Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sort­ing it all out, decompressing.

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.

Pass the Vit­a­min C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my busi­ness, hang­ing out with my kids and, now, my grand­chil­dren, tak­ing care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teach­ing and writ­ing. And every day, I par­tic­i­pate in the nev­er-end­ing effort to build a pow­er­ful and irre­sistible move­ment for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then – often unpre­dictably – appear in the news­pa­pers or on TV, some­times with a ref­er­ence to Fugi­tive Days, my 2001 mem­oir of the exhil­a­rat­ing and dif­fi­cult years of resis­tance against the Amer­i­can war in Viet­nam. It was a time when the world was in flames, rev­o­lu­tion was in the air, and the ser­i­al assas­si­na­tions of black lead­ers dis­rupt­ed our utopi­an dreams.

These media episodes of fleet­ing noto­ri­ety always led to some extrav­a­gant and fan­tas­tic asser­tions about what I did, what I might have said and what I prob­a­bly believe now.

It was always a bit sur­re­al. Then came this polit­i­cal season.

Dur­ing the pri­ma­ry, the blo­gos­phere was full of chat­ter about my rela­tion­ship with Pres­i­dent-elect Barack Oba­ma. We had served togeth­er on the board of the Woods Foun­da­tion and knew one anoth­er as neigh­bors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a cof­fee gath­er­ing that my wife, Bernar­dine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a dona­tion to his cam­paign for the Illi­nois State Senate.

Obama’s polit­i­cal rivals and ene­mies thought they saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to deep­en a dis­hon­est per­cep­tion that he is some­how un-Amer­i­can, alien, linked to rad­i­cal ideas, a clos­et ter­ror­ist who sym­pa­thizes with extrem­ism – and they pounced.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D‑N.Y.) cam­paign pro­vid­ed the script, which includ­ed guilt by asso­ci­a­tion, demo­niza­tion of peo­ple Oba­ma knew (or might have known), creepy ques­tions about his back­ground and dark hints about hid­den secrets yet to be uncovered.

On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R‑Ariz.), appar­ent­ly in an attempt to reas­sure the ​“base,” sat down for an inter­view with Sean Han­ni­ty of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the nar­ra­tive Han­ni­ty had been spin­ning for months, and so Han­ni­ty filled him in: Ayers is an unre­pen­tant ​“ter­ror­ist,” he explained, ​“On 9⁄ 11 , of all days, he had an arti­cle where he bragged about bomb­ing our Pen­ta­gon, bomb­ing the Capi­tol and bomb­ing New York City police head­quar­ters. … He said, ​‘I regret not doing more.’ “

McCain couldn’t believe it.

Nei­ther could I.

On the cam­paign trail, McCain imme­di­ate­ly got on mes­sage. I became a prop, a car­toon char­ac­ter cre­at­ed to be pummeled.

When Alas­ka Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 ral­ly, she said Oba­ma was ​“pallin’ around with ter­ror­ists.” (I pic­tured us shar­ing a milk­shake with two straws.)

The crowd began chant­i­ng, ​“Kill him!” ​“Kill him!” It was down­hill from there.

My voice­mail filled up with hate mes­sages. They were most­ly from men, all vent­ing and sweat­ing and breath­ing heav­i­ly. A few threats: ​“Watch out!” and ​“You deserve to be shot.” And some e‑mails, like this one I got from satan@​hell.​com: ​“I’m com­ing to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”

The police lieu­tenant who came to copy down those threats dead­panned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tor­tured and then shot. (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to inves­ti­gate threats made against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois at Chicago.)

The good news was that every time McCain or Palin men­tioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The car­toon invent­ed to hurt Oba­ma was now pok­ing holes in the rapid­ly sink­ing McCain-Palin ship.

That ​ ’ 60 s show

On Aug. 28, Stephen Col­bert, the faux right-wing com­men­ta­tor from Com­e­dy Cen­tral who chan­nels Bill O’Reilly on steroids, observed:

To this day, when our coun­try holds a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, we judge the can­di­dates through the lens of the 1960 s. … We all know Oba­ma is cozy with William Ayers a ​ ’ 60 s rad­i­cal who plant­ed a bomb in the cap­i­tal build­ing and then lat­er went on to even more heinous crimes by becom­ing a col­lege pro­fes­sor. … Let us keep fight­ing the cul­ture wars of our grand­par­ents. The ​ ’ 60 s are a polit­i­cal gift that keeps on giving.

It was inevitable. McCain would bet the house on a dis­hon­est and large­ly dis­cred­it­ed vision of the ​’60s, which was the defin­ing decade for him. He built his polit­i­cal career on being a pris­on­er of war in Vietnam.

