Readers on the Weather Underground

[see portside: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/5731
and
http://people-link5.inch.com/pipermail/portsidelist/Week-of-Mon-20040405/005730.html

As a member—though not, perhaps, a representative
one—of that younger group of activists who have taken
an interest in the Weather Underground and in movement
history in general, I’d like to weigh in in this
ongoing (and I suspect never-ending) conversation.

I attended a screening of "The Weather Underground"
last month at the Chicago Historical Society. I don’t
know what the other, mostly young, attendees were there
for (though I will say that both Bill Ayers and Bill
Siegel gave highly entertaining—and sobering—answers
to the question of who’s worse—Nixon or Bush). I went,
though, because I continue to believe, against most
evidence to the contrary, that there is something to
learn from both the actions and the motivations of
those in the past.

Of course, Weather has a better story than most. Joe
Berry is right to suggest Max Elbaum’s _Revolution in
the Air_ as an account of what some other people did
after 1968-9. I’ve read it—it was heavily endorsed and
promoted on Portside a couple years, though very little
discussed. It chronicles the "New Communist Movement,"
which seems to have been less a movement than a
continuously splintering of splinters—a collection of
groups all trying to figure out how to be a Communist
in a post-Stalin world. It’s fascinating, but it’s not
gripping. The people in _Revolution in the Air_, many
of whom requested that the author not name or identify
them, do not, for the most part, do very exciting
things. They move into working class neighborhoods;
they take factory jobs; they go to meetings and read
books and produce papers. They talk to people. They do,
in other words, the kinds of things that most of us
have done in the course of our activism; they just did
them more intensely, and more exclusively, than most of
us have ever managed. If you’ve done any organizing,
you know that a great deal of it is drudgery. I’m proud
to have been both a rank and file and a coordinating
committee member of my union in graduate school, and I
had some great moments. But I also had a lot of doors
slammed at me when I was out trying to get people to
join, and I sat through a lot of meetings, and I’m not
going to pretend that there weren’t times when I would
much rather have been home reading a book. And I’ll
admit as well that most of the books about Weather
(with the notable exception of _Family Circle_, Susan
Braudy’s book about the Boudins, which is only amusing
for its incredibly shoddy writing and even shoddier
research) are a better read than Elbaum’s.

I’m not sure, ultimately, that Weather or the new
communists succeeded or achieved great change in any
way. I do believe that they both felt that they were
living their own lives authentically, and I think it is
that authenticity, more than anything, that is so
alluring to younger people. (I’m 28, incidentally, and
I first read about the Weather Underground in _Acid
Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA,
The Sixties, and Beyond_, in which they show up briefly
to orchestrate Tim Leary’s jailbreak. SDS shows up
earlier, in a chapter comparing the radicalizing
effects of drugs with those of politics.) So many of
the anti-globalization protests have been, at their
hearts, about that desire to live authentically—a
desire that is, of course, articulated beautifully in
the Port Huron Statement, written back when Bob Dylan
was still rambling, acquiring an Okie accent and
singing about Hattie Carroll and Emmett Till.

But of course a mere desire to live authentically and
freely does not secure a living wage or health
insurance, nor does it stop wars or negotiate peace.
It might, if you take living authentically to mean
farming organically or not driving a car, mean reducing
pollution slightly, but it won’t get the Bush
administration to clean up its act mercury. And so on.
And, of course, there is no guarantee that living
authentically means living well. It seems instead to
create, over and over, the situation of the speakers in
that famous (at least in radical circles) Bertolt
Brecht poem: that we, who wanted to build a society
based on kindness could not ourselves be kind.

There are very few saints in history, radical or
otherwise. Sometime after the 2000 election a friend of
mine said she wished we functioned the way some Indian
tribes did—that when there was an election and the
vote was split, the minority votes would simply leave
with their leader and form their own tribe. Because we
were young and we believed in authenticity, of course,
we were Nader voters, and we spent a few happy moments
imagining the world we might live in, somewhere in the
west, where the forests were old and the waters ran
clear. We knew, of course, that it was just a fantasy,
not unlike the fantasy of the underground: a world
where, because you’ve chosen to leave the ordinary
world, you no longer function by its rules. That makes
it harder, of course, but also more thrilling. But we
didn’t create that world, that or any other. She went
on to work at a women’s center in LA, where her
boyfriend had gone to do Union Summer and then stayed.
And I—I seem to have ended up here, reading and typing
away into the night, whatever that may mean.

Laura Crossett
above-ground in suburbia and living to tell the tale