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6. Do We Need a Weatherman After All?
50 Plays1 year ago
Can reflecting upon the legacy of the Weather Underground help us today to develop strategies to change the world for the better?
Book: Dan Berger's Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. (Available here.)
Also mentioned: Underground (1976), The Weather Underground (2002), Jean Amery, CS Lewis, an imaginary version of King Lear
Intro and Outro Music: Candy Jail by Silver Jews
Recommended
Transcript
Humorous take on spam emails and voting motivations
00:00:00
Speaker
You're tired of receiving panties in the mail. Yeah, I'm tired of receiving like discounts to my local CVS prescription pharmacy and like Best Buy deals. Well, in all the years I've had a Gmail address, what I've learned is that Democratic political candidates have exactly the same email databases as dick lengthening supplements.
00:00:22
Speaker
That makes sense, and I would actually prefer the supplements, I think, to whatever political emails they'd want to send me. I only voted for Bernie Sanders because I thought it was going to give me an extra two inches. That is incredible. I did get a pump in the mail. I just didn't know from whom, so now I know.
Introduction to Candy Jail podcast and key sources
00:00:48
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to Candy Jail. I'm Brendan, I'm here as always with Robert, and we are tackling kind of a big subject this time around, the weather underground, the 1970s revolutionary group, the radical underground. And our main text for this is going to be Dan Berger's book, Outlaws in America, which is
00:01:11
Speaker
I think we would both recommend as a sort of primary source in this material. We also watched the 1976 film Underground, which was directed by Haskell Wexler, Emil D'Antonio, and Mary Lamson, as well as Sam Green and Bill Siegel's early 2000s documentary simply called The Weather Underground.
00:01:34
Speaker
And we also dived a little bit into some of the literature that the underground itself put out over its years of existence. Just a little bit of background here. This was something that we first started talking about. About a year ago, we were on a road trip and the podcast Mother Country Radicals came out around that time. And so we listened to it together driving across the American Southwest.
00:02:01
Speaker
It's a fascinating podcast, highly recommended as well.
Recommendation of 'Mother Country Radicals' podcast
00:02:05
Speaker
Zaid Dorn, who is the son of former weather underground leaders, Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayres is the host and producer of the podcast.
00:02:14
Speaker
So if this is something that you're at all familiar with and you want to learn a little bit more about it, any one of those four things, Dan Berger's book or the two films, or maybe especially as a starting place, Zade Dorn's Mother Country Radicals podcast is a fantastic place to go.
Struggles and discomfort with Weather Underground's legacy
00:02:33
Speaker
But one thing we realized is we were
00:02:35
Speaker
Listening to that podcast is that the subject matter made us uncomfortable enough that we we spent a solid week making a lot of this is Bernadine Dorn jokes just as a way to sort of relieve some of the the tension that we felt around this subject matter and this is probably something we're gonna come back to like this may not be the only time we talk about this stuff on mic because there's so much here to wrestle with and
00:03:03
Speaker
We actually recorded this a couple times already and scrapped it because we just weren't happy with the results. So Robert, I wrote up a little synopsis of the weather underground. So just give us a little bit of background on who these guys were.
Formation and ideology of the Weather Underground
00:03:17
Speaker
Yeah, so basically the weather underground formed in 1969 as a militant Marxist offshoot of the, at the time, far and away the most popular organization for young folks in general, which was Students for a Democratic Society, also known as SDS. So unlike SDS,
00:03:42
Speaker
Weather leadership, including Bernadine Dorn, Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, and others believed that violence and revolutionary guerrilla activity was a viable and necessary tactic for fighting violent imperialism.
00:03:57
Speaker
So while their first coordinated action, the Days of Rage protest in Chicago, seemed more petulant than militant, the group soon grew more sophisticated.
Shift in tactics after bomb-making accident
00:04:08
Speaker
In 1970, after three weather members were killed while building bombs to be deployed against civilians, weather pivoted to targeting buildings rather than people. And between 1970 and 1975, the organization planted bombs in a series of government and commercial targets.
00:04:26
Speaker
Each bombing was preceded by a warning to ensure that no one would be present at the moment of the detonation. During these years members lived underground, scattered across the country, issuing communiques to explain their rationale for attacking each target. They were the focus of a massive and mostly unsuccessful federal manhunt.
Decline due to internal disagreements and end of Vietnam War
00:04:48
Speaker
In the mid-1970s, weather began to disintegrate due to internal disagreements, and by 1976, it had effectively ceased to exist. And I'll also add that with the conclusion of the Vietnam War, both the weather underground and other
00:05:06
Speaker
attendant organizations, militant leftist organizations struggled to find a coherent sort of mission. I think it was a real moment for the left in general in terms of reorienting and recalibrating what it was exactly that they were fighting for and against because that was such a major topic, a major issue that was in their crosshairs and a very live one.
Prosecution failures and global solidarity
00:05:35
Speaker
So
00:05:37
Speaker
The federal prosecution of former weather members mostly collapsed under the weight of the federal misconduct associated with COINTELPRO, although some ex-weather people were imprisoned on other charges.
00:05:51
Speaker
Although the group was almost entirely white, it expressed solidarity with global struggles against imperialism in any form and believed that black liberation was essential to revolutionary change. In terms of revolutionary philosophy, it was thus an intersectionalist group, although the term was not really in use at the time. Nice introduction. So let me then just
00:06:18
Speaker
Explain like why I think both of us are so interested and have been so interested in learning about and wrestling with the legacies of the weather underground.
Middle-class background and activism questions
00:06:32
Speaker
So essentially they were almost all middle class, some in fact upper class white kids with all the attendant privileges constellated around those designations.
00:06:45
Speaker
And they committed themselves to militant leftist politics in the name of, as Brendan put in the introduction, essentially anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and ultimately anti-capitalism. Being middle class white folks ourselves, and ones who sympathize with much of the underground's political convictions, even if we disagree and feel ambivalence towards some of their tactics,
00:07:12
Speaker
We find ourselves asking many of the same, I would say agonizing questions in 2023 that those in SDS and later the underground and beyond were asking themselves in the sixties and seventies. So yeah, go ahead. Well, I just wanted to add something to that, which is it's not as though I'd never heard of the weather underground, but interestingly,
00:07:36
Speaker
they first came to my attention.
Personal influence of Weather Underground on hosts
00:07:38
Speaker
I don't think through a history textbook or a documentary or anything like that. It was actually my father who explained to me who SDS was and who Weather was. And his story was that he'd been a student at the University of Delaware in 1969, 1970, and the campus was taken over by leftist protesters
00:08:02
Speaker
as happened frequently across the United States during those years. Campus buildings were occupied and a left-wing group that was either the underground itself or associated with the weather underground issued a list of demands and those demands started out.
Perception of revolutionary groups in America
00:08:21
Speaker
pretty much what you would expect student protesters to be demanding in the late 60s and into the war in Vietnam, the release of political prisoners, so on and so forth. And then the list of demands, as my father tells the story, became increasingly unhinged until finally this student fire brand with a bullhorn was demanding a National Hockey League team for the state of Delaware.
00:08:47
Speaker
And I have no way of verifying that story, but my father's I think he told it to me because he thought it was funny. So I think it's telling that my introduction to the underground was as something a little bit absurd. And I think that.
00:09:04
Speaker
Generally speaking in America, that's kind of how we're conditioned to look at revolution and revolutionary groups that, of course, if you're on the right, you simply look at them as, you know, terrorist organizations who should be stood up against a wall and shot. But if you're not on the right and you're more sympathetic to their positions, you're nonetheless trained to a certain extent to see them as faintly ridiculous.
00:09:29
Speaker
And I think that's really interesting, and I think it's especially interesting that I was able to then go, you know, say I was 16 when my dad told me that story, I was then able to go for another 25 years of my life without really having to seriously engage with these guys because they've just fallen off the pop culture radar in a certain way, and even fallen out of the history books in a certain way.
00:09:52
Speaker
if they even made it into them to begin with. Yeah, exactly. And yet here we find ourselves finally reckoning with them, I mean, you and I, and trying to engage in some of these really serious questions.
Bill Ayers' school invitation controversy
00:10:07
Speaker
And I'll just jump in very quickly and say that in some ways my first exposure to them, and this was interesting,
00:10:15
Speaker
I was already in college, I might have even graduated from college at this point, but a former teacher that I remained close with and actually became a mentor when I myself became a teacher.
00:10:29
Speaker
invited Bill Ayers, one of the key players in the weather underground, ultimately the husband of Bernadine Dorn, who's arguably the face of the organization at this point, was invited to speak at my former high school
00:10:46
Speaker
And the principal at first agreed because I don't think he knew who he was. And then when it started to circulate that he was going to be attending and giving a speech, a bunch of parents, of course, with conservative leanings, all probably piled on at once and said,
00:11:05
Speaker
if you let him on the campus, yada, yada, yada, yada. And he wound up canceling the engagement, which was, I thought, extremely interesting. He caved to the pressure. And so that's my direct initial experience or exposure to something to do with the weather underground. And it was a fairly one degree of separation sort of thing.
00:11:34
Speaker
And then to add to your point, Brendan, with they either haven't shown up in history books or if they have, they've been mere footnotes.
Legacy and memory of Weather Underground
00:11:42
Speaker
You know, teaching history, I've now read a number of scholarly books on the history of the United States, but also some of those, you know, not that those aren't dry, but some really fucking dry textbooks, right? And what I have found is if they get mentioned,
00:12:01
Speaker
they get maybe a sentence at the most, a paragraph, and often a footnote, if not full-on omission, consigning them to oblivion. And so they're very much still a fringe topic in US historical circles, I think.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, and if you remember back in 2008 when Obama was running for the first time, the right tried to drum up furor over the fact that Obama had associated with Bill Ayres. And even that was just sort of a tempest in a teapot that went away. It was like there was sort of this unwillingness to engage with the subject at all.
00:12:42
Speaker
true and i don't we're not here to talk about obama's legacy but i will say from the little i read about that he was very quick and willing to totally dismiss and wash his hands of whatever the that connection consisted of with bill ares yeah that's the way i remember it as well.
00:13:01
Speaker
So anyway, that's why we are interested in the underground because we feel a certain identification with these folks, even if again we want to reiterate we are ambivalent and at times pretty critical of some of their tactics and we'll get into that further.
Exploring Weather Underground's impact with Dan Berger's book
00:13:21
Speaker
We basically came up with some core questions that I think we want to wrestle with and explore in this episode. Basically what we came up with is we will use Dan Berger's book, Outlaws in America, as the organizing
00:13:40
Speaker
principle of this discussion and that we'll begin by trying to discuss the book and our general takeaways and then through that lead back into those fundamental questions. So Brendan, let me throw it back at you and let's just start with a loose kind of informal review of Dan Berger's book. What did you think of it? What were your general takeaways?
Critical review of Dan Berger's portrayal
00:14:09
Speaker
It's a good book. It's a thorough examination. It's a work of scholarship. I think there are some omissions in it. Namely, and I don't want to make too big of a deal about this because it was sort of a, it was an isolated incident, sort of a blip on the radar, but there was a convention in the early day, the very early days of the weather underground. And Bernadine Doran had emerged as the
00:14:38
Speaker
the leader of the New Weather movement. And this was right after the Manson murders, the Tate-LaBianca murders, and she was caught on Mike gloating about, and just to emphasize, Sharon Tate was pregnant when she was murdered. It was a brutal, brutal, brutal crime. I mean, she died pleading for her life and calling out for her mother.
00:15:05
Speaker
and it's just like an absolutely indefensibly despicable act of violence and Bernardine Dorn is caught on a mic laughing about that. That is not mentioned except in Passing and Berger's book and he doesn't really detail what exactly it is he's talking about and you know Bernardine Dorn even in the 70s
00:15:28
Speaker
recanted that and I think apologized for it, tried to take it back. But and there may have been drugs involved. You know, this was the the underground were a rather hedonistic bunch at times in their history. And so I don't think that moment defines them. But I think it's a moment that you kind of have to reckon with if you're trying to reckon with this group. And Berger doesn't get into that. He skates past it entirely. And that bothered me a little bit. And it made me wonder what else he skates by that I'm simply not aware of.
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, and let me back up and just provide a little more historical context.
Flint War Council and psychological state of members
00:16:05
Speaker
Not that you are unaware of this, but just to situate it in the continuum of all that was unfolding at the time. Fred Hampton was murdered by FBI during a raid, and they wound up having a emergency meeting in Flint, Michigan.
00:16:26
Speaker
And this was an infamous meeting where they put up all these slogans and pinatas of like AK-47s, put up posters of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, sort of the patron saints of their
00:16:45
Speaker
organization if they even had any. And that was the event where actually you are right to say there was drugs. There was apparently a lot of LSD getting taken. And it was just a fucked up dark scene from what I remember reading in the various things we've read and in Zaid Dorn's recounting of it in Mother Country Radical. So that was the moment that Bernadine Dorn made that really
00:17:15
Speaker
what would you call it, inexcusable, to be charitable, tasteless, and to be uncharitable, absolutely reprehensible, and discussed in comment.
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, there's no taking that back. But I think it helps to just realize that they were already ramping things up prior to the Hampton murder. They had reached arguably the highest fever pitch of intensity in that moment. So this isn't to excuse or defend or talk away.
00:17:54
Speaker
what Dorn said, but I think it helps in just understanding these young folks who were extremely political, were kind of out of their minds, and arguably rightly so. It doesn't excuse what she said, but it might help in just laying the scene a little bit, right?
00:18:15
Speaker
And there's a part of me that thinks I shouldn't have even brought that up. And maybe Berger was right, because when you're seriously engaging with these people who were serious political thinkers, they did their homework. They were very, very far from the Symbianese Liberation Army. And to sort of single out that one moment is somehow representative of their political struggle and their impact on society is perhaps unfair.
00:18:45
Speaker
At the same time, one of the things that we wrestle with is the level of conviction that you have to possess in order to be a revolutionary and what that says about what kind of person you are. Also, there's the fact that if I project myself back in time, like if I imagine myself being, say, 17 in 1970 and being the same 17-year-old that I was in 1996, I would have been totally sympathetic to the underground
00:19:15
Speaker
unless I heard that Bernadine Dorn had said that, in which case she would have lost me potentially forever.
Influence on young radicals and karate training humor
00:19:21
Speaker
And even later on as the organization became more precise and more sophisticated and received press for different kinds of actions, I don't know that I ever could have gotten past that initial moment. So I do think that it is worth mentioning, but probably not discussing at length.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it also, just to now move forward a little bit, like from that really crazed, I think it was a couple days that they were there with a group of maybe like a hundred or more people. Notably, Tom Hayden was there, who was essentially the face of Students for a Democratic Society. And they wound up, he actually wound up, I think, leading Karate
00:20:05
Speaker
like training activities around the premises. And I do think, right, like you're right, and I'm with you, that there's a tendency certainly amongst folks on the right, even among sort of centrist Democrats. Brian Burrow wrote the book Days of Rage. You could say
00:20:25
Speaker
Actually, just to back that up a second, Ron Jacobs wrote one of the first books on the weather underground called The Way the Wind Blew, which is a slim, broad brushstroke overview. It's OK. I don't hate it. I don't love it. It gets the job done, I suppose. But he basically leveled the charge against Brian Burrow, who wrote, arguably,
00:20:48
Speaker
even with Berger's book, the most detailed history of the underground and other organizations at the time. And Jacobs, Ron Jacobs, in a review of the book for Counter Punch magazine, who he'd written for, who he has written for for years,
00:21:09
Speaker
basically leveled the charge against Burrow that he was writing from a bourgeois middle-class perspective and consequently was condescending and smug towards his subject matter, which, having read the book now, man, I can agree with. I think he was right in that critique. But I do think imagining these kids engaging in karate,
00:21:35
Speaker
in an effort to gas themselves up and train for the overthrow of the American Empire and anti-imperialist guerrilla movements, there is a certain cartoonishness to that. And I don't think that means we should mock the whole movement. That's stupid. But I do think even assessing this soberly and even, I think, assessing this from a non-middle class, quote unquote, bourgeois,
00:22:04
Speaker
filter. One can't help but smile a little bit imagining Tom Hayden and company practicing karate, right? Yeah.
Evolution to sophisticated operations
00:22:15
Speaker
But yes, absolutely, if that's where the story ends, just like my dad's story about the University of Delaware ends with the demand for the hockey team. But with the underground, of course, that's just the beginning. It's not where the story ends at all. And they morph into something that was deadly serious and very good at what they did. No one was ever injured, let alone killed of however many
00:22:40
Speaker
bombings they did, I think upwards of a dozen. These people bombed the Pentagon. Even taking into account 1970s security compared to modern security, that takes not merely courage, but careful planning and a certain level of cold-blooded expertise.
00:23:02
Speaker
They managed to elude, mostly elude, capture for the entirety of their existence. And, you know, they busted Timothy Leary out of prison. No, it's not like Timothy Leary was being held in a Supermax facility somewhere, but all the same, it's in most cases, it's not that easy to bust someone out of prison. And so they became from those rather ridiculous beginnings, something very, very serious that I think deserves to be taken seriously. And I also wanted to add to something that you said,
00:23:32
Speaker
I surprised myself in doing this research the degree to which I do not have reservations about them.
Sympathetic views on politically motivated violence
00:23:41
Speaker
I have reservations about certain things here and there, but
00:23:46
Speaker
Certainly no organization is perfect, ever, regardless of whether it's engaged in revolutionary violence or in a more mild-mannered enterprise. But I don't have any moral reservations about bombing the Pentagon when no one's in it. I don't. We can argue the effectiveness of those tactics, but I'm entirely sympathetic to them politically with the caveat that their politics changed a little bit over the years.
