From this…
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…to this?
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I’m spending a good long time reading the new book about the lives of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayres, and Zayd Ayres, the family on the run from the law in the 1970s and into the ’80s. Bernardine Dohrn was, for a while, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. She and Ayres had founded the militant wing of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) known at first as the Action Faction, then the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and eventually the Weathermen. Then, the Weathermen declared war on the US empire, armed themselves, made and exploded bombs in public buildings, and aligned with the most militant faction of the Black Panther Party.
The accidental explosion of a homemade dynamite bomb that killed three Weathermen and destroyed a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970 sent Dohrn and Ayres scurrying underground where they renamed their group, naturally, the Weather Underground. Dohrn and Ayres eventually became a couple, married, and had two kids even as they moved from place to place in the United States, assuming aliases, constantly looking over their shoulders for G-men, and hoping against hope no one would recognize them in a grocery store line.
I started reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young about two weeks ago. I’m a notoriously slow reader, plus the story is so compelling I find myself putting the book down for long periods of time just to contemplate, to digest what I’ve read. I try to cut through my emotional reactions and put myself in the shoes of Dohrn (mere) and Ayres as they lug their two little boys (one of them being Zayd, who authored this memoir of life on the run and the history of the radical groups his parents were involved with). Just as important, I try to empathize with the people affected by Dohrn’s and Ayres’s actions, including their parents, their former friends, law enforcement officials, and plain old folks at home, in their living rooms, watching TV news reports about the latest bombing of the US Capitol or a police station.
It might take me another two whole weeks to finish reading the book. That’s okay. I’m immersed in their world, trying to grasp it, and trying to understand my own feelings about the people involved. As noted previously in this global communications colossus, I idolized the militant radicals who scared the bejesus out of everyone from Richard M. Nixon to J. Edgar Hoover to Mayor Richard J. Daley to countless next door neighbors across the country.
I realize, at this remove, that my affinity for long-haired radicals hollering for an end to the war in Vietnam, to institutional racism, and to American imperialism around the globe was as much driven by my own teenaged urge to rebel as by a moral revulsion to America’s sins.
Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres were not wrong for opposing, strenuously, the war, Jim Crow and other American evils but their “war” (yep, in May 1970, the Weather Underground issued a manifesto titled a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States) was as fatuous, albeit homicidal, as anything conjured up by previously comfortable, entitled white kids.
That’s what Bernardine and Bill were, at first. Comfortable, entitled white kids. Members of the post World War II generation, they were the most well-fed, well-clothed, provided for generation in the history of the human race. Their country was the most powerful in the world and had just won, in part, a pitched battle against tyranny, the Holocaust, book burning, and more. Dohrn and Ayres grew up not only believing so much was due to them within their homes and families, but their nation believed the rest of the world owed it. The Baby Boomers understood from birth that whatever they wanted, they could get.Their parents stood on their heads to provide everything their kids needed. Their nation provided them fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter, a car for every member of the family, cheap gasoline, grocery store shelves packed to overflowing with countless brands of breakfast cereal. University education was either free or easily affordable even for families just scraping by. They had record players and braces on their teeth and princess phones and good shoes.
They naturally grew up thinking that whatever they wanted was attainable.
Until what they wanted was peace in Vietnam and a fair shake for Black people.
Suddenly, they were frustrated for the first time in their lives and, goddamn it, they weren’t gonna take that lying down. I know this sounds as though I’m minimizing Dohrn and Ayres et al’s commitment to justice. Yes, they truly wanted peace and harmony and racial equality. But when those ideals weren’t coming in the snap of a finger, they reverted to the entitled, privileged kids they still were. If they didn’t get their way, they were gonna throw a tantrum and wreck the house.
Their “war” against the US, their revolution, appealed to an entire generation of people, many of whom wouldn’t give a second thought to Vietnam or voting rights in Mississippi. It was appealing because it allowed them, metaphorically, to thumb their noses at square Mom and Dad, to flash the finger at their mean old high school principal, and to tell the cop busting them for smoking pot to fuck off. Radical revolutionaries in the 1970s were the ultimate rebels, James Dean, Bob Dylan, and Hunter S. Thompson on steroids. All authority was evil. Everybody in a suit a tyrant. We could do whatever we wanted and fuck you if you didn’t like it.
And the funniest thing of all is, that train of thought is what led us directly to MAGA, a nation of rebels uprising against,.., well, everything. Morality? Please, don’t make me laugh. Justice? Don’t try to force that shit on me. Regulations? Try and stop me from doing what I want to do whenever I want to do it.
Doctors, lawyers, priests, politicians, experts, scientists — anybody in charge of anything must be defied. Wear a mask during a pandemic? Why, it’s tyranny! Electric cars? How dare you — I love rolling coal! And worst of all, a black man has become President of the United States of America? Damn it, we have to tear the whole thing down!
What a bizarre irony. The revolution of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres was an arrow pointing directly to the neo-fascist Donald J. Trump.
Who could have ever guessed?