July 17, 2009
by Joel Bocko
[On Saturday, July 18 at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH, The
Weather Underground will be screened and followed by an appearance by
Mark Rudd, a member of the group and participant in the film who will
take questions regarding himself and the documentary. This will be
part of the Maine Independent Film Festival at the same location,
which will be written about on this site tonight. The event itself
will also be analyzed in a follow-up piece on The Weather
Underground, to appear on Sunday. In the mean time, here is a piece
written for my blog as part of a political movie series. The content
has been moderately revised.]
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
-Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"
"We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America.
We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your
mother's nightmare."
-"J.J.", member of the Weather Underground, as relayed in The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the
same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim's
stomach. Wild!"
-Bernardine Dohrn, member of Weather Underground, wife of Bill Ayers,
on the Charles Manson murders
"They knew they were crazy...Terry [Robbins] and Billy [Ayers] had
this Butch Cassidy and Sundance attitude-they were blessed, they were
hexed, they would die young, they would live forever, and at their
most triumphant moment they would look over their shoulders, as Butch
and Sundance looked back at their implacable pursuers, and say more
in admiration than in dread, 'Who are those guys?' I believe they
thought they looked cute, and that everybody would know it was
basically a joke. The next minute, they were lost in it and couldn't get out."
-Carl Oglesby
"You don't need a proctologist to know who the assholes are."
-Popular saying amongst Students for a Democratic Society
The Weather Underground, the only domestic terrorist group to take
its name from a Top 5 hit on the Billboard charts, became - briefly -
a household name again during the 2008 election (thanks to Bill
Ayers, once a member of the defunct left-wing cadre, now a Chicago
education reformer who has crossed paths with Barack Obama). The
Weather Underground, an excellent 2002 documentary, is a decent
starting point for anyone curious about the group; though somewhat
sympathetic to the radicals (you won't find that Manson quote
anywhere in the film) the upshot is that it solicits interviews from
many of the Weather big shots. This offers a look into the group and
its history which veers from funny to scary to pathetic, but is never
less than fascinating.
Indeed, the possibilities for compelling stories in this material are
endless. The film begins by thrusting us into the midst of
late-sixties tumult. The Vietnam War has been raging for years, the
nonviolent civil rights movement has given way to black militancy,
and the student Left - at the height of its power - splits into
different factions. One of the most notorious is the Weathermen, and
at first they seem to be something of a joke, striking the
Marxist-Leninist pose half-ironically as if they can't quite convince
themselves that privileged white students are somehow equivalent to
Vietnamese guerrillas. They declare a desire to "bring the war home"
but while Asian hamlets are being napalmed, they hold orgies in order
to "smash monogamy" and destroy any last semblance of bourgeois conservatism.
At what point does the self-indulgent revolutionary play-acting
become real? The exact turning point is hard to determine, but by
early 1970 at least one faction of the Weathermen was building bombs
with the intention of killing people. A crossed wire prevented what
would have been the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil (the bomb,
studded with nails, was intended for a dance at Fort Dix) and the
Greenwich Village townhouse went up in smoke, along with three
Weatherpeople. As former SDS president Todd Gitlin (who also appears
in the film, comparing the WU to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao) mercilessly
puts it in his book: "The best to be said for the Weathermen is that
for all their rants and bombs, in eleven years underground they
killed nobody but themselves."
It was actually after the townhouse explosion that the group
officially went underground, declaring that they would go out of
their way to destroy only property, not people, from now on.
Throughout the early seventies they planted bombs, including in the
Capitol and the Pentagon, sent out manifestos, and even sprang
Timothy Leary from prison. In 1976 they showed up in an Emile de
Antonio-Haskell Wexler film, Underground, which is depressing to
watch now. With the camera shooting the back of their head, they
drone monotonously about how the revolution is closer than ever,
sounding bored with their own ideas. One by one, they re-emerged into
a changed world, and the footage of Bernardine Dohrn emerging in
1980, shot on video with everyone dressed in early 80s fashion, has
the shocking quality of Rip Van Winkle.
This vibe was cultivated in the excellent 1988 Sidney Lumet film
Running on Empty, about a family that is still in hiding 20 years
after a botched bombing left a man blind. Though the movie ups the
ante on the violence its protagonists had committed, it also portrays
them as liberal humanists and loving parents. What's missing is the
obvious fanaticism of the Weather Underground, their love of abstract
theories and militant slogans and revolutionary stardom. Also missing
is the cold, almost zombielike trance they eventually slumped into,
evidenced in Underground...it's hard to shake the impression that if
most of these radicals had ever attained power they wouldn't have
been planting flowers and humanizing communities but rather sending
their enemies into gulags or re-education camps (or worse). But that
may give them too much credit; as they swing from one emotional
extreme to another, they hardly seem to know where the hell they're
headed. One Black Panther, regarding their buffoonish random violence
with disbelief, berates their organization as "Custeristic."
