The theme of last night’s installment of The Encyclopedia Show was “explosives,” a tie-in to Young Chicago Authors’s Louder Than a Bomb poetry competition. So who better to serve as the unannounced special guest than Bill Ayers?
Ayers sat down on the Chopin Theatre’s stage for a 15-minute conversation with host Robbie Q. Telfer midway through the show. And in a development sure to disappoint Sarah Palin acolytes but no surprise to those who know him, the real Bill Ayers turns out to be a thoughtful, fiercely intelligent, thoroughly charming guy. He held forth on education, the current state of activism—today’s young activists, he suggested, are actually held back by the myth of the ’60s—and adroitly pinpointed the “post-partum depression” many of us political junkies experienced after the election, without new polls to check every morning: “I was like, Thank God for Minnesota!” He also pointed out the strange nature of his own newfound celebrity: “The Weather Underground is way more famous now than it ever was in the ’60s.”
One of the most important things we have to do in political discourse, Ayers said, is to “rename the metaphors.” Every time a candidate is asked what they’ll do to win “the war on terror,” he said, the question itself reinforces a falsehood. “I was so thankful for the BBC, and I never thought I’d say that, because they always said “the ’so-called’ war on terror. You can’t win a ‘war on terror’ any more than you can win a war on nervousness.”
Palling around with Telfer, Ayers also displayed a quick wit. When the host asked him if he’d ever touched an explosive, Ayers grabbed Telfer’s knee dramatically and said, “Yes.” Telfer noted that Ayers had once kissed him on stage in an event at Steppenwolf, “thereby ruining my future political career.”
Ayers was quick to add: “If not for me, you could have been president.”
Ayers serves as a judge for the Louder Than a Bomb finals Sunday 8 at the Vic Theatre; he’ll also give free 6pm pre-show talks before the March 26 and Apr 2 performances of Jeffrey Sweet’s ’60s campus comedy Class Dismissed at Victory Gardens (email events@victorygardens.org to RSVP). The Encyclopedia Show continues the first Wednesday of every month at the Chopin.
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