Public Enemy (19 page)

One night after dinner at a Mexican grill in Greenwich Village, our kids joined us at the Quad Cinema for a short Q and A after a screening of the film. The Quad was a classic art house cinema, the space cramped and the smell of weed heavy in the air, the crowd that night hipsters, poets, painters, students, and freaks—our people. A few minutes into the post-film discussion, a young woman in the audience wondered what it had been like for our kids growing up and being raised by notorious us. I glanced at the kids, and Chesa nodded, winked, and stood up—he’d had a couple of margaritas, but he didn’t need that kind of courage because he loved this type of thing anyway.

“You know, whatever hand you’re dealt is normal to a little kid,” he began. “I mean, what was it like being raised by
your
parents? Normal, right? And maybe a little weird for you looking back at it, or for me if I happened to peek in today.” He reminisced about sitting around one afternoon when he was in high school with his cousins and friends—Amilcar, Atariba, Haydee, Thai, Bluejay, and others—and Zayd sighing, “Why couldn’t I have been given a normal name like River.” River?

“Kids want to be loved and safe and cared for and recognized—we got all that and more. We didn’t know anything about them as public people, and why would we?” Chesa described the shock of learning that Bernardine had once been a good friend’s partner decades before and then realizing that parents aren’t supposed to give their kids a chart of every hookup, and said he doubted he would ever provide such a thing to his own kids.

When we left the theater, Chesa and his friends, now including the woman who’d gotten him on his feet and into the dialogue in the first place, headed to the corner club.

“This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin cried out to the agitated crowd during a 2008 campaign rally, referring to then-senator Barack Obama. “We see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” This was how “real Americans” saw things, according to Palin. As for Obama, he’s “someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country!”

There it was: the punch line that would resonate no matter what else was said or done—
palling around
. It had a special creepy ring to it, for sure.

When Governor Palin—or, as our late friend Studs Terkel called her, “Joe McCarthy in drag”—uttered it that first time (and ever after) the crowd exploded: “Kill him! Kill him!” I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was me or Senator Obama who was the target of those chants—perhaps both. I’d been designated a public enemy before. I knew the territory pretty well and accepted the consequences with some equanimity, but now poor Barack Obama as well was forced to play Ibsen’s brilliant character, the embattled Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the “enemy of the people.” Stockmann was viciously taunted in the public square by a chorus of townspeople bent on delusion and self-deception: Kill the enemy of the people!

There was no way to prepare for what was about to hit me, of course, and at the outset I could barely glimpse it on the far horizon of my imagination—the great speeding locomotive designed to derail Obama would run me and others down as just some unavoidable debris or collateral damage, the inevitable road kill. No one really knew its shape or its power yet, no one could guess at its velocity. I grasped a couple of small things right away, but my family understood a lot more, and they were in fact already gearing up.

At that time, I’d been a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago for over twenty years and was officially Senior University Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Education—I know, I know, it sounded a bit too lofty to me, too, but I even had official business cards to prove it. I’d written several books—mostly on teaching and learning and education—and I was on the faculty senate and the boards of several national and local organizations. Moving to Chicago from New York in 1987 was a kind of homecoming for us since Bernardine and I had each grown up nearby, and Bernardine had gone to college and law school at the University of Chicago. Hyde Park was the obvious choice for her, and we built our home and raised our three sturdy sons in a little rented coach house there.

When Chesa left home for college and we were on the brink of empty-nesting, Bernardine’s father died, and she brought her mother, well into Alzheimer’s disease, to live with us. We had found the loveliest and most devoted caregiver ever, and Dorothy Dohrn and Florence Garcia were our steady companions and roommates for almost five years. Dorothy liked to sing at the dinner table—Broadway show tunes and classics from Sinatra mostly—and we were a lively chorus most evenings. When Dorothy passed away in her room in our house, Florence moved out. We were oddly quiet, but not for long. A few months later my dad moved in because of his own advancing Alzheimer’s, and thankfully Florence returned for another three years. A lifesaver.