00:24:17
Speaker
They sometimes got confused about what their priorities were and they used to do these self-criticism sessions, which is like some fucking therapy if you were at the outermost ring of Dante's Inferno.
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Ludicrous, vaguely Maoist. Clearly they'd gone too far with their ideology, and they were trying to out-revolutionary one another, as it were, and it became absolutely ridiculous. All of that is total nonsense. But like I said, there isn't
00:24:51
Speaker
there isn't any organization that's perfect. And so I'm surprised the degree to which I thought maybe if I looked into these guys, I would be able to dismiss them. And then I would feel better about myself. I would feel better about the world. But in fact, the more I look into them, the more compelled I am to take them seriously.
00:25:06
Speaker
I feel similarly and I also think it's further complexified by the fact that surviving members of the underground to this day have very mixed feelings about their activities and the organization in general.
Reflections and regrets of surviving members
00:25:20
Speaker
I think if we talk to Bernadine Dorn,
00:25:23
Speaker
She's certainly gone on the record and many times at this point, of course she has some regrets and of course she acknowledges mistakes made, but I don't think she would take back or recant most of, if not practically all of what she and others got up to at the peak of the organization's
00:25:45
Speaker
existence. Now, if we pivot it over to Mark Rudd, who's arguably maybe not as important as Dorn, but he's up there, he'd certainly be in the top five, maybe the top three. His memoir, which came out somewhere in the 2000 aughts, does actually, apparently, I haven't read it, but he speaks to it in the same green documentary. Is that his name?
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, and the same Green documentary, he basically is like, I was an arrogant, condescending little shit. And I thought I understood the world perfectly and I didn't. And therefore, if I had the chance to do things over, I would do a lot over. So I find that extremely interesting that it's not just the usual suspects like John Bircher's and whoever the hell else would be vilifying the weather underground to the point of really not engaging in
00:26:36
Speaker
In any sort of helpful or thoughtful analysis it's even members within the organization or former members that. Some have some very deep reservations about what they did while others don't so that's that's interesting but I.
00:26:51
Speaker
I did want to add one thing, man, just to keep the history straight. So the Flint War Council, as it was called, took place in Flint, Michigan between December 27th and the 31st of December of 1969. And I bring that up to say the townhouse bombing, which is probably what they're most infamous for.
Townhouse explosion and tactical shift
00:27:13
Speaker
And if someone were to be asked, what do you know about the weather underground? Don't you think, man, that, like,
00:27:18
Speaker
This is probably the event that everyone knows without fully understanding the context, the townhouse. Yeah, that's that's probably, unfortunately, you're probably correct. That is what they are most infamous for. So the townhouse tragedy, I guess you could call it, in Greenwich Village of March 6, 1970, resulted in the deaths of three prominent members of the underground, Diana Otten, Terry Robbins, and I'm
00:27:47
Speaker
I'm blanking on the third, but basically Diana Alton was Bill Ayers' girlfriend, and Ayers was elsewhere at the time of this tragedy. And just to give a little background on the townhouse explosion, they were actually planning on building, they had dynamite, they were not skilled bomb makers. I don't mean to say obviously in an insensitive way, but
00:28:15
Speaker
They had no background in this, but their intention was to actually bomb, what was it, man, a military... They were going to bomb Fort Dix, but specifically they were going to bomb an NCO dance at Fort Dix, meaning that not only servicemen, but their significant others would be blown up.
00:28:37
Speaker
So essentially civilians, and if it had been successful, they had successfully made these bombs, successfully planted them and successfully detonated them. There's really no telling, but it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility that dozens of people would have been murdered.
00:28:55
Speaker
And so there's a sort of interesting paradox in all of this. On the one hand, it's clearly a tragedy that these three young people died in this heinous way in the townhouse. But on the other hand, had they succeeded in pulling off this attack,
00:29:12
Speaker
The weather underground would certainly be, and perhaps deservedly so, labeled as a terrorist organization, and probably Ayres and Dorn and company would not be walking around today. It would completely change the entire history of and
00:29:29
Speaker
sort of historical development of and legacy of the underground. So I don't mean to say this in a sort of flippant or callous way, but I think they themselves even say in so many words that they're almost lucky that this is how that played out because A, they couldn't carry out what would have been a disastrous action.
00:29:51
Speaker
on many levels, and B, it gave the surviving members an opportunity to think long and hard about what it actually meant to use violence in the service of political ends. And it's from that point that they essentially use, as you've brought up, man, like just empty buildings as their targets instead of human beings, which I mean, it obviously had a, as it should have, profound impact on their tactics.
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah, and just so we do, do them the justice of getting their names right. Diana Alton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold.
00:30:27
Speaker
That's it, Ted Gold. Yeah. So anyway, here we are like sort of in a hodgepodge fashion recounting the history of the underground, which is important to some degree in making this discussion coherent.
Balancing narratives in historical analysis
00:30:41
Speaker
But let's get back to the book. So I'm with you, man, that I think Berger at times lapses into arguably a kind of
00:30:52
Speaker
I don't want to say he was wearing rose-tinted glasses or that he was putting on kid gloves as he handled these folks. He's obviously writing from a sympathetic perspective, unlike Burroughs, Burroughs' book. He obviously, I think, and I mean this with respect, but is clearly
00:31:10
Speaker
very much impressed by David Gilbert, who he opens the book with in his introduction. He pays him a visit in Attica prison. And then this sort of serves as a red thread through the entirety of his book, returning to Gilbert's comments. But so I'm hearing like the first sort of light criticism is maybe a unwillingness to square his shoulders with some of the uglier moments of the weather underground's actions in history. That sounds fair.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean he certainly does get into some of it, but even the self-criticism sessions, he doesn't really get into that much. And if you listen to the way Zayd Dorn tells the story, those play a much bigger role in it. So I do think that Berger may have gone too far in omitting some of the uglier aspects of this history.
00:32:03
Speaker
balance the burger against the boroughs i guess uh... balance the burger against the podcast you know if you're really serious about this stuff you're gonna have to consult multiple sources anyway so there's not gonna be a single bible for any of this
00:32:16
Speaker
And I wanted to add, even though I know you have not read Burroughs' Days of Rage, but I think you could almost use a film terminology to understand the different ways in which Burroughs approached this subject matter and the way that Berger approached it. I think that Burrough approached it from a kind of bird's eye view.
00:32:44
Speaker
where he's sort of like playing the omniscient journalist, attempting a kind of critical distance. And the strength of that in theory is that you don't over-identify with your subject matter. But the weakness of it is that you fail to identify with it even at the barest minimum in order to properly empathize with your subjects.
00:33:08
Speaker
and actually try to get in their heads. And I think it would be fair to say Burrow failed to get into most of these people's heads in his dismissive smug approach in sort of like casting them as clowns and almost as unworthy of trying to understand. Whereas I think Berger, if that's a bird's eye view or an establishing shot, Berger takes the extreme close up or at the very least the close up where he is right in the nitty gritty
00:33:38
Speaker
He's getting his hands dirty. He is trying to get inside David Gilbert's and Bernadine Dorn's and Bill Ayers' heads. But the risk with the close-up is lapsing into over-identification and in doing so losing sight of
00:33:56
Speaker
what deserves respectful critiques that can only be accomplished arguably from a certain degree of critical distance. So I think there's strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. But if I had to choose one over the other, I would choose Berger. Because I think you have to be able to at least try to sympathize with and get inside the heads of your subjects.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah. And here's the thing, man, like we are both, like you said, we're white middle-class people and it's important to remember with the underground, what was happening historically at the time,
Social upheaval and personal activism reflections
00:34:33
Speaker
right? With the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement and the massive upheaval that was happening all around and how easy it was for open-minded young people to just look around and see what kind of enterprise the American government was engaged in in Southeast Asia or
00:34:50
Speaker
how repressive the American government was being at home. And we're not living in those times, but we're living in times that are somewhat similar, right? But here we are, we're sitting in our respective homes, we're living comfortable lives, we're consuming this literature, we're watching these films.
00:35:11
Speaker
To the best of my knowledge, neither you or I have seriously considered forming a left-wing militant group of any kind. Whatever causes we are sympathetic with, being sympathetic to them is not the same as being in solidarity with them.
00:35:31
Speaker
And solidarity takes all kinds of forms, but how do we, like, does the, when you think about the underground, do you get uncomfortable? I think I'm probably, if I, if I were forced to answer that off the cuff, I would, I can't help but go back to what Zayd Dorn, the son of Bernadine and Bill,
00:35:53
Speaker
said about his own parents, and I think he specifically was discussing his mother, Bernadine, at the time, but he basically said, I have never been the sort of person that feels a kind of total confidence in my view of things.
00:36:13
Speaker
And as a result, I have trouble relating to my mother on some level who I think it's clear that he loves her and respects her, but he can't identify with what I think he even used himself as a dogmatic approach to good and evil, right and wrong, her view being correct, and any view that
00:36:35
Speaker
contradicted it or the actions that she engaged in, it didn't sound like it was a particularly complicated thought process for her. And so I feel similarly to Zaid. On the one hand, I respect
00:36:53
Speaker
that these young people, and that's another important thing, right? I have now, I don't know if you've done this yourself, man, but anytime I'm around people who would have been young in the 60s and might have been between the ages of, let's say, 15 and 25, around 1968,
00:37:11
Speaker
I now definitely ask, like, what was that like? And what college did you go to? And was there an SDS chapter? And what was what level of political involvement were you engaged in? And you can probably guess what I'm going to say. 99%, if not 100% basically said either I was not involved at all.
00:37:30
Speaker
or I didn't even know what was going on, or likely both, which I think is important to linger on. We have this idea that all these young people were simultaneously taking to the streets with extremely sophisticated understandings of global politics and even domestic politics. And the reality was it wasn't everyone, it was a fairly small cohort, but nonetheless sizable and real and strong.
00:37:58
Speaker
And these young people that we're talking about, Dorn Ayers, David Gilbert, one way or another, with family upbringing, with experiences they were having, perhaps just on accident, compelled them to really engage with this stuff. But they were outliers.
00:38:16
Speaker
You know, before we even get into like, do I agree with the days of rage, you know, activities where they smash up a ritzy neighborhood and still managed to inadvertently destroy working class people's cars and damage them. They were very much plugged in to
00:38:37
Speaker
all that was going on in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and I guess you could call it the anti-imperialist movement in general, in ways that most young people weren't and still aren't, and still aren't. And so I really respect that. I really respect that what I think I have encountered in these different individuals and their stories and what they did
00:39:02
Speaker
is a moment of clarity where they're like, this is deeply fucked. And I'm on some level complicit, even if my complicity, I mean, it's very complicated, the complicity question, but at the very least, I'm complicit in not doing anything. Therefore, I want to diminish this complicity and show solidarity by doing something substantively helpful. What is that? I think the fact that they were asking those questions then actually trying to do something impresses me.
00:39:32
Speaker
But some of what they got up to depresses me and at times disturbs me. But I don't claim if I were in their shoes, had we been 18, 19, you know, somewhere between 18 and 25 at this point.
00:39:50
Speaker
that they emerged, that we would not have fallen into the same mistakes.
Historical context and moral clarity of activism
00:39:54
Speaker
I'm resistant to say that they were foolish, although I do think some of the actions don't make sense on a tactical level. But I can kind of get around all of that or get out of the granular hyper-critiques, hyper-specific critiques of individual actions and just say, I'm really impressed that these people were so fucking young man,
00:40:16
Speaker
and they'd already developed this kind of consciousness and conscience within themselves, because I do not only take them at their word, I take them at their deed, that they meant this stuff, that they were really disturbed by what the United States was getting up to and by extension what their privilege, their unchecked privilege was directly or indirectly, how that was directly or indirectly
00:40:43
Speaker
impacting and harming people within the country and beyond it.
