Nice story with interesting points--but the question remains, how can one
have supposedly understood that the US government is an imperialist
government and now support its wars. The only conclusion I can draw is
that Mr. Lerner never truly understood the nature of imperialism and how
the US is an imperialist country. Too bad. -ron jacobs
At 07:01 PM 3/4/02 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 16:42:49 -0800
>From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
>Subject: I was a terrorist
>
>I was a terrorist
>
><http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41899-2002Feb20.html>
>
>Where did it come from, the hatred that led pampered Americans to want to
>bring down the system in the 1960s? A surprising answer from one who was
there
>
>[Photo] The author, in ponytail, with Cree Indians in 1974. He was on a
>Weather Underground assignment supporting the Native American movement.
>(Courtesy Jonathan Lerner)
>
>By Jonathan Lerner
>Sunday, February 24, 2002; Page W24
>
>I didn't grow up hungry, seething with inherited hurt in some refugee camp
>or ghetto -- but well-fed in Chevy Chase, in a big loving family, in a
>house full of books. My grandparents were struggling immigrants, but my
>parents were solidly middle-class, and when I approached adulthood in the
>mid-'60s, all the richness of this country was there for me. I could have
>been anything.
>
>Like many children of affluence, I was horrified by racism and poverty, and
>filled with idealism. The impulse was simple and honorable: Everybody
>should have opportunities like mine. I became an activist in the civil
>rights movement, and renewed my desire to perfect the world in response to
>Vietnam. Yet by the end of that decade I had become warped enough to help
>found the Weathermen, a cult of leftist cynicism and violence. We were
>contemptuous of others, convinced we had the answers, and willing to impose
>them through violence. In other words, we were political terrorists.
>
>That's not where I thought I was heading. I started out wanting to humanize
>the world, but ended up perverting my own best instincts and dreams. I
>lied. I stole. I put innocent people in danger. The only bombs I ever
>personally built were duds, though there were capable technicians in the
>group. Among the terrorists of history, however, we must rank low in havoc
>wreaked. Our bombs were low-power, left in restrooms mostly, at places like
>the Pentagon, police stations, corporate offices. Security was lax then.
>
>We didn't pretend to do real damage with those little devices. It was
>victory to elude capture, to reveal the vulnerabilities of the institutions
>we held responsible for war, poverty in the Third World, inequalities at
>home. Our real weapon was youthful swagger, which is cheap and thrilling to
>use, and magnifies well through the media. We gloried in our violence, and
>glorified it, and in so doing, we helped to create the atmosphere in which,
>to some inhabitants of the planet, terrorism now seems like right action.
>
>Take two snapshots of my past and lay them side by side. The first, one of
>my most magical early memories, is from a children's concert, in the Hall
>of the Americas at the Organization of American States -- a part of the Pax
>Americana I would later hope to destroy. I was invited forward that day to
>pluck the strings of a harp. I can close my eyes right now and feel that
>golden sound go through me. I was a sweet little boy. But I was not a nice
>young man.
>
>The second snapshot is from one of the last public events at which the
>Weathermen appeared -- the Vietnam Moratorium of November 1969, when half a
>million people came to Washington for a protest intended to be peaceful. As
>its centerpiece event, more than 40,000 people walked single-file from
>Arlington National Cemetery to the White House. Each carried a candle and a
>placard with the name of an American who had died in the war. "Many come
>from places like Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.," an observer
>wrote, in Life magazine, "where they tell me they have never marched and do
>not belong to any political organization. Among them are older couples who
>occasionally ask for a particular name. The monitors hand them the card
>swiftly, without asking the relationship."
>
>I stood in Lafayette Square with my comrades and heckled these people for
>their earnest longing for peace. Then we Weathermen stomped off to an
>unofficial event, an attempt to trash the embassy of the U.S.-backed South
>Vietnamese government. The cops wouldn't let us near it, but we weren't
>picky: Any damage would satisfy. I pulled a length of pipe from my pocket
>as we ran, and smashed the windshield of a parked Oldsmobile. Like the
>call-and-response chant of a civil rights picket line, it was answered up
>and down the block by shattering glass.
>
>Earlier that day, I had gone with several Weathermen to the office of the
>Moratorium's organizers. We presented ourselves there -- as described in
>Life, "flat and grim in their shades and work clothes and heavy boots" --
>to extort money. We dangled, for barter, the intimation that we might
>refrain from picking a fight with the police, and mentioned the figure
>$40,000. The Moratorium leaders didn't give us any money, but we wouldn't
>have cooled it if they had. By then we did not want conciliation, at any
price.
