---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 16:15:15 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Critical review of Weather Underground memoir
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Subject: Critical review of Weather Underground memoir
[This extraordinary review of Bill Ayers's FUGITIVE
DAYS (Beacon) by Cathy Wilkerson appeared in the
December 2001 issue of Z. They haven't put it on their
website yet. I felt it was important to share it
widely, in response to recent attempts to recast the
Weather Underground experience as a myth of movement
glory. I think most survivors of the period would agree
that these reinterpretations come from bad historical
memory, bad political sense, and/or a fetish for
violence. To the extent that these features recur in
present-day left movements, any sugarcoating of the
Weather fiasco could have painful consequences. - Ethan
Young]
As a past member of the Weather Underground
Organization I found Bill Ayers' book Fugitive Days
to be quite upsetting. When September 11 happened,
however, I felt even more urgently the responsibility
to weigh in. it was Ayers's inaccurate and unforgivable
trivialization of our experience with political
violence that I was trying to write about. For me,
political violence includes the Gulf War, the U.S.
attack on the Sudan, ethnic cleansing, world wars,
civil wars, and national liberation - all of it. The
decision to commit acts which intentionally or
peripherally by chance injure or kill human beings,
their cultures, and their environment never happens
without lasting repercussions to those who do it, to
the victims, and to the world that cradles these
individuals. Unfortunately, political violence also has
a partner, economic violence, which inevitably or by
chance results in the death and injury of human beings,
their cultures and environments.
I was an organizer for the Students for a Democratic
Society, and then a member of the Weather Underground
Organization, which carried out a series of small,
symbolic bombings of government and corporate buildings
in the 1970s to protest U.S. policy of attacks on black
activists in this country and aggression in Vietnam. As
such I have grappled with these questions very
personally. I have struggled ever since to sort out
what parts of it I think contributed positively to
progress and what parts were damaging to others and to
the struggle for justice and peace. While those of us
in Weatherpeople never killed anyone but ourselves, we
made the choice - in the face of mounting violence
against the black movement and the Vietnamese - to use
lethal weaponry, which could have killed others, had we
been unlucky. Many of us - certainly everyone in
leadership - argued very convincingly for far more
drastic steps than symbolic attacks at one point or
another.
As I mourn those who died recently in the World Trade
Center attack, I mourn daily the three brave and
honorable friends who died a few feet away from me in
an accidental explosion of dynamite, and many others
who died during that struggle, in Vietnam and here, I
take none of it lightly. In that spirit I offer this
review.
Fugitive Days is a cynical, superficial romp through
struggles waged in the 1960s and 1970s to change our
country's unjust and inequitable institutions. Not that
Ayers doesn't contribute genuine passion: he
convincingly portrays outrage against the war in
Vietnam, at the killing of millions of Vietnamese and
tens of thousands of U.S. GIs. But he writes most
effectively about his explorations of sex, drugs, and
his participation in alienated, boyish pranks. While
this approach captures a certain irreverent playfulness
of the era, he maintains it even through his discussion
of the armed actions of the Weather Underground.
Nowhere in the book does he seek to name, let alone
discuss, any deep questions of goals, strategy, or
morality that faced organizers of that era, many of
which still face young people who are working for peace
and justice in the world today. Instead, he relates
only pieces of potentially interesting stories about
people who cared about peace and about justice, making
these struggles seem like a glorious carnival. At the
beginning of the book Ayers notes that when he moved to
Cleveland to join ERAP (a community organizing project)
for the summer, "the poverty of the neighborhood hit
(him) at first like a cruel blow" because he "knew
nothing of the smell of hardship, the taste of want,
the enveloping feel of need." Sounds poetic and if it
had been followed by some real exploration of poverty
and his own questions about how this experience
challenged his view of his own future, I would be
interested. Instead, it is followed by the "falling in
love" experience of those few months, one of dozens
relayed with rapid-fire regularity throughout the book.
The ERAP projects were honest attempts by many people,
both students (many of whom came from working class or
old left families) and community members, to work
together in multiracial coalitions to affect change.
The projects did change most people in both groups by
providing each with a deeper understanding of the
other, and by showing how much could be accomplished
with the mix of experience and skills. While Ayers
tells some interesting stories about participants, he
concludes only that he "mostly loved everything (he)
was seeing, and especially all that I was learning."