Dad loved playing gin rummy, and Florence learned the game; he was devoted to watching the Cubs, and Florence became a fan; and he was content listening to Fox News at full volume for hours at a time—but that proved to be, for her and all of us, one bridge too far.

One day I came home from work and clicked off Fox News as he slept in his chair. He awoke with a start, looked at me hard, and asked in an accusing voice, “Bill,
what do these gays want?
” I responded a little sharply, “Well, they for sure don’t want to marry you,” and he laughed and said, “Good! I’m too old!”

My dad, Tom, was a large, public man with a record of accomplishments to fill a book, and he had a big personality to match. Dementia didn’t change that. He was an industrialist and a big capitalist, an establishment heavy, civic leader, and energetic cheerleader for all things Chicago, and, of course, in decline those things faded to dust. But he was still charming and talkative and full of good humor.

Sometime after he’d retired in the 1980s, he and I had met for lunch and walked across the Loop toward his train. He seemed to know everyone we passed, and he greeted several by name. When anyone asked, in typical polite greeting, “How are you doing, Tom?” he’d respond heartily: “I’m the best in the world!”

I said to him, “You used to simply say, ‘I’m great!’ and now it seems you’ve escalated and ramped it up.”

“That’s right,” he said. “People expect an old man like me to wail and complain, so I try to generate a little hope and a little happiness.”

“OK,” I said. “But couldn’t it be just a bit over the top and a little annoying to hear that you’re the
best in the world?
That’s a little excessive, no?”

“Fine,” he conceded. “I’m also trying to annoy the whiners: Fuck ’em!”

“I’m the best in the world”: that was his theme song for the last three years of his life, a message of hope edged with mockery.

Tom was supremely confident, but I never thought he was arrogant—he believed in himself, true, but he didn’t think he was better than anyone else. “You’re not all-knowing,” he said. “The other guy has a point of view, too, and don’t be too sure that you’re right in all things.” He also regularly gave us a bit of advice that he would have more than one occasion to regret in my case: “Always stand up for what you believe.”

When Malik graduated from high school, Dad came to the graduation with us. We sat near the front so he could see and hear all the action. The commencement speaker went on too long, of course. There should be an instruction manual for commencement speakers with one big-letter message: PEOPLE CAME TO SEE THEIR KIDS GET THE DIPLOMA, NOT TO HEAR YOU. MAKE IT QUICK! Dad began sighing loudly. I tried to shush him quietly and assured him that the speaker was about to wind up, but it wasn’t true, and in any case Dad’s complaint turned on the content of the talk, not its length. Finally he turned to me and said in an exaggerated stage whisper, mocking the cliché passing as advice to the graduates: “
Follow your dreams! Follow your dreams!
That can get you in a lot of trouble . . . just look at you!!”

A few days before he passed away, I sat holding Dad’s hand for a long while, and as I got up to leave, asked him how he was doing.

“Great,” he replied somewhat softly.

“Great?” I asked in mock surprise. This was clearly backsliding!

He smiled slightly and shot back with a weak but determined voice: “I’m the best in the world!”

He had always kidded me for being a “tattooed man.” It’s true, I got my first in 1963, and I never stopped doodling bits of art on the big living canvas. But there was just a hint of jealousy for the little red heart on my left arm with “Mom” emblazoned across it in script. I’d gotten that one on the day my mother died, and he would say in mock complaint, “Where’s ‘Dad’?” So the day he passed away at our home, I went back to Dave, my skin artist, and got “Dad” carved prominently on my right arm: “The best in the world.”

We were reluctant to see our brilliant friend Florence leave a second time, and I said to Bernardine that the three of us had become such a great elder-care team that maybe we should find some random old person to move in with us. “You’re already here,” she said, a little meanly I thought, and we laughed about how long in the tooth I really was. OK, but where’s my caregiver?

Our three sons monitored news and information from the wide, wide world affirmatively, proactively, and Bernardine and I had ongoing disagreements with them about what to read and why. As a digital immigrant I was particularly slow to even begin to see the propulsive reality exploding all around, let alone know how to negotiate or use it. As digital natives, they knew it all.

