obama, turned to him and said, “On this…general theme of patriotism in your relationships…” The story always involved Obama’s former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose impassioned statements about racism and the American government (“God damn America!”) had been widely disseminated and discussed, but soon the moderator switched direction: “A gentleman named William Ayers…He was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon… He’s never apologized for that…Your campaign has said you are ‘friendly.’ Can you explain that relationship for the voters…?”
I thought Obama looked slightly stricken, temporarily off-balance and uncharacteristically tongue-tied — I was probably projecting because I felt suddenly dizzy, off-balance and tongue-tied myself — and my students were thunderstruck. Their heads snapped in my direction as Obama replied: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know… [T]he notion that
An Interview with Bill Ayers
An Interview with Bill Ayers The following interview comes to us from a research project by Isaac Graves that looks at community, education, and the relationship between community and education through the eyes of educators and community stakeholders. The words ‘community’ and ‘education’ are often invoked with the assumption of a shared definition, but even educators within the same commun
by billayers / 10:50 AM UTC-8