Cathy Wilkerson's Flying Close to the Sun (Seven Stories 2007)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=14052
by Ron Jacobs
October 16, 2007
One of the email lists I belong to is made up of a few former
students at the University of Maryland. All of the members were
involved somehow in the radical student movement at the university in
the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the listserv discussion is over
political questions of the day and the members arguing equipped with
a variety of viewpoints across the spectrum. More interesting in
terms of history, however, are the names that occasionally pop up
when one or the other member is recalling their glory days. Some of
those names include local heroes and renegades while others are the
names of nationally known scholars and political figures.
One name that pops up regularly is Cathy Wilkerson. For those that
don't recognize her, Wilkerson was among the leadership of the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during its heyday. She was
the head of the Washington DC region for SDS and editor of the
organization's newspaper New Left Notes. She was also a member of
Weatherman/Weather Underground. It is because of that membership
that she was living in her father's townhouse in Manhattan on March
6, 1970 when the building exploded as a result of a wiring mistake
during the building of a bomb by fellow Weatherman members.
Wilkerson is also the author of a new memoir titled Flying Close to
the Sun. This book is less about the Weather Underground and the
bombing than it is the story of how a young person from a well-off
family from the United states develops a political conscience. It is
a personal look at how one's political growth is also part of one's
personal development; how the development of a moral standard can
drive one to accept and commit actions that seem contradictory to
that conscience. It is also a uniquely personal take on the history
of the radical movement in the United States from the early 1960s
until the mid-1970s.
When I am invited to classes to talk about the Left radical movements
of the aforementioned period, there are always those in the audience
who seem to be looking for some kind of psychological flaw in the
members of those movements. It's as if they are unwilling (or
unable) to accept that people in the United States can become
political radicals for moral and political reasons. This is
especially the case when groups like the Weather Underground are
discussed. While Wilkerson's narrative is strictly her narrative, it
relates a trajectory not very different from most middle-class and
wealthy members of U.S. radical movements. It is the story of hopes
dashed by elected leaders preaching democracy, frustration with
supposedly democratic channels that do more to prolong war and racism
than end those ills, and the growing awareness of the power of the
people. Furthermore, it is the story of the moral dissonance created
upon realizing your family's financial wellbeing depends on other
families' misery. It's a tale of frustration with the fact that
power in the United States is directly related to wealth and the
amorality of that wealth and the pursuit of ever more wealth it
requires to exist.
At times, exciting and at other times reflective, Flying Close to the
Sun is always captivating. Her descriptions of undercover police
activities against SDS show the seriousness of the government's
fear. The discussions of her internal emotional and intellectual
conflicts complement the descriptions of the political discussions
within the movement while simultaneously providing the reader with a
different understanding of how the personal does become intertwined
with the political. Like most activists of her age, Wilkerson's
radical politics were directly related to the discovery that racism
was not only entrenched in U.S. society, but essential to its
development. This realization came through her observation , then
participation in the civil rights movement that eventually ended
legal apartheid in the country. In the minds of many activists that
came of age around the same time as Wilkerson, there was nothing that
white skinned people could do that would be enough to end racism's
bloody and terrible legacy.
While this perception is crucial to understanding the nature of the
U.S. economy and its accompanying governmental policies, the
guilt-driven desperation this analysis often brought was part of what
fueled the decision by many white activists to reject anything having
to do with that legacy. It is a decision that Wilkerson acknowledges
helped place her fellow revolutionaries in Weather outside of the
movement. It's not that many in the movement didn't agree with the
essential nature of Weather's argument that ending racism was core to
ending oppression and creating a new world, it's that they didn't
share Weather's frustrated rage that tended to go nowhere. Wilkerson
takes a look at Weather's macho posturing and examines her reasons
for going along with it despite her misgivings. She writes
critically about the results of the lack of a structure in SDS and
the resultant hierarchical relationship between the Weather
leadership and the various cadre. In addition, she examines the
nature of revolutionary violence and its validity in the long term.
There are several books out now that look at the legacy of the
Weather Underground Organization. Some are histories by outsiders
and some are memoirs (including the recently republished With the
Weatherman by Susan Stern). All of them are good reads and useful to
the serious and casual historian. In addition, they provide several
relevant insights to today's radicals regarding the pitfalls of
organizing in the belly of the beast. Wilkerson's stands out among
all of these books for its thoughtfulness, carefully worded
discussions and the fact that it is the narrative of a woman's
involvement in this most interesting period of history. For those
that don't like straight history but want to know more about this
particular period, Flying Close to the Sun might be your best bet.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment