have hosted the Obamas in their community organizing era. Maybe misunderstanding the assignment, Ayers sent me an exuberant 4,558-word e-mail – an explosion of patriotic sentiment, you might say. And which, according to an online plagiarism-detection service, was partly an amalgamation of his Facebook posts from over the years. “The American Dream is mostly tubular (I like that word!), a pipe dream,” he writes, apparently winking at his own historical preference for pipe bombs. He contrasts lofty ideals and ugly realities, like “rampant consumerism, unchecked acquisition, being bigger and badder than anyone else,” and then adds – sarcastically, I think – “We are the chosen people, we’re building that city on the hill, and we are definitely number one. USA! USA! USA!”
read their disdain for reactionary nationalism as a blanket disregard for the nation. Some on the left do seem readier than ever to reject the American idea outright because its authors were white men who owned people. Others see signs of late-capitalist decay in every corner of American society and publicly decry blind patriotism as a ploy to placate the proletariat. Sure, they say these things – but do they really mean it? Unconvinced, I asked them... I asked lefty activists, perennial firebrands, progressive politicians, former conservatives now living in a perpetual state of Trump- fueled crisis, and one retired domestic terrorist what they love about America. I asked what, in 2019, gets their patriotic sap rising? I asked them to tell me what, if anything, makes them feel the way I feel about mini golf. The longest answer came from Bill Ayers , who you may remember as the founder of the Weather Underground – the group that bombed the Capitol building, the Pentagon, the State Department, and a long list of corporate headquarters, city courthouses, cop cars, and police stations in the 1960s, 1970s, and even for a little bit of the 1980s. Ayers lived as a fugitive for most of his tenure as a terrorist but never went to prison for his crimes. These days, he’s an education professor in his native Chicago and enough of a pillar of the conventionally liberal community to Bill Ayers Loves Bo Diddley
“We are the chosen people, we’re building that city on the hill, and we are definitely number one. USA! USA! USA!
In the less-than-fresh section that follows, he quibbles with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous line, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future” – taking this 1998 soundbite as proof that patriotism is “an arrogant myth that blinds people to
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July 2019
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