>
>The Weathermen emerged in 1969 from a far more benign and idealistic
>leftist grass-roots movement, Students for a Democratic Society. Our
>faction's name was from a line of Bob Dylan's, appropriated as the title
>for a position paper, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the
>wind blows." To us, the wind was blowing only where we pointed -- meaning,
>in printable terms, "See things our way, or you're full of it."
>
>An earlier SDS slogan had been "Let the People Decide." Toward the end of
>that organization's life, some of us reserved the deciding for ourselves.
>"How many SDS elections did you rig?" a former Weatherman asked me, years
>later. I stole only one, but it was a crucial vote that made possible the
>Weathermen's takeover and evisceration of SDS. Along with two other SDS
>organizers who later, like me, were near the center of the Weathermen, I
>stuffed offending ballots into a brown grocery bag, and then dropped it in
>the trash.
>
>Where did I get this cynicism about political process, this lack of
>scruple, this delight in the sound of breaking glass? Certainly not at home.
>
>My parents were liberals, not radicals. Their boldest political gesture was
>attending the Lincoln Memorial concert by Marian Anderson when the
>Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the African American
>singer perform in Constitution Hall. I was respectfully aware that many in
>my grandparents' and parents' generations had been labor activists and
>communists. But among my own relatives only Great-Aunt Bessie had been
>involved at all, and we made fun of her because she insisted into old age
>that the FBI was watching her.
>
>My siblings demonstrated against racism and the war; they participated in
>the era's cultural upheavals. But they were never hellbent on violence and
>breaking the law, as I became. Instead, they went on to engaged,
>unconventional careers: a modern dancer who became a psychologist, a
>psychologist who makes films and writes songs, an acupuncturist who leads a
>jazz band. Whatever separated me from them, it wasn't in our family
background.
>
>My first political act, in 1961 when I was 13, was to join a picket line to
>integrate the McLean Gardens apartments in Northwest D.C. I went by myself
>that day. But I was inspired by some kids I knew from school who had
>already been to civil rights events. I was drawn to the cause -- and to
>them, because they espoused it, and because they were smart and cool and I
>wanted to be one of them.
>
>Over the next years, we collected canned food for black people in
>Mississippi who were boycotting white-owned businesses; we often skipped
>school to picket the White House. It felt good to be part of this thing for
>which some people were risking their lives, even if for us it was all fun.
>It felt wonderful to be part of a tight circle that was welcomed into an
>enormous movement where people referred to each other as sister and brother
>and marched to updated spirituals. It was spiritual. It was about
>connection, about healing the world.
>
>I went off to college, at Antioch in Ohio. There was an SDS chapter, but I
>never attended the meetings. SDS was then emerging from obscurity, thanks
>to the expansion of the war and the voracious draft, which put so many male
>students at risk; eventually it would boast hundreds of campus chapters, a
>network of regional offices, thousands of paid members, and hundreds of
>thousands who responded to its calls and rallied against the war. I would
>join demonstrations, add my passionate voice to the chanting. But I wasn't
>-- then or ever -- much interested in theoretical or strategic debates,
>which dominated SDS meetings. I was into art; the actions I liked best
>involved image and media, and in those days were called guerrilla theater.
>
>But Jeff Jones, my best friend, was a big radical on campus. That's not all
>we didn't have in common. He was a sunny, blond surfer from L.A. who'd been
>a counselor at YMCA camp, while I was an emotionally mixed-up, culturally
>pretentious East Coast bohemian wannabe. Antioch was small and familial,
>with no hard separation between the politicos like Jeff and the artists
>like me. How did we meet? Passing a joint in somebody's dorm room, maybe,
>or kibitzing on the student union steps. We responded to each other's
>cleverness, savored the ways we were exotic to each other.
>
>In 1967, after two years at Antioch, Jeff and I both decided --
>independently -- to drop out and move to New York. I did it to get involved
>in professional theater. He did it to join the regional staff of SDS. There
>was a community of Antiochians in New York -- there on student co-op work
>assignments, or, like the two of us, having left school. It was like a
>branch of the sweet academic village where we'd all met, grafted onto the
>big city. Jeff and I ran into each other in New York, and made a point of
>staying in touch.
