The Weatherman Temptation
By Jon Wiener
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=788
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Eat the Document
by Dana Spiotta
Scribner, 2006 291 pp $24
American Woman
by Susan Choi
HarperCollins Publishers, 2003
369 pp $24.95
The Darling
by Russell Banks
HarperCollins Publishers, 2004
392 pp $25.95
The Company You Keep
by Neil Gordon
Viking, 2003 406 pp $25.95
THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD nomination in October for Eat the Document, a novel about the Weather Underground by Dana Spiotta, came at a time when several other strong novels addressed similar themes. Russell Banks’s The Darling, Susan Choi’s American Woman, and Neil Gordon’s The Company You Keep, alongside Eat the Document, suggest a renewed interest in imagining what we might call “the Weatherman temptation.” It arises when young activists are drawn toward violent tactics, out of despair for democracy—especially in the early seventies, when the Vietnam War seemed endless—and maybe again today, when the Iraq War and the war on terror also seem endless.
For anyone who has ever tried to change a government policy through political organizing and political action, it’s all too easy to understand the Weatherman temptation. It goes like this: the issues are crystal clear to us, but change seems impossible. The people in power are causing immense destruction, but the system seems impervious to challenge. The government is supposed to be democratic, but the American people are so distracted by the media or blinded by ideology or bought off by consumerism that they will never wake up.
But a few of us see what’s going on. We know that the hour is getting late, that too many people have died, and that it’s time to get serious—no more fun and games. Although we are few, we are not powerless. Because we are white and privileged, we can strike back in the heart of the empire. And by the strategic use of targeted violence, we can make sure our actions are not ignored. Our violence will create images that will be irresistible to the media, and we will thereby turn the ideological weapons of the powerful against them. We will reveal the system’s vulnerability. We will bring a bit of fear to the hearts of the rulers. We will show them they will pay a price for their crimes.
The oppressed and the excluded will see the same thing; we will show them that they are not alone, and not as powerless as they have been told they are. And although we are few within the United States, we act on the global stage, where “we” are many; we act in solidarity with the great majority of the world’s suffering people. Those who are queasy about violent tactics need to understand that our violence is mostly symbolic; it is nothing compared to the daily mass murder practiced by those in power. Therefore our cause is just, and our actions are necessary: this was the Weatherman temptation in the early seventies.
Its appeal today was articulated recently by the producer of the award-winning 2003 documentary The Weather Underground. Carrie Lozano told me, “we were inspired by the commitment of the Weather Underground and by their ability to put their lives on the line for what they believed in.” She was twenty-five when she started making the film, thirty when she finished it. No doubt others find the same features even more attractive.
But of course the Weatherman failed. Its members never accomplished much, beyond getting a lot of media attention and accidentally killing three of their own people (Ted Gold, Terry Robins, and Diana Oughton) in 1970 when a bomb they were making in a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded prematurely.
THE PROTAGONISTS in Dana Spiotta’s novel go underground and adopt new identities after a bombing plot goes bad—in her story, an innocent bystander was killed—and their movement collapses. The book describes the methodology of creating a new identity and explores the emotional cost of living with it. Mary, now Louise, has established a new life in suburbia. Deprived of her past, her life is shot through with loneliness and a feeling of defeat; she dreams of turning herself in.
What makes the book so fascinating is the way Spiotta imagines the Weatherman temptation not just from the perspective of today’s defeated survivors but also through the eyes of today’s adolescents. Mary’s fifteen-year-old slacker son, Jason, finds her reluctance to talk about her childhood and her parents “creepy”—and then begins to seek out the truth about her secret past. Before he finds out who his mother really is, he writes a paper for school on Alger Hiss, and wonders why Hiss never admitted spying. He asks her, “if something is worth doing, shouldn’t you admit doing it? Shouldn’t you take responsibility for your actions?” Maybe you wouldn’t, he speculates, if you regretted it—or if you were a coward. She is devastated.
At the climax of the book, Jason writes in his journal, “My mother is not only, not merely, my mother. She’s a revolutionary. She’s a fugitive. She’s a liar. She’s a killer.”
He confronts her, and she explains her side of the story, that “you can’t look at what we did in a vacuum. That immoral war was going on and on . . . . It doesn’t only matter if we succeeded . . . it matters what our intentions were. . . . There had been years of peaceful efforts,” and still the war continued. But Weatherman “was a huge miscalculation,” she concedes. “A huge mistake.”
Jason, however, is thinking about something else: “I just can’t believe you lied to me all these years about who you are.” To this she has a powerful response: “The last thing I would ever want is for you to have to keep my secret.” Now Jason softens: “At least you did something. What a world that must have been where ordinary people actually did things.” So in the end he gets it—he understands the Weatherman temptation.
In a parallel story, her old comrade and boyfriend from movement days, Bobby, now Nash, lives in another city, “off the grid”—he has no driver’s license, no credit cards, no identifying documents—and runs a left-wing bookstore called Prairie Fire—the name of a 1974 Weather Underground manifesto. Young anticorporate activists meet in his store to plan protests, and one of them begins to discover Nash’s true identity.
When Nash is about to be outed, he goes back over the bombing that went bad: “I knew someone was going to end up dead,” he says. “And I was still willing to do it. And not because I really believed we would change anything for the better. . . . I needed to prove to myself I could go all the way.” It’s hard to imagine a more devastating critique of the Weatherman temptation.
EAT THE DOCUMENT is set more or less in the present, while American Woman, by Susan Choi, takes place mostly in 1974. The book re-imagines the events that followed the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and her rebirth as Tania, the guerrilla fighter with an automatic rifle photographed by a surveillance camera during a bank robbery. Patty/Tania spent a year underground before being arrested and sentenced to seven years. During that “lost year,” she was aided by Wendy Yoshimura—here, Jenny, a twenty-five-year-old Japanese American woman who, at the start of the book, adopted a new identity after a bombing went bad.
Jenny is living a lonely life in upstate New York, contemplating the failure of her movement. She agrees to act as den mother to a trio of SLA-style fugitives holed up in a remote farmhouse—Juan, the angry Maoist who has taken up the gun; Yvonne, his submissive girlfriend; and Pauline, the heiress turned revolutionary. Juan plans a robbery to break their inertia, and of course it goes bad; Jenny takes off with Pauline, driving west in a glorious version of On the Road, and the trip draws the two of them together. In the end they are arrested, and Pauline sells out Jenny.
Jenny’s keen consciousness provides the book’s center. She has nothing but contempt for Juan, the macho ideologue of violence, but the book is not a critique of the Weatherman temptation—it’s about Jenny and her relationship with Pauline, and how that relationship changes in the white-hot political atmosphere of the era.
Jenny comes to understand what she did wrong. “She’d believed high intentions gave her the right to use violence. . . . But it wasn’t intentions, however lofty or petty, that mattered, but how things turned out.” The bombings did nothing to end the war; and it was only good luck that had kept her from becoming a killer. “Bombing a building that ‘ought’ to be empty was not so different in type, if very different in scale, from bombing a village that ‘ought’ to house only the enemy and not any civilians.”
At the end, closer to the present, “she felt it was worse now that there was no war to focus protest and discussion, no palpably identifiable evil to point fingers at. It was just the same fatal world as always, with its staggering inequalities, which she realized now weren’t exceptions to be excised but the rules of the game. . . . She felt more powerless now than she ever did in the years of the war.” The passage of time has left the Weatherman temptation with nothing to offer her, but she has no other politics to replace it.
RUSSELL BANK'S The Darling also centers on a woman who went underground because of her Weatherman affiliations. Hannah was indicted in Chicago in 1969 for the Weather Underground’s Days of Rage, and was “a fugitive still at large,” as the New York Times described her in her fictional father’s obituary—he was a Dr. Spock-type doctor and antiwar activist who was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and wrote for the Nation. The drama of the book begins in 1975, when she helps the aspiring African revolutionary Charles Taylor escape from prison in Massachusetts and flee to Africa. She does it to put into practice her old Weatherman belief in dramatic action to bring justice to the oppressed, seeing Taylor as an African Fidel Castro in the making. Then she herself flees underground life for Liberia, where most of the book takes place, and where she establishes a new life as the wife of a government minister and devotes herself to chimp rescue. But when Taylor’s revolution comes to Liberia, it is brutal: her husband is “chopped down and killed” in front of her and their children. They become crazed child soldiers who murder freely. She flees back to the United States, landing on September 10, 2001.
Banks’s portrait of the Weather Underground woman fugitive is harsher than Spiotta’s or Choi’s: his Hannah describes herself as “the girl who, in the interest of justice and equality for all people everywhere, was perfectly willing to break as many laws as seemed necessary. The girl who found moral clarity in the phrase ‘by any means necessary.’” But she was a failure as a terrorist: her underground cell was “incompetent and timid and more or less driven by fantasy,” and so her life was “sad. Pathetic.” Behind her “mask of idealism” Banks sees “the face of the privileged, angry kid who, in the name of peace, justice, and racial harmony, has declared war against the state, the university, and, before long, her parents’ entire generation.” Thus Banks gives us terrorism as Oedipal rebellion, the leading cliché about the sources of Weatherman temptation.