He wasn't going to linger long enough to carry any pain
or outrage with him. All of this would only reflect on
Ayers as a privileged movement gadfly if he didn't so
often claim to speak, despite a disclaimer at the start
of the book, for all of us who were also present, as if
everyone around him experienced these events with the
same cavalier enjoyment. While most people in the
movement shared a feeling of intense love and hope, and
most of us sighed in relief for the increased freedoms
we carved bit by bit from the rock of 1950s conformity,
most of us spent time, resources, and emotion on
surviving the bumps and punches of the daily struggle
to survive, sometimes in extreme poverty; we were
insulted and attacked in response to our political
work, sometimes painfully by our own families; and we
contended frequently with those who went under, often
with drugs or alcohol, from the strain, from despair or
from poverty and tried to figure out how to bring them
back. Reflections about these kinds of experiences are
completely missing.
The movements of the 1960s had so many agendas -
support for civil rights, black liberation, Puerto
Rican independence, Chicano and Native American self
determination, women's liberation, new economic
arrangements, cultural freedom, peace in Vietnam,
Vietnamese self-determination - to name just a few,
that they interwove in complex ways. During the mid and
late 1960s women came both to the arts scene and the
movement, and later the hippie culture, to take
advantage of new intellectual opportunities, to explore
and validate our own sexuality and to stumble, fall,
and argue our way into new roles in relationships,
families, and work. But these steps were unevenly
taken, and in many instances, the acceptance of freedom
and experimentation became yet another license for
exploitation and oppression. Thirty years later, many
people have tried to sort these experiences out.
Yet Ayers relates his relentless sexual encounters
without the slightest trace of awareness that some of
these encounters might not have been so positive for
the woman. Ayers was a white man with access to
tremendous resources who aspired to leadership. He
indicates no awareness that he might have used his
privileges to provoke women to give him access to a
vulnerability that he was unable to honor. Certainly,
when he asserted his leadership quite forcefully, and
when access to leadership was in part defined by
"coolness" - coolness being defined by a small
clique, with increasingly tight control over
information - the pressure for women to consent was
enormous. My complaint here is not primarily with his
behavior at the time, when we were all experimenting
with values and at the same time coping with the
escalating violence of the government, with the result
that our choices were not always well reasoned out, but
with Ayers's absolute lack of reflection since then,
especially in the face of numerous attempts by women to
explain - in conferences, writing and conversations -
what it was like is mystifying.
Most importantly, I think it is dangerous that a young
person today could read this book and never realize
that Ayers was one of the architects of much of the
insanity he blames on others. His account mysteriously
leaps from the Chicago Democratic Convention in August
1968 to June 1969. During that period Ayers was the
leader of the Michigan region, and then of the Detroit
collective, which was one of the earliest formations of
what became the "Weatherman faction." He later joined
the leadership collective of the Weather Underground.
During that time his infatuation with street fighting
grew and he developed a language of confrontational
militancy that became more and more extreme over the
year. Yet he never mentions these speeches. I believe
that he never took this language seriously himself, but
rather saw it as a way to act tough - the way to
recruit "working class youth." But he never takes
responsibility for the fact that many people, most of
us, did not realize that he only meant it as talk. In
those days of murderous assaults on young black leaders
and Vietnamese civilians, we were indeed desperate. A
call to throw care to the wind, for white people to
sacrifice, to bring the war home resounded with
hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Many of us did
not understand what this strategy meant in practice,
especially the incoherent "Days of Rage." But the
national leadership seemed to be saying that they did,
and I, for one, admired the courage of those who were
willing to step forward to leadership at a time when
the task of responding to the apparent collapse of
democracy seemed terrifying and absolute.
Ayers recounts believably that, after the explosion in
the Greenwich Village townhouse, differences existed
among those in leadership between those who wanted to
build a fighting force to do material damage and those
who wanted to carry out occasional, symbolic, armed
propaganda. To most Weather activists, however, in the
year-long buildup to those days of their leadership
meeting, none of those cracks were evident. By the
summer of 1969, the romanticized violence was in full
force. It was very easy for all of us to confuse a
romanticizing of violence with increased militancy.
Most people were uneasy with the escalating
glorification of street fighting, which mostly seemed
terrifying, not fun. Most were puzzled by the strategy
of exhibiting random toughness as a way to recruit
young people. But, since no one knew how else to up the
ante to challenge a government that seemed bent on the
total destruction of Vietnam and of black leadership
and their supporters in this country, many of us
committed ourselves to trying to "Bring the War
Home." Then we endured long criticism sessions where
our courage, intelligence, and commitment were
challenged, often with the unfamiliar but powerful
language of psychotherapy, dampened further our
critical thinking.
Within Weatherman, most of us wanted to escalate at
that point. Many national liberation movements were
struggling around the world. Some, like Cuba and China,
had already been victorious. Armed struggle seemed to a
great many like a reasonable possibility to consider.