>
>With a group of those transplanted Antiochians, I once tried an ambitious
>guerrilla theater. One of these friends had a film studio in a building
>facing Times Square. From its roof, on New Year's Eve, when millions of
>people would be in front of their televisions watching the ball drop, we
>would crash a radio-
>
>controlled toy airplane right into the ball, and then release a statement
>to the press decrying U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
>
>Those toy planes, with their gasoline engines, look real -- not like
>jetliners, but like the single-engine craft an antiwar kamikaze might have
>commandeered then. At a time when people were starving themselves, even
>immolating themselves, to protest the war, a kamikaze-style attack wouldn't
>have been so far-fetched. We loved the idea of TV screens filled with the
>image of a crashing airplane; now of course I get an extra chill from this
>scenario.
>
>None of us had ever been close to the mechanism of the dropping ball. We
>paused for a brief discussion of what might happen. Was there a ledge to
>catch any falling, possibly flaming, debris? Or would the whole rig just
>tumble into the crowded street? What about the people watching from across
>the country? Mass panic? If anyone got hurt, we shortly concluded, it would
>just be their tough luck: Innocent people were dying every day in Vietnam,
>so why not at home? In the end, we couldn't get the little engine to start
>in the cold, so we'll never know.
>
>By the way, none of the other participants in this unstaged drama joined
>the Weathermen. They became, variously, a filmmaker, a muralist, a critic,
>the founder of a feminist press -- all using their radical sensibilities to
>touch people. As far as I know, none of them ever again did anything that
>could have hurt anybody. I wish I could say those things about myself -- or
>that I never had another such glib discussion about the possibility of
>injuring innocent people.
>
>I had gone to New York for love of art, but images of insurrection were
>everywhere. Race riots broke over America's cities, in those summers, as
>surely as bad storms. Newark, across the Hudson, went up, and I went with
>Jeff to an angry rally condemning the police response. The New York Review
>of Books ran an account of the Newark battle. The magazine's cover showed a
>schematic drawing of a gasoline bomb; this picture blazed for a fortnight
>from news kiosks all over the city. With a group of Jeff's SDS comrades, I
>watched the film "The Battle of Algiers," about the successful urban
>guerrilla war against the French: unannounced bombs in coffee bars, weapons
>hidden beneath chadors, French officers confounded by a diagram of the
>decentralized rebel organization -- as spread out, invisible and hard to
>dig up as the roots of an invasive tree. We left the theater breathless,
>giddy, inspired.
>
>Against all this, the theater and dance workshops I was doing seemed
>pitiful and unconnected. Also, I felt lonely -- and scared, as should any
>19-year-old attempting to break into theater who lacks dramatic talent and
>emotional armor. But within a few months, I was asked to join the SDS
>staff. Jeff's friends wanted me to start guerrilla theater groups in the
>campus chapters. And Jeff said he needed me: We would work together, get an
>apartment together. I felt close to these people, welcomed by them. And I
>was impossibly in love with Jeff -- although I was only murkily aware of it
>at the time.
>
>Is this too sketchy a motivation? Add this dark pencil stroke: My mother
>died of cancer when I was 16 and a senior in high school. My family fell
>apart for a while then. I was smart, worldly and bristling with
>touch-me-not attitude. But I really needed direction and supervision --
>hardly forthcoming at Antioch in those days -- and a firm embrace. I needed
>my mom. I was in worse shape than I knew. But to be an SDS staffer was to
>seem powerful, pulled together. By joining, in a single step I got a job
>description (theater director, office manager), a stance toward the world
>(as a member of an international radical movement), a place in a community
>that valued me (for my competence and jokes), and time with my best friend
>(but never enough of that). I felt the politics, and didn't disagree.
>Still, I joined SDS then, and the Weathermen later, mostly for
>psychological, not ideological, reasons.
>
>This is how it is in organizations that have the characteristics of cults,
>and maybe in any group of activists. You get a role that fills some hole in
>you. The hijacker Mohammed Atta, like me, came from a middle-class family
>and received a good education. He also happened to have, it was reported by
>the New York Times, an overbearing father who derided him for being timid
>and girlish and challenged him to be as successful as his older sisters, a
>professor and a physician. I don't doubt the fierceness of Atta's Islamic
>passion. But perhaps he also had something to say to his dad.