00:40:47
Speaker
You know, I mean, that's impressive. How the hell did they get there? Wow. I wasn't there at my head so far up my ass at 18. I barely could put my shoes on. And here they are, not only with their shoes on, they're marching with MLK Jr. They're trying to show solidarity with the Black Panthers. They're doing anti-war demonstrations. I mean, Gilbert got up to that stuff at 16 years old. That's astounding to me. Um, so there's my answer. I don't know if I answered it for you, but there it is.
00:41:17
Speaker
Well, in your hypothetical defense, you know, at 16, you couldn't stick your head out the window and see Black Lives Matter protests happening down the street. You couldn't open up your phone and look at video of the police murdering a black man. And so it was sometimes it's contingent just upon what is happening around you that is, you know, just those those people you cited that you spoke to who said,
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, I was there, but I didn't know what was going on. That I think is a little bit unusual. Like if you, I think if you're an, if you're an observant and inquiring person, I think, which we both were when we were teenagers, however far up our respective asses our heads may have been, then, you know, I had you been that age at a different time, you might've had a different reaction. But in my case, it's not, my discomfort does not come from a lack of certainty.
00:42:14
Speaker
I certainly have that in many aspects of my life. I don't particularly suffer from a lack of certainty when it comes to my understanding of the evils of racism, the evils of the US government, the depredations of the US government. I'm pretty confident that I'm right in the way that I assess those things. My discomfort comes from the limited amount of things that I am willing to do in order to fight against those problems.
00:42:44
Speaker
And let me just clarify, I don't have a lack of certainty, I think, over anything you just mentioned. I think where I'm getting at with lack of certainty is lack of certainty in the effectiveness of the tactics.
00:42:57
Speaker
I think that that is something that, of course, there was deep reflection with the townhouse bombing as there should have been. But even beyond that, there's a kind of confidence in all that they did. And even with the symbolic bombing of buildings, I'm with you, too, that obviously if we're talking civilian casualties or empty buildings,
00:43:20
Speaker
an empty building bombed for a particular reason with a political communique attached is far and away an ethically purer action. But I think, and this is where it gets tough, they are part of a very, very large
00:43:38
Speaker
group of other organizations and movements that were all on some level acting in concert for similar ends. One of them was to end the war in Vietnam. So to say, how can we measurably or quantifiably determine the negative or positive impact that the weather underground bombings had in expediting our getting out of that fucked up war?
00:44:05
Speaker
Well, you can't answer that. I mean, it's a stupid question and it's an unanswerable question. But with that being said,
00:44:14
Speaker
And knowing that this isn't a kind of like thing you can plug into a math equation and get a neat answer, I'm not sure I would be as certain of the effectiveness of the tactics they engaged in, in whether or not those got them closer to their goals, to their purported goals. And that's where I differ from a Dorn as Zaid Dorn himself distinguished himself from his mother. If that makes sense.
00:44:41
Speaker
Yeah, no, I totally hear that. And I think you would be hard pressed to make an argument that if you read the communiques they put out around the various bombings, they are cogently reasoned arguments for why this particular government agency or this multinational corporation is culpable
00:45:03
Speaker
in a particular atrocity, and the arguments make sense, and yet it would be difficult to argue that the action itself accomplished much of anything. And even without trying to make some kind of stupid pie chart where you try to apportion responsibility for ending the war in Vietnam, like you said, that would be a stupid thing to try to do, but even without doing that,
00:45:29
Speaker
I think it's safe to say that the Underground's tactics did not succeed in the way that they hoped they would succeed. Nonetheless, I admire them very deeply for trying, and I should clarify that had they gone through with the Fort Dix bombing, we would be having a very different conversation right now, because blowing up people and blowing up buildings without people in them are two things that are so different from one another.
00:45:54
Speaker
that I almost feel like the word violence should not even be applied to blowing up empty buildings. It's like the difference between setting off fireworks and hijacking a plane and flying it into a building. They're just two fundamentally different categories of things that just happen to both involve
00:46:15
Speaker
pyrotechnics. And one point to add that you reminded me of with the plane flying into the building comment, and then I'll get back on track here, just a brief tangent. There were upwards of four bombings a day in the United States in the late 60s and early 70s. That's hard, I think, for people to wrap their heads around.
00:46:39
Speaker
Now granted, many of these bombs were very weak compared to what people have used in modern day bombings. But to give you an example, I can't remember if it was Burroughs' book or it was Burgers, but they recount that a movie theater was bombed in the middle of a screening. Like people were in their seats, a bomb went off, not particularly powerful, but strong enough to, let's say, blow up a couple empty seats, right?
00:47:06
Speaker
They cleared the building, the police came and they said the movie is over and this is a crime scene. And apparently the audience response to give you a sense of how different things were at the time was, give me a fucking break. Can't we just finish the movie? They didn't even want to leave the theater. So I think people need to just keep in mind, and I need to keep in mind, there were hundreds of bombings at the end of each of these really tumultuous years.
00:47:33
Speaker
And our way of relating to bombings today, certainly post 9-11, is just unfathomably different than how bombings were carried out, related to, and really tolerated in some ways as a legitimate form in many circles, even with centered Democrats from what I've read as a legitimate form of symbolic protest.
00:48:00
Speaker
So I think that's an interesting just detail to include. And I just want to add, like, here's where I get stuck, man. Like, you know, they bomb the bathroom and the Pentagon, and then they get these sort of smug responses, like, this is trick or treat.
00:48:16
Speaker
It's a bunch of fucking brats bombing a Pentagon bathroom. What has this accomplished? And even if that is a little bit over the top, because, yeah, there's a communique attached. It is, as you put it, an important symbol of power. And it's not nothing that they accomplished this and maybe in doing so created a platform for forms of, let's say, political critique domestically that needed to be made. Right. But you look at someone like David Dellinger,
00:48:45
Speaker
who I want to learn more about.