Thousands of young people were willing to consider
tremendous personal sacrifices, regardless of our
fears. Many Weather supporters, however, managed to
listen to their own inner feelings and finally reject
the spiral of self-destructive behavior that seemed to
be accompanying this direction. Others could not summon
up the necessary macho and were mustered out or took
themselves out, feeling like complete failures. Still
others stayed involved, despite warning signs that the
means we were using to achieve freedom were far from
fair or equal. The outrage at what was happening around
us numbed us to the warning signs. The process by which
the Weather leaders changed from the language of the
famous Manson speech glorifying violence in January
1970 to the moderation described in Ayers's book in
early March was invisible to almost all Weather
members. Certainly, the assumption of most was that a
plan to build a clandestine, fighting force was full
steam ahead. If, as Ayers says, things were different
in the West, most participants and supporters in the
East and the Midwest did not know this. Other positions
were argued, but they were crushed under the weight of
our urgency to be heard, some how, some way.
At 17, Terry Robbins went to Cleveland ERAP the summer
after his freshman year at Kenyon College because he
was drawn to the community organizing model. Ayers, two
years older than Robbins, moved in as one of his
roommates for that summer. Robbins came to idolize him.
During the next few years - especially during the year
that is missing from Ayers's book - Robbins and Ayers
continued to get closer, appearing inseparable at most
SDS conventions and meetings. Robbins and Ayers worked
together as leadership in the Michigan-Ohio region of
SDS. Robbins was a high school honor student, a year
ahead of himself in the Long Island public school
system. He had grown up using his quick intelligence to
win respect. As he and Ayers got closer they competed
about everything, including the ability to come up with
quick one-liners, quirky names, sexual conquests,
street fighting ability, and eventually the ability to
talk tough. In most areas, Ayers won hands down, but in
intensity, Robbins had the definite edge. But while
Ayers, according to what he writes, knew that his
language, which increasingly glorified violence, was
just show, Robbins was one of those who really believed
all of it. He tried to act it out, being abusive to his
girlfriend and trying to psych himself up to love
violence. Robbins was far from alone in this behavior,
but was certainly one of the most intense.
Robbins worked hard to organize campuses throughout the
Ohio region where he had remained after leaving the
Cleveland project, and continued to be fundamentally
motivated by the love for humanity that directed him
initially toward the movement. For Ayers to claim that
all of the craziness of late 1969 and early 1970 just
sort of happened, that his "CW" character (who was
not me despite the uncanny similarity of initials) and
Robbins were primarily responsible for the disastrous
bombing at the Greenwich Village townhouse, takes
himself completely out of the process.
For those of us who were there, the question of
individual accountability matters. The most interesting
and important question about this period to the broader
audience, however, is how world and national events,
the FBI's Cointelpro program, and committed activists
interacted in pressure cooker conditions. What
responsibility and accountability fall to political
leadership - and "followership"? What are the
strengths and weaknesses of a political strategy, which
employs violence of any sort? What is the nature and
value of democracy within political organizations, and
to what extent does it reflect the future of any social
institutions led by such organizations? Could we have
been more effective in defending young black activists
under attack? These are only a few of a host of
fascinating and important questions raised by our
experiences. Why write about this period and not engage
any of them? It cannot bring honor to those who died,
nor can it realistically help those who languish in
prison under conditions that often approach torture,
despite upwards of 25 years and more that most have
already served. All of us who were active in the 19960s
cared deeply about the injustices promulgated by our
government. Like Ayers, almost all of us have continued
to work for social change in one way or another. At
times, Ayers writes eloquently about his past and
present efforts to speak up against the greed and
brutality of the political and economic system we live
under. He was an effective and forceful leader and many
people joined, left, or participated in activities of
the time in part because of his leadership. If we think
Robert McNamara and others should be accountable, then
we, too, need to hold ourselves accountable and be able
to discuss the mistakes we made along with the
strengths of our past. Ayers did not, as the book
suggests, float through the days in a haze of pot,
semen, and good conversation. He was a powerful,
articulate white male with a zany appreciation of
life's twists and turns. He also fought for leadership,
had opinions at least strong enough to argue them to
others, and to act on them himself. Artists can say
they are accountable only to their art. But people who
presume to lead, to represent others, are accountable
for the effects of those actions. How we sort all that
out is what's interesting and what might help another
generation of activists. A razzle-dazzle account of how
cool someone thinks they have been is not.
--------
Cathy Wilkerson was an organizer for Students for a
Democratic Society during the 1960s and a member of the
Weather Underground Organization during the 1970s. She
survived an accidental explosion of dynamite in her
father's Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 in which
three WUO members died. She has recently been a teacher
and writer.
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