>
>In my experience, the glue that bound groups together was not so much
>ideology as a collective identity based on feeling different -- superior,
>that is -- continually reinforced by our state of escalating battle. At the
>center of SDS when I joined, we saw ourselves as part of the enormous youth
>culture and student movements; but as more serious, because we were trying
>to lead; more committed, because we were doing it full time, on
>"subsistence" salaries of $15 a week; and braver, because we could get into
>trouble.
>
>So we felt cooler than the rest of our generation: that our parties were
>more intense, our sexual and communal-living experiments more liberated and
>meaningful. We felt ourselves to be more heroic and inventive, closer to
>people like Che Guevara and Simone de Beauvoir than to your average
>peacenik or hippie.
>
>We were still driven by political realities -- racism at home, apartheid in
>Africa, police states in Latin America, and that relentless war being waged
>in our name. But we became increasingly frustrated, enraged, embittered. We
>felt torn between our roots in the nonviolent civil rights movement, and
>our desperation to do something -- almost anything -- powerful. Fighting
>internally over strategy, by 1969 SDS was whirling apart.
>
>This was provoked in part, it must be said, by the dirty tricks of the
>FBI's COINTELPRO campaign. These included classics like planting agents in
>our midst to cause dissension and spread rumors, and more inventive tactics
>like distributing a pornographic comic book depicting recognizable SDS and
>black-power leaders having sex and absconding with their organizations'
>treasuries. I once opened a letter that accused one of our regional
>organizers of being a secret agent. It was written in a jeering tone, and
>humiliatingly quoted another line of Bob Dylan's: "Something is happening
>here, but you don't know what it is." The organizer it named was someone I
>knew a bit, and liked, and whom I had considered brave and reliable. Of
>course I assumed that the letter was an instance of FBI disinformation. But
>I couldn't help myself: I made sure to never have a substantive
>conversation with him again, and struck him from the mental list of people
>I would ever trust. It works as simply as that.
>
>When I joined SDS, its inner circle was like a family. But later the
>Weathermen was more of a cult, especially in its formative period -- the
>second half of 1969. Paranoia plus egotism plus a worldview that
>obliterated all subtlety combined to create an atmosphere that was insane.
>
>You had to parrot the party line. Woe unto you if you uttered some
>political formulation that sounded too much like what a rival faction --
>whose members might have been close friends a few months back -- could have
>said; or if you had hesitated during that day's confrontation with the
>cops. You could be subjected to a "criticism/self-criticism" session, in
>which you were expected to abase yourself and recant, and to then "fight
>for yourself" and show reconstructed thought. Weatherman ideology,
>distilled to its simplistic essence, was this: that racism was the
>organizing principle of American history; that the United States was a
>thieving imperialist power; that the solution was revolution; and that the
>way to bring it about was to support black liberation at home and national
>liberation abroad. There were plenty of other people with such ideas. Some
>founded tenant unions and radio stations and legal defense teams. Some went
>on to analyze burning questions like those of natural resources, new
>technologies or sexual politics, all issues that the Weathermen --
>male-identified, and seeing through 19th-century Marxian lenses --
>addressed only reluctantly and smugly. We weren't even the only radicals
>who supported the idea of clandestine, armed action. But we were among the
>few who felt compelled, for reasons originating deep within our individual
>selves, to actually try it right this minute. We took this step because we
>had already placed ourselves on a self-propelling spiral of confrontation,
>never stepping off long enough to notice any other possible paths.
>
>In June 1969, a final rigged election delivered SDS into the hands of the
>Weathermen. The prize was the national machinery -- nothing fancy, just an
>office on a seedy Chicago block, with phone lines, a print shop and a
>membership list; plus intangibles like reputation and reach: SDS was the
>most visible organization on the American left, with contacts at nearly
>every campus and in movements around the world. But our goal of a
>revolutionary militia was the antithesis of big, unwieldy SDS. We quickly
>squandered all the resources, alienated everybody remotely close, and let
>SDS collapse.
>
>The following spring, when the United States invaded Cambodia and student
>protesters were killed at Jackson State in Mississippi and Kent State in
>Ohio, there were spontaneous strikes and reactions at hundreds of colleges
>and communities. But by then, SDS was dead. That awful war in Indochina
>dragged on for another five bloody years, in part because domestic
>opposition was in disarray. We Weathermen did many reprehensible things,
>but together they amount to very little next to the thousands of American
>and Indochinese lives lost and ruined between 1970 and 1975. A strong,
>focused student movement might have helped end the war sooner. Destroying
>SDS was our worst, most selfish act.