The ​’60s – as myth and sym­bol – is much abused: the down­fall of civ­i­liza­tion in one account, a time of defeat and humil­i­a­tion in a sec­ond, and a per­fect moment of right­eous oppo­si­tion, peace and love in a third.

The idea that the 2008 elec­tion may be the last time in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life that the ​’60s plays any role what­so­ev­er is a mixed bless­ing. On the one hand, let’s get over the nos­tal­gia and move on. On the oth­er, the lessons we might have learned from the black free­dom move­ment and from the resis­tance against the Viet­nam War have nev­er been learned. To achieve this would require that we face his­to­ry ful­ly and hon­est­ly, some­thing this nation has nev­er done.

The war in Viet­nam was an ille­gal inva­sion and occu­pa­tion, much of it con­duct­ed as a war of ter­ror against the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. The U.S. mil­i­tary killed mil­lions of Viet­namese in air raids – like the one con­duct­ed by McCain – and entire areas of the coun­try were des­ig­nat­ed free-fire zones, where Amer­i­can pilots indis­crim­i­nate­ly dropped sur­plus ordi­nance – an immoral enter­prise by any measure.

What is real­ly important

McCain and Palin – or as our late friend Studs Terkel put it, ​“Joe McCarthy in drag” – would like to bury the ​’60s. The ​’60s, after all, was a time of reject­ing obe­di­ence and con­for­mi­ty in favor of ini­tia­tive and courage. The ​’60s pushed us to a deep­er appre­ci­a­tion of the human­i­ty of every human being. And that is the threat it pos­es to the right wing, hence the attacks and all the guilt by association.

McCain and Palin demand­ed to ​“know the full extent” of the Oba­ma-Ayers ​“rela­tion­ship” so that they can know if Oba­ma, as Palin put it, ​“is telling the truth to the Amer­i­can peo­ple or not.”

This is just plain stupid.

Oba­ma has con­tin­u­al­ly been asked to defend some­thing that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the impor­tance of talk­ing to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble in this com­pli­cat­ed and wild­ly diverse soci­ety, of lis­ten­ing with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of learn­ing some­thing new, and of speak­ing with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of per­suad­ing or influ­enc­ing others.

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by asso­ci­a­tion, they also assumed that one must apply a polit­i­cal lit­mus test to begin a conversation.

On Oct. 4, Palin described her sup­port­ers as those who ​“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.” But Oba­ma, she said, ​“Is not a man who sees Amer­i­ca as you see it and how I see Amer­i­ca.” In oth­er words, there are ​“real” Amer­i­cans – and then there are the rest of us.

In a robust and sophis­ti­cat­ed democ­ra­cy, polit­i­cal lead­ers – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many peo­ple who hold dis­sent­ing, or even rad­i­cal, ideas. Lack­ing that sim­ple and yet essen­tial capac­i­ty to ques­tion author­i­ty, we might still be burn­ing witch­es and enslav­ing our fel­low human beings today.

Maybe we could wel­come our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion – torn by anoth­er ille­gal war, as it was in the ​’60s – as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to search for the new.

Per­haps we might think of our­selves not as pas­sive con­sumers of pol­i­tics but as ful­ly mobi­lized polit­i­cal actors. Per­haps we might think of our var­i­ous efforts now, as we did then, as more than a sin­gle cam­paign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.

We might find hope in the growth of oppo­si­tion to war and occu­pa­tion world­wide. Or we might be inspired by the grow­ing move­ments for repa­ra­tions and prison abo­li­tion, or the ris­ing immi­grant rights move­ment and the stir­rings of work­ing peo­ple every­where, or by gay and les­bian and trans­gen­der peo­ple coura­geous­ly press­ing for full recognition.

Yet hope – my hope, our hope – resides in a sim­ple self-evi­dent truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entire­ly unknowable.

His­to­ry is always in the mak­ing. It’s up to us. It is up to me and to you. Noth­ing is pre­de­ter­mined. That makes our moment on this earth both hope­ful and all the more urgent – we must find ways to become real actors, to become authen­tic sub­jects in our own history.

We may not be able to will a move­ment into being, but nei­ther can we sit idly for a move­ment to spring full-grown, as from the head of Zeus.

We have to agi­tate for democ­ra­cy and egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, press hard­er for human rights, learn to build a new soci­ety through our self-trans­for­ma­tions and our lim­it­ed every­day struggles.

At the turn of the last cen­tu­ry, Eugene Debs, the great Social­ist Par­ty leader from Terre Haute, Ind., told a group of work­ers in Chica­go, ​“If I could lead you into the Promised Land, I would not do it, because some­one else would come along and lead you out.”

In this time of new begin­nings and ris­ing expec­ta­tions, it is even more urgent that we fig­ure out how to become the peo­ple we have been wait­ing to be.

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