Symbolic protests and their effectiveness
00:48:47
Speaker
He was a Catholic priest who engaged in symbolic actions as well. They went after ROTC buildings. They bombed draft folders, making it at least temporarily difficult for those
00:49:03
Speaker
draft boards to send out letters to young American soldiers would be soldiers and hopefully in doing so delayed what could have led these young men to their certain deaths you know and so to me like that is you don't you want to burn some some draft offices and in doing so gum up the machinery of coerced enlistment that makes sense
00:49:28
Speaker
There's a measurable sort of logical cause and effect that I can make an argument for. I don't have as easy of a time as something like bombing the bathroom and the Pentagon. How does that actually work in the service of gumming up the machinery that could ultimately save lives? And number two, if my brain doesn't fail me, where is my brain? What did I want to say? Fuck, I lost it. So go ahead. Go ahead.
00:49:57
Speaker
Well, I think the underground might say that they wanted to make it clear to the public that the American monster was in fact vulnerable, that it was not invincible, that it was capable of being hit where it could be embarrassed. And if you can hit something where you can embarrass it, you can probably hit it where you can hurt it.
00:50:17
Speaker
At the same time, you know, it's one common defense of gun ownership on the right is that the people have to be able to protect themselves from the government, right? Which is, you know, it's a standing joke to point out, you know, like you understand that the government has nuclear weapons and it has like fighter planes and the fact that you have an AR-15 in your house doesn't mean you can stand up to the government, you dumb fuck, right? And there's a little bit of that with the underground where you're like,
00:50:47
Speaker
Yes, blowing up the Pentagon bathroom may have some symbolic value in embarrassing the US government, but past that, you're not gonna make a dent against these guys. So I think putting emphasis on, I feel like I should put violence and quotation marks at this point, but using that kind of violence symbolically makes sense to me. But it seems in the case of the underground that the symbolism
00:51:14
Speaker
that was meant to be inspiring. I think it was meant to inspire people to further action. It was meant to inspire more people to join the revolution. I think the ideal reaction in their minds was, you hear that the Pentagon bathroom has been bombed. And the first thing you think is, fuck yeah. And then the second thing you think is, I want to fight for that team, right? I want to be part of that. What can I do to be a part of this? And that did not seem to happen at all.
00:51:42
Speaker
But like you pointed out at the same time,
00:51:45
Speaker
underground disintegrated following the end of the Vietnam War. And as you pointed out, that caused confusion among a lot of groups on the left. You know, it's like the dog that finally catches the car, like, oh, Mike, what the fuck do I do now? Right. And so these bombings that are happening on a daily basis are happening in this incredibly fraught climate. And the end of the war is the kind of thing where
00:52:15
Speaker
everybody took a deep breath. And who am I to say that in all the uproar, in all the chaos, all the thousands of people mobbing the streets with anti-war slogans, who am I to say that a significant percentage of them were not motivated by having heard about a weather underground action? There comes a point where you just can't untangle all this stuff.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have the surveys available because I assume they never were sent out. And I don't think a lot of people that were sympathetic to the underground would fill out a survey, even if it was anonymous saying, how have your political leanings and actions been negatively or positively influenced by these symbolic bombings by the weather underground? But with that being said, I see kind of a dual thing going on here, the pro and the con. Here's the pro.
00:53:09
Speaker
And I think it speaks to your arguments here. The pro would be that, hey, look at how, yeah, you have, you want to go against the army with your little bombs, the U.S. Army. You want to go against the National Guard. Good fucking luck. Like that's going to be fatal. At the same time, there is a certain pride, I think they should rightfully feel, that Herbert, or excuse me, J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon, who we have to know, we know, it's not that we have, we know,
00:53:39
Speaker
because it's documented, they were pathologically disturbed by the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and they were pathologically committed to the point of engaging in criminality, hence COINTELPRO, and ultimately what didn't allow them to prosecute any of these people really in any substantive way, to destroying them, and they couldn't.
00:54:01
Speaker
And I think that's hats off to the underground. They did in some ways successfully evade and poke holes in the US police and surveillance apparatus. And that's impressive.
00:54:17
Speaker
Yeah, fuck yeah. No, if my only legacy in the world was that I had given J. Edgar Hoover an ulcer, then I would be quite proud of myself. And he gave them a lot, they gave them a lot fucking more than an ulcer, right? I mean, and they, yeah, it's incredible with, and again, back to your point, like these are disciplined young people.
00:54:33
Speaker
and they did not fuck around and they were careful with what they did in many regards. Now the flip side, right? I could actually see, because I did, I have talked to enough older folks now as well that were young at that time that said either their parents or I guess their grandparents, either of democratic or right-leaning politics, were already souring on Vietnam. Like that was becoming more and more of a popular thing.
00:55:01
Speaker
And again, knowing that we can't refer to a survey that doesn't exist or studies that don't exist, I wonder how many centrist Democrats wound up voting for Nixon because of organizations like the underground bombing buildings in the name of anti-war sentiment, which was just a bridge too far.
00:55:23
Speaker
for not political radicals, but those that were sympathetic to the anti-war movement, even on the right, but certainly center-left. I don't know. I could hear an argument being made that they inadvertently dumped a bunch of Democratic votes in the lap of Nixon's second election.
00:55:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think about my own grandparents. My grandfather was a World War II veteran, a very conservative man, a school principal. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't swear, attended church religiously.
00:55:58
Speaker
And he took, when my father was 17 or 18, he took him aside and said, if your number comes up in the draft, I will drive you to Canada myself. There it is. There it is. And I don't think that he was influenced in his thinking probably by groups like the Weather Underground. And if anything, I suspect that had he paid attention to them, they would have driven him further to the right. Exactly.
00:56:19
Speaker
Yeah.
Modern militant left and legacy challenges
00:56:20
Speaker
So you drafted a list of questions ahead of this recording, and I did the same. And there was a little bit of overlap between our questions. I want to combine two of them, if that's okay with you. Question that I- How dare you? How dare you?
00:56:36
Speaker
Well, it's this is a communal enterprise Robert. So how could you you're just gonna have to relinquish your piece of the the delectable capitalist pie in this particular instance and Going in the diary going in the diary. All right. Oh, yeah So my question was
00:56:56
Speaker
Why is there no longer a militant left? Your question was, can assessing the successes, failures, and legacy of the Weather Underground help those on the left today in developing strategies in the service of changing the world for the better? I think we can fold those two questions into one discussion.