>
>Instead of building that movement, we spent the second half of 1969
>exhorting ourselves to "chaosify Amerikkka," contemplating "revolutionary
>suicide," proclaiming our willingness to "go out in a blaze of glory." Just
>like a cult, we spoke this rhetoric of apocalypse. The only element of the
>typical cult we lacked was the single charismatic leader; our '60s-style
>innovation was to have a whole group of them. These were mostly people who,
>like Jeff, possessed a combination of good looks, glib speech and daring
>posture that the rest of us found irresistible; I wasn't the only person
>who fell in love with them, one way or another. Still, fewer than 200
>people (at a time when SDS had more than 20,000 paid members) chose to join
>the Weathermen, forming 24-hour living and working groups -- we called them
>collectives, but now they might be called cells -- in fewer than a dozen
>cities.
>
>Our new conviction was that white college students -- which we ourselves
>had been so recently -- were irremediably racist, and too soft and spoiled
>to be revolutionaries. Plenty of affluent white Americans -- radical or
>not, then and now -- have felt guilt over class and race. It's an
>understandable, if essentially useless, emotion. But we took our own bleak
>vision of white people to heart, transforming our guilt into self-hatred.
>
>We made an exception for working-class white street kids. We considered
>them sufficiently oppressed and alienated to have revolutionary potential.
>Also -- a big plus -- we figured they knew how to fight. So our Weather
>collectives would mount actions designed to attract them by showing that we
>were heavies, too: planting a Viet Cong flag at a beach, and then defending
>it; running through city high schools shouting, "Jailbreak!"
>
>We did usually end up in fights -- with the people we were hoping to
>attract, or the police; we didn't convert anybody. Because I worked in the
>office, and was supposed to keep things there running, I never got any
>licks in, myself. At our biggest action, the Days of Rage in Chicago in
>1969, I stood watching from the shadows as the group gathered, and followed
>for a few blocks until the trashing started. That's when I turned back, so
>I would be sure not to get busted. I was scared of fighting, so I didn't
>mind being excused; but it added another little twist of guilt.
>
>Our cultivated self-hatred fueled these provocative actions, and it fueled
>the exhausting way we lived. Nobody had his own room. A collective house
>would have little furniture, just a few mattresses on the floor; you slept
>where you fell. For something to wear, as one ex-comrade recalls, you
>picked through the communal pile to distinguish between "the clean dirties
>and the dirty dirties." Money, cars -- pretty much anything you brought
>with you -- was collectivized. We lived on peanut butter and jelly. Sleep
>and privacy were in short supply.
>
>Even sex was collectivized. Those with power routinely commandeered the
>bodies of those whom they desired. On a number of occasions there were
>group sexual encounters of 10, 20, 30 people. We called these orgies, but
>the term implies something more pleasurable and less forced than what I
>recall -- even though I was one of those who instigated them. We passed
>around crab lice, gonorrhea, pelvic inflammatory disease.
>
>What is called to mind by this voluntary state of collective delusion,
>deprivation and confrontation? Waco? Jonestown? Heaven's Gate? Unlike some
>cults, the organization didn't instruct us to break ties to our families,
>so much as to see what we could extract from them. But nobody maintained
>normal contact. How could you breezily chat with your folks when you were
>busy torching their hopes for you? My sister passed through Chicago and
>tried to see me; nobody at the office would tell her where I was that day
>-- off in the country, learning to shoot an M-1 carbine. Surely she would
>have been shocked; my family only knew me as a gentle kid. "We always
>thought you were just handling the money," my stepmother says now. Once I
>wrote to my mother's brother with some bogus story, trying to guilt-trip
>him into sending me a check. He replied that he would support me if I would
>return to school, but not now. "I am," he wrote, "part of the establishment
>you are trying to destroy." I circled this in red and taped the letter to
>my office door, a flag of my eagerness to cut myself off at the roots.
>
>Here is an exquisite recipe for slavishness: You see yourself having given
>everything for the group -- but you never know how long the group will
>deign to keep you. Individuals' standings were always shifting. People were
>frequently reassigned from one location to another. Rank-and-file members
>rose into and then were busted from positions of intermediate leadership --
>unpredictably, at the word of central committee members. Leading a
>criticism of somebody, or having sex with one of the male leaders if you
>were female, could enhance your position. If you were offed from the group,
>no one would trust you again -- or even talk to you. Sometimes members of
>the central committee were offed, though the rest of us never knew quite why.
