February 23, 2002

The Baby and the Bathwater

I've received a great deal of feedback on my post in response to the SF Bay Guardian article on the SLA and 60s radicalism. Thanks for all the email: I'm still working through it, but it may be awhile before I get to it all.

The letters fall into two broad categories: (a) succinct expressions of approval (e.g., "Nice! Laughing my ass off...") and (b) criticism that I didn't give enough credit to all the wonderful things accomplished by the 60s generation, such as the civil rights movement. (By the way, not one correspondent attempted to defend J.H. Tompkins's article, which is a mercy.) Of course, I don't denounce everything that happened in the 60s. And allow me to go on the record as being in favor of civil rights. But it seems to me that would-be defenders of the 60s violent revolutionary tradition are fooling themselves when they try to hitch it to things like civil rights. The SLA may have seen themselves in the forefront of a struggle against racism, but that doesn't mean we have to. And in fact, no one would mistake their crazy words and despicable deeds as having anything to do with what most people understand as "civil rights." Their words and deeds don't have much to do with anything, except perhaps nihilism, the glorification of violence for its own sake, and psychopathology.

This is acknowledged by practically everyone, even, in a somewhat confused and reluctant way, by J.H. Tompkins. The defense of violent 60s radicalism, in consideration of the manifestly indefensible SLA, seems to rest on the idea that the SLA is somehow a different sort of animal, a peripheral aberration, the "bad terrorists" among a good, if occasionally misguided, breed. One correspondent, echoing Tompkins, urged that we not "throw the baby out with the bathwater."

I have thought about it a lot, and I find it difficult to distinguish baby from bathwater in this situation. The Symbionese Liberation Army, the Manson Family, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the Red Brigades, the Weatherman/Weather Underground: where's the "baby" here? Despite superficial "stylistic" distinguishing marks, they have a great deal in common, and it outweighs the differences. They were all in the grips of the same kind of idiotic revolutionary-chiliastic ideological delusion, all believed in an imminent world-transforming hip apocalypse which justified the senseless slaughter of innocent "pigs" like Myrna Opsahl. (Some individual members may have been true believers while others were merely opportunistic common criminals mouthing the same platitudes-- it comes to the same thing.) Their rhetoric is largely indistinguishable; their methods were complementary if not always identical; and the "pigs" they killed are just as dead. It makes no sense to condemn the SLA while singing the praises of the Weather Underground. They are merely different flavors of the same poisonous substance.

Nowadays, of course, no one defends the Manson Family, and few defend the SLA. Back then, however, the hipsters of the revolution tended to stick up for one another. Most notoriously, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dorhn, speaking at a Weatherman "War Council," urged her comrades to "get into armed struggle" by adducing the example of the Manson murder of Sharon Tate:

Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!

Even among those of the New Left who didn't participate directly in the violence, there seems to have been a remarkable complacency, tolerance, and even enthusiasm for those who did. How is it that such insanity flourished among so many educated, privileged people? It's a difficult question. In order to understand "what it was like" in the 60s, we are told, "you had to be there." I wasn't "there" (or rather, I was a small child) but I'll hazard a guess. Part of it has to do with the fact that these people were all on drugs. Weren't they, practically all the time? I'm sure there were other factors, but it's hard to avoid that one.

Those who want to defend "the legacy" don't do their case any favors by trying to excuse some terrorists at the expense of others, or by uttering platitudes about "you had to be there" and violence being "in the air." In fact, speaking as one who wasn't "there" to breathe in this strangely exculpatory miasma, the more I read about "the movement" the less defensible, the less comprehensible it seems. Mercifully, there are now more of "us" than there are of "them." Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground leader whose bombing of the Pentagon was perpetrated 30 years before Osama bin Laden's, boasts at the end of his memoir that he is "guilty as Hell and free as a bird-- is this a great country or what?" It is indeed a great country, but Ayers and his apologists are a disgrace. I'm flabbergasted when people say what fine fellows the Weather Underground were; it quite literally makes me ill. And no, the words "Viet," "Nam," and "Kissinger" will not change my mind on this subject.

Anyway, here's a good page of links and resources on the Soliah case. I appreciate the feedback, even though some of you are horrifyingly wrong. Keep 'em coming.

Posted by Dr. Frank at February 23, 2002 06:09 PM | TrackBack