Zayd said to me one morning as he packed to return to his home in New York, “You know, I’ve watched you, and it’s kind of sad that you waste an hour or two a day reading the
New York Times
and listening to NPR.”

Sad? Was he patronizing me?

“I’m not wasting my time,” I said. “Just trying to keep up with what’s going on.”

He gave me a pitying (yes,
patronizing
) look and said, “If you pay too much attention to them, you actually
don’t
know what’s going on. Think about Judy Miller.”

He was referring to the disgraced
Times
war correspondent who acted like a compliant stenographer for power and whose blind reporting and fawning posture toward government and military sources greased the wheels for the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq. “She’s not a writer with a mind of her own.”

Her name had indeed become synonymous with the rotten state of American journalism: no skepticism (unless interviewing a foreign leader out of favor with the State Department) and no follow-up questions (unless involving another inevitable “sex scandal”). Judith Miller and her cohort were a far cry from Mr. Dooley’s often-cited observation that a good newspaper reporter ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” or I. F. Stone’s simple reminder that the starting point for any thoughtful political journalist is the knowledge that “
all
governments lie” (Burma, of course, Syria and Russia, but also Israel, Germany, and, yes, the United States), or even the hard-bitten advice that’s become less a serious mantra than a self-congratulatory cliché in J-schools everywhere: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The degraded state of the profession in Miller and Company’s hands was a good deal less lofty. If the Pentagon or the president says they love you, type it up—it’s fit for the front page, without a doubt.

Bernardine was easily convinced, and she converted quickly to all-sports AM talk radio, where she became particularly devoted to
Mike and Mike in the Morning
with their high-energy boy banter and macho, know-it-all posturing. “No pretense,” she said, “just diversion, amusement, distraction—without the faux earnestness, self-importance, or delusional thinking.” But I couldn’t see myself sacrificing a ritual I imagined I shared with millions: waking up with an early cup of coffee and a pungent reading of the
Times
, two sharp slaps across the face.

“If it makes you feel better, go ahead,” Zayd said. “But if you spent those two hours a day reading Dickens, you’d be much better informed.” Zayd was a playwright; his wife, a poet and novelist. They were two of the most insightful writers and best-informed people I knew, and he had a point. I often felt that the
Times
was a self-important, wildly overdressed, and heavily perfumed toxic waste dump, but one I had to visit every day just to pick through the remains, like an archeologist from Mars.

Before he left, Zayd showed us how to set up easy access to better sources, as well as Google alerts for things we ought to be aware of instantly. He had alerts set for some of his friends and his whole family, and he set up a file full of every utterance on the web concerning Bernardine or me.

Because Zayd had a file and had passed some of the juiciest and most bizarre tidbits on to us, we knew that attacking us had been a project of the hard, hard Right for years, long before Obama was a glint in anyone’s eye. And of course we had seen the Weather Underground as fairy tale and emblem resurrected once before, right after the attacks of 9/11, providing “further evidence,” according to the masters of war, of the imminent danger of violence in our midst and the need to mobilize for permanent combat. And we knew that Bernardine and I could become a tiny part of some twisted, nutty, deeply dishonest narrative from the moment Senator Obama entered the Democratic primary in 2007. That’s just how I saw it then: tiny . . . twisted and nutty.

There were already a couple of bloggers hyperventilating and flogging the story—“Obama Launches Political Campaign in the Home Of Radicals,” wrote one; “Records Show $200 Donation to Obama from Weather Underground,” said another—and the
National Enquirer
touched as many bases as possible when it ran a cover story called “Obama’s Secrets” featuring “a chilling murder mystery—the slaying of a gay choir conductor . . . silenced because of what he knew about Obama”; “Screaming matches with his wife—over other women”; and, of course, “Another ticking time bomb . . . his close friendship with . . . a former member of the violent, hippie-era, anti-American group the Weathermen.” Still, no one else seemed to notice.