NEIL GORDON'S The Company You Keep is set mostly in 1996 and tells the story of Jason, a Weather Underground fugitive—another bombing gone bad—who’s been outed after living for twenty years with a different identity, and who is now on the run, seeking help from old comrades.
While Eat the Document imagines what the Weathermen look like to teenagers today, The Company You Keep imagines a father today trying to explain to his seventeen-year-old daughter, Isabel, why he became a Weatherman. The book is a series of long e-mails sent to Isabel by Jason and several of his former comrades, “a bunch of balding ex-hippies,” trying to persuade her to testify in a parole hearing to help win release for a member of their group. The book presents a vivid kaleidoscopic debate, taking up the arguments for and against the Weatherman temptation.
Jason tells Isabel that, back in the sixties, “the bigger the opposition grew, you know what? This odd thing happened: the war didn’t get any smaller, it got bigger. . . . And the government didn’t get more responsive but more oppressive.” And then “a group of people in SDS start growing, shall we say, impatient.” That’s one of the most efficient explanations of the Weatherman temptation anywhere.
The leading critic of Weatherman in the book is Rebecca, now a Republican, who considers its members deluded egomaniacs. “Why they bothered with bombs is a mystery,” she says, “when they could probably have ended the war in Vietnam by force of character alone. Peer-pressure Lyndon Johnson into dropping acid. Browbeat McNamara into a criticism-self-criticism session. . . . They’d have probably given in just to shut them up. God knows I did.” Close to the end of the book, Jason gives his final argument: “it was the best dream we ever had. That these motherfuckers could be made to stop.” But he also concedes that “we fucked it all up, killed the antiwar movement, destroyed the New Left.” It’s the only one of these books to give voice to that crucial argument.
Jason concludes that “no one’s right, everyone’s wrong.” And here the title of the book finally appears: “The question is, do you want to keep company with the folk who are wrong my way, or the folk who are wrong their way?” With the question posed in those terms, when the plot requires that a character decide whether to turn in a Weather Underground fugitive or help him escape, the answer is easy. In real life, of course, there were other political choices about whose company to keep; the great majority on the left opposed both the war and the Weathermen.
In the book’s final scene, the abandonment of the Weatherman temptation has left the movement veterans politically exhausted. We see the protagonist on “the other side of middle age . . . in a world that he would, from then on, only live in, never think that he could change.” Was this “giving up? Well, maybe.” Maybe it was “time to let the kids . . . plan their own revolution. . . maybe it would be their children who’d at last, at long last, do better with this rotten, corrupt world.”
These novels are full of political ideas and arguments, but none of the characters answer the Weatherman argument directly: yes, terrible things are going on, and yes “the system” seems hopeless, but real change takes a long time. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for twenty-seven years, and then apartheid was overthrown—peacefully. The slave trade existed for thousands of years; in 1787 the first abolitionist group was organized in London; it took them more than fifty years, but the British slave trade was abolished in 1838—peacefully. (Adam Hochschild tells that story in Bury the Chains.) Closer to home, the American people are indeed ignorant and distracted, but they did end the Vietnam War. They did kick Richard Nixon out of office. Segregation was declared unconstitutional. Millions of people demonstrated against the start of the Iraq War. They didn’t succeed in stopping it, but they were a lot more impressive than a bomb at the capitol would have been.
In some ways it’s surprising the Weatherman temptation doesn’t have more adherents today, given the objective conditions: the toll in Iraq is horrifying—650,000 dead, according to the authoritative Lancet study—with no real end in sight; we have an opposition party that failed to oppose the war at the outset and now seems to be failing to end it. But we don’t have young white people trying to plant bombs at the Pentagon today. Maybe that’s because they were preempted on September 11, 2001, by Osama bin Laden.
That is suggested by the fate of the only recent book that celebrates the Weathermen: it’s a memoir, written by underground survivor Bill Ayers: Fugitive Days. He famously told the New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.” His interview was published—bad luck for him—the morning of September 11, 2001. Then he wrote a letter to the Times complaining that his book was “now receiving attention in a radically changed context”—which could be used in a definition of chutzpah (his complaint recalls the old joke about the boy who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan).
The Weatherman temptation remains a perennial problem for the left, however, if only because “These things take time” is not as stirring a slogan as “Death to Amerikkka.” But the opposite of Weatherman bombing is not apathy; it’s the steady work of political argument, persuasion, and organizing. As Rebecca Solnit argues in Hope in the Dark, you have to keep trying to win people over, because you can never be sure the forces of darkness will triumph; the most impossible things sometimes happen.
