The Weather Underground

On Friday night, I watched a documentary about the 60s radical group, The Weather Underground. For those of you unfamiliar, here's the story: after the tumult of 1968, the most radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), seized control of that group. Their aim was to "bring the [Vietnam] war home"--that is, demonstrate the violence happening in Southeast Asia, and mete out a measure of suffering currently being endured by the Vietnamese people, to the masses here in America (which were, then as now--how do I put this kindly?--consumption-addled and preoccupied).



After their dream of leading a parade of destruction here in Chicago (romantically called "Days of Rage") petered out through lack of interest, they started building bombs. After the Greenwich Village brownstone they were using as a bomb factory exploded, killing three members, they realized that killing masses of innocent civilians here, in the name of innocent civilians somewhere else, was probably not a good idea. In the next five years or so, they planted a lot of bombs in various public buildings, to protest various actions of the Nixon Administration. To their credit, no one was killed in these events. And they were able to bust Timothy Leary out of prison, where the High Priest of Psychedelia was being held for the possession of three joints. THREE JOINTS? Shit, you'd find more drugs just by making him give blood!



But back to the Weathermen. What a bunch of idiots. Arrogant, naive, self-indulgent, and ultimately useless--a textbook example of how political change DOESN'T happen. Driven to violence by the violence of the Vietnam War, they didn't shorten that war by one day, and probably created support for it. Quite an important lesson for those of us against the war in Iraq.



People wonder where the Sixties went--how the anti-war movement allowed (and participated) in our country's disastrous and protracted slide to the right. I think the answer can be found in these two facts from the documentary:

1) Fred Hampton was Information Minister of the Black Panther Party; he was shot to death by the Chicago Police in 1970.

2) Bernadette Dohrn was the leader of the Weather Underground; she now teaches law at Northwestern University.



It's easy to tell who the real revolutionaries are in any society--they're the ones that get shot. Everything else is just the same old struggle to make it to the top of the heap, except with berets.