>
>As people accumulated felony charges -- for assault and mob action -- and
>faced jail, the planning began in earnest for going underground. It was
>clear that not everyone would go; we underlings waited in excruciating
>tension, wondering who would get "the tap on the shoulder" that meant
>elevation to the heroic status of guerrilla.
>
>Because I was working in the office, handling the money -- secretly
>skimming a bit for the occasional greasy spoon breakfast -- and enjoying
>the protection of several top leaders who were friends, my circumstances
>were less brutal. I had a prestigious position, and more freedom than most
>members, with nobody bossing me around -- and a staff, in fact, to whom I
>gave orders. Writing leaflets, designing posters, giving press conferences,
>I got to glorify violence through imagery and words without having to
>actually fight; anyway, I was supposed to stay away from the battles and
>raise bail money. Plainclothes cops would follow when I went to the bank or
>the printer, but I was never snatched and beaten up by them, as some others
>were. And I came through that period without acquiring felony charges.
>
>But I didn't escape the sting of our internal culture. It finally dawned on
>people that I'd never been the subject of a criticism session. So, on a
>date when people from other city collectives were in Chicago for a mass
>court appearance, one was called. It commenced late in the evening, with me
>on a stool in the middle of a big circle. In my nightmarish recollection, I
>have blocked out the specific accusations. Probably they had to do with my
>never having proved myself in a street fight with the cops. And given how
>we all glorified battle, I was indeed racked with just such self-doubt. All
>I do remember is clamming up under the barrage of criticism, and wondering
>who all these people were. But I knew my best friend Jeff never uttered a
>peep in my defense. By dawn -- I noticed with a sinking sense of betrayal
>-- he had dozed off in his chair.
>
>Soon after, in February 1970, I was sent with a group of Weathermen on a
>propaganda trip of U.S. radicals to cut sugar cane in Cuba. After lunch one
>day, while I was sharpening my machete, a friend came running to tell me
>that a newscast somebody had picked up from Miami on a transistor radio
>said a town house on West 11th Street in New York had blown up, killing
>several people.
>
>In an instant I grasped what had occurred. One of our comrades' fathers
>owned a house on that street; I'd visited her there. Her collective must
>have been using the place as a bomb factory, and slipped up. A few weeks
>later, the Cuban authorities gave us copies of American newsweeklies that
>confirmed this, and passed along a verbal message from our leadership --
>conveyed, I have always assumed, through the Cuban representative at the
>United Nations -- telling us not to return. From those magazines, we also
>learned that the Weathermen had vanished underground. So with three others,
>I went to Europe. Our plan was to find false ID, make our way back to the
>States without being noticed, and then reconnect with the fugitive
>organization. We accomplished the first two parts, but not the third. For
>nearly a year, until a purely accidental encounter with a Weatherman
>comrade in a New York subway car, we four were "lost."
>
>The three who blew themselves up had climbed to the reckless pinnacle of
>Weatherman terrorism: They had, evidently, been making a bomb filled with
>nails, for an ROTC dance. Their deaths forced a period of reflection, and
>by the time we four reconnected in New York, the organization had calmed
>down. It was known now as the Weather Underground. Future bombings would
>have only symbolic, not human, targets; guns would not be used. This had
>been agreed to by everyone still a member; people deemed responsible for
>what had gone wrong, or seen as unremorseful, had been kicked out. And
>indeed, no one else was ever again physically injured by a Weather
>Underground bomb.
>
>The internal culture had changed, too. The madness had become hippie
>mellowness. Gone were the thuggish street-fighting stance, the leather
>jackets, lengths of chain and steel-toed boots. In their place were
>moccasins, love beads and long hair -- dyed, of course, for disguise. Jeff
>and his pals on the central committee had a sweet floppy dog now, and a
>vintage pickup truck. They looked like any stoned freaks en route to a
>commune. Youth culture was protective coloration for the fugitives.
>
>This was fine with me. I'd never felt comfortable trying to match the
>violent revolutionary archetype, despite my facility with the rhetoric. Now
>I looked forward to a more romantic, less scary organizational life --
>conducted around campfires in the countryside, maybe, rather than under
>bare bulbs in city basements.
>
>Maintaining people underground was hard. Facing no charges, I was told to
>live openly. Until the Weather Underground imploded in 1976, I remained a
>member. I was publicly active all that time, too, in antiwar activities and
>later in support of the militant Native American movement. I had continual
>contact with the fugitive friends I loved and idealized -- but never enough
>to make me happy. I was frequently watched by the police. So meeting my
>comrades required cover stories, disguises and elaborately confusing
>itineraries.
>
>To spend a week with them, for instance, which I did a number of times, I
>might tell people I was going camping -- off the grid with some fictitious
>high school friend. Then I would leave my apartment, take a bus and then
>another to the house of a publicly unconnected supporter. There I would
>pick up my fake ID, put on a hat and false glasses. Then I would take a
>taxi to the train station, a train to a nearby city, and from there an
>airplane to the city where my underground friends were waiting.
>
>Still, I lived with the constant fear that I might accidentally blow my
>friends' cover. And I felt guilty over the extra sacrifices of their lives
>underground, and self-loathing for not being fully that which we revered, a
>guerrilla.
>
>So as long as I chose to stay with the organization, I remained weak,
>effaced and mildly but continually put down -- by myself as much as the
>group. The subtext of my own story was desire for an intimacy and belonging
>that was always just out of reach, never fully attainable. Other people had
>their own peculiar motivations. But for every member of the Weather
>Underground, there was something going on besides the politics, something
>to get or prove.
>
>As the movement that began in the '60s was petering out, for the Weather
>Underground self-perpetuation became the point. The same leaders stayed in
>place the whole time. The members were decentralized, so that even those of
>us who had known one another for years could be kept out of contact.
>Occasional squeaks of dissent were easily muted. Venally, the leaders lived
>better -- in bigger houses, driving cars instead of using public transport.
>They held their secret meetings with the richer, more glamorous supporters
>in nice restaurants, while lesser fugitives met their contacts at Burger
King.
>
>And as usually happens to groups based on corruption, deceit and unexamined
>loyalties, the organization eventually tore itself apart. As the Vietnam
>War ended in 1975, taking the antiwar movement with it, our leaders hatched
>a classic Marxist-Leninist plot. Using secretly directed activists like me,
>the Weather Underground would start a "public" front organization. But the
>unaffiliated participants we gathered in turned out to be less stupid than
>this transparent scheme required, and soon angrily realized the thing was
>being controlled from someplace they couldn't quite see. They weren't smart
>enough to walk away, though. Instead -- in the grim communist tradition --
>they instigated a "rectification campaign" of accusation, recrimination and
>surreal miniature show trials, to determine just who among us had sold out
>the revolution most. And the Weather Underground quickly splintered apart.
>
>I had objected to this "front organization" plan, but as usual allowed
>myself to be told what to do. Now I felt bitter at everybody involved for
>our grandiosity and games. And at myself for caving in, and letting my
>emotions and personal loyalties be manipulated. I had one last, sour
>meeting with Jeff, in a Chinese restaurant, and got from him neither
>explanation nor apology. His mellifluous tongue was thick and dumb now: He
>could not explain his role, nor would he acknowledge how our friendship had
>been used. Suddenly it felt easy to walk away.
>
>A few people retained their zeal for revolutionary violence and later did
>things to land themselves in jail, where some still reside. For most of the
>Weathermen, like Jeff and me, the legal consequences were negligible. We
>came to in a daze. We crawled off to lick our wounds, learn to be
>responsible grown-ups -- hard work, for the inexperienced -- and come to
>terms with what we had done.
>
>It has taken me until now -- 25 years -- to fully realize how foolish and
>wrong we were, and to be able to say these things out loud. I had to wait
>for my father to die, so I wouldn't break his heart. I try not to
>gratuitously hurt people anymore. And I had to know for sure that the life
>I have made is good for me, and good for the world, and all mine. I still
>have my political sensitivities, to things like racism and the dangerously
>worsening disparity between the rich and poor of the world. But I do not
>need to be the one who changes it all. It feels strange to find myself
>supporting our country's current war. I certainly have my criticisms, my
>dismay that it is necessary, my fears of what it will provoke. But I am not
>confused at all about defending a society resilient enough to have me as a
>full participant -- after I devoted my youth to tearing it all down.
>-------
>Jonathan Lerner is at work on a novel, Alex Underground, based loosely on
>his experiences. He can be reached at www.penpowerpublishing.com.
>
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