All this makes for a great story, with swings from romantic
revolutionary fervor to choking paranoia to that cold, empty morning
when unemployed college graduates realize that a decade has passed
them by and they are sitting on a park bench, pretending to be
revolutionaries and getting absolutely nothing done. There's
something humorous in this realization and at times The Weather
Underground suggests a sublime black, and bleak, comedy. Sometimes
the humor is broad parody - when one Weatherwoman whines about
cutting her hair after her comrades had just blown themselves up in a
botched bombing, you can't believe your ears. At other times we
approaches sharp satire - some of the slogans have to be heard to be
believed and the image of wimpy white college students psyching
themselves up to be street fighters is priceless. And occasionally
the humor has a poignant edge (Mark Rudd emerges from hiding and his
father says, "he's 30 now, too old to be a revolutionary.")
There was always an incredible tension in the countercultural left,
exacerbated in the Weather Underground, between the sense of personal
liberation and political duty. To what extent was the revolution a
pose, a game that a bunch of privileged romantics were playing until
the rules evaporated and as Oglesby says, "they couldn't get out"?
The film does a good job showing the serious context of the times,
including the shocking brutality of Vietnam, and the crippling sense
of shame that one's own country was responsible for this brutality;
also the violence unleashed on black Americans, and the guilt of
white middle-class kids who realized that they could never, ever
experience the same share of desperation. But, scored as it is with
Aphex Twin electronica, The Weather Underground doesn't quite capture
the joyousness of that time, of what it must have been like to be
young and feel that the world was transforming around you,
crystallized in rock 'n' roll and a youth culture which made the
transition from teenage rebellion to political revolution seem like a
natural progression. Many of the Weathermen saw themselves as rock
stars, and the film touches on this when Todd Gitlin notes the Bonnie
and Clyde vibe that some of the revolutionaries cultivated.
As a result, intoxicating experiments with drugs and sex were all
wound up with street violence and the romance of the doomed outlaw.
There's a mystical aspect to all of this - as ludicrous as it sounds,
the recollection of a car barreling down a highway while tripping
radicals conducted an orgy within is oddly captivating. One can see
how impossible it may have been to separate the fun from the serious,
the excitement from the responsibility - there's the sense that the
radicals themselves were never really sure where one stopped and the
other began. An antecedent to their confusion is Godard's great La
Chinoise, a vibrant piece of Pop Art in which the Mao-spouting
student revolutionaries play-act at revolution and then seem to
regard their own violent actions with disbelief. Revolution as
performance art, or vice-versa, I suppose, but the charm ends where
the damage begins.
Had another bomb detonated at the wrong time, had someone not
received the message to evacuate a building, there could easily have
been more victims of Weather violence. And meanwhile, what did their
bombing achieve? If anything it furthered the dissolution of a viable
antiwar movement, encouraged the government to crack down on the
Left, and soured public opinion against "those radicals." Some of the
Weather veterans realize this, and their recollections drip with
regret. Mark Rudd, now a math teacher at a community college, admits
that he feels more confused than anything else when looking back on
those years. He's ashamed that he succumbed to violence, but
remembers the rage that drove him and the knowledge that something
terrible was going on in the world, and acknowledges that he still
doesn't know what to do with that.
Ayers, Dohrn, and most of the others come off as unregretful. Some of
them have gone on to professional success in academic circles, and
still spout leftist rhetoric while leading comfortable bourgeois
lives. Others speak nostalgically of the past and seem to regard it
as a big fun adventure. Probably the most likable interviewee is
Brian Flanagan, a New York City bar owner who seems remarkably unlike
the typical Ayers-type aging leftie, and more like the working-class
guys that the Weather Underground initially sought support from.
Flanagan acknowledges that "the war made us crazy" and regretfully
speaks of how one can do terrible things when one thinks one is in
the right. When asked why he left the organization, he shrugs and
says "it wasn't fun anymore" and that he missed his girlfriend. After
all the grandiose glorification, the honesty is refreshing.
Brian Flanagan is also present in one of the many surreal passages in
the film: a clip from his appearance on "Jeopardy." To these bizarre
mixtures of pop culture, outsider politics, and political reality,
one can now add the cast of "Saturday Night Live" dancing with
Eskimos and a man in a giant moose costume while the vice
presidential nominee raises the roof to shouts of, "You say Obama, I
say Ayers! Obama! Ayers! Obama! Ayers!"
It's a crazy world we live in...
--
IN ADDITION: I'd just like to point you to this fascinating article
from Chicago Magazine.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/December-2006/Sudden-Impact/index.php?cp=1&si=0#artanc
It's about a physical altercation between Flanagan and a Chicago
lawyer during the Days of Rage which left the lawyer crippled for
life and Flanagan charged with attempted murder (he was acquitted).
.
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