00:57:19
Speaker
I wanted to ask, because there isn't a militant left, not in the mainstream. BLM is not a militant organization. It's pretty decentralized also. Antifa, whatever Antifa is, that's not really a centralized organization either. There was a period not that long ago when you had
00:57:42
Speaker
the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army and FAL and the list goes on and on and on. And these were significant organizations that performed significant actions with varying degrees of success, but they were known entities and that no longer exists. If we're talking about militant political organizations these days, we're almost exclusively looking at the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the dumb white women for liberty or whatever the fuck they're called.
00:58:12
Speaker
Is there an argument to be made that the underground itself contributed to the demise of the militant left in America? Because one thing that Berger gets into, although he doesn't explicitly map it out, but concomitant with the rise of militant activism on the left was a rise in
00:58:51
Speaker
Many ex-Panthers remain political prisoners to this day. The government basically created a zero tolerance policy when it came to political dissent. Is that why we don't have a militant left anymore? Or is there another reason that I'm overlooking? So I struggle with this because
00:59:00
Speaker
repressive tactics on the part
00:59:14
Speaker
I think we can run the risk, like I certainly can, but I think the left can in general of like not recognizing, and that's probably actually in large part a consequence of privilege that a lot of these issues, if not all of them remain live and very much in need of intervention. Certainly we could talk about detention centers for immigrants seeking refuge.
00:59:42
Speaker
We could talk about just the prison industrial complex in general, which I don't know enough about. I want to learn more about. Dan Berger actually has written extensively on that topic multiple books, and I'd recommend to anyone to read Outlaws in America, but certainly look into his work in the prison systems. And also, he has a recent book called
01:00:05
Speaker
I think it was stayed on freedom that came out like this year, that's looking at more of the like militant and black power wings of the civil rights movement in the United States, interviewing people that are still alive and contributing
01:00:22
Speaker
I think very substantively to that historiography, much needed. So I'm glad he's out there doing that. But why did I go there? I want there to say firstly that it's not as if these issues have ceased. They're still live and they're still in need of action and strategizing and turning the strategy into intelligent action.
01:00:49
Speaker
And you tell me if this is, keeping in mind what I've just shared, like if this is one of the reasons. We read up on the Vietnam War, right? We don't even need to read up on it. The footage is astounding, right? I mean, the journalists and the newscasters that got access to all kinds of craziness in Vietnam on the ground. I mean, many historians argue
01:01:13
Speaker
from all sides of the political spectrum that that in many ways is what lost the war on the domestic front in terms of popular sentiment was just having to watch these body bags getting loaded onto planes and all this gruesome gore night after night
01:01:31
Speaker
blasting out of television screens in the living rooms of Americans all across the country, really, irrespective of class differences. Most folks could get to a TV or had a TV, and most folks were watching those same images.
01:01:46
Speaker
In some ways, I could hear an argument like those lines are clear. Those issues are stark. The stakes were high and the involvement on some level and the question of which fucking side are you going to be on? This actually on some level isn't complicated.
01:02:08
Speaker
Are you really going to support this war or are you going to push back against it? I almost want to say that these young people, and this isn't to say I want, I wish a war on ourselves as fucked up as Vietnam, because I don't. But on some level, because the villains, I think, were clearer, and what you were pushing back against was also arguably clearer.
01:02:35
Speaker
it made it easier to pick a side and to get involved and even to get militant if we want to call it that.
01:02:42
Speaker
Today, we don't have a Vietnam. We had Iraq. I was too young to get involved in any kind of anti-war activity regarding our recent engagements in the Middle East. But even that war was the sort of like, I think of Todd Solon's movie, what's it called? Anyway, it's basically looking at Florida in the midst of the Iraq war, life during wartime. That's what it's called.
01:03:10
Speaker
You know, the movie is interesting because it basically shows this incredibly depressing but also darkly hilarious sort of like suburban community of white folks and this young boy visiting his grandma. And every once in a while you get a line like, but grandma, like we're at fucking war. Like we are at war right now.
01:03:33
Speaker
and she's like yeah honey but you know that's over there and we're over here and it's sort of abstract and i think there's actually like a deep comment there a deep thought which is that kid or no kid myself i think even if i were twenty although i i wish i wasn't that way at twenty it's just so much easier to go like what do you even line up to fight against i know that we're fighting theoretically against
01:04:00
Speaker
imperialism we're fighting against oppression we're fighting against um out and out violence uh against civilians and and populations that do not have no business being in the crossfire of that of our craziness and yet we don't have a vietnam war we don't have these sort of issues or or richard nixon we don't have a water gate although we have had a
01:04:25
Speaker
a Trump, I don't know what you want to call it, a series of Trump events that in many ways far surpass anything that Nixon got up to. And that's worth noting. And so I feel torn, man, that the part of me says we don't have issues that were as in your face or the issues that as they express themselves in 1969 were much more in the faces of young people than they are today.
Mainstream media portrayal of leftist movements
01:04:52
Speaker
And consequently, it's harder for us to pick a side and even know after having picked a side what it looks like to push back. But again, this might be kind of my own, like the mainstream media, so to speak.
01:05:08
Speaker
has done a brilliant job of minimizing things like Occupy Wall Street, has done a brilliant job of minimizing any number of moments that have emerged that would count as arguably leftist militant actions and turned it into a clownish escapade, all barely even worthy of the news, of reporting. And so, I don't know, how is this sitting with you? Do you think there's any truth in
01:05:36
Speaker
Obviously, the issues as they stood then stand now. We're not done with these problems, but because the problems were so front and center in American society and American consciousness, it was a little bit arguably easier to say, okay, I'm picking a fucking side and I'm actually going to do something substantive here. I don't know, man. I think a lot of these things are
01:06:03
Speaker
quite comparable. I mean, the police filming themselves murdering black people, I think is pretty in your face and pretty clear. And, you know, my own mother, conservative leaning mