Anonymous Defends the Weather Underground

Some readers might remember a post I made a while back after watching "The Weather Underground," a documentary on the radical group of the late 60s-early 70s. Yesterday, an anonymous reader sent this comment:



"If you weren't there you couldn't possibly understand. How bad were the Weathermen as compared to a coke snorting, draft dodging coward of a right wing president who in abject terror of attack had the superpatriot, anti-american, government snooping act made into law? Power to the people!"



Er, right on, anonymous. But what does our current Nincompoop-In-Chief have to do with the Weather Underground? Here's an answer: both W. and the WU were self-indulgent privileged clods unable to think of politics as anything but a stage for their narcissism. We all go through phases where we're self-absorbed and obnoxious, but only Baby Boomers demand that the whole world get dragged along for the ride. Don't blame Bush for The Patriot Act, man, he's just doing his own thing.



Remember last summer before the conventions when people on the left were terrified by the possibility of "another '68"? That is, images of street fighting suggesting that the country was falling apart--and needed a strong authoritarian at the top? You could make a case that it's been the bogus-but-carefully-stoked FEAR of hippie revolution which has guided the country steadily to the right over the last 36 years. The WU can't be blamed for that, but note nobody was fearing "another Martin Luther King." My problem with the WU isn't their desire for change, their utopianism, or even their anger; it's their use of violence, which belies at best a youthful impatience and at worst makes them no better than their adversaries. Using violence to stop violence is, to use a Sixties phrase, "like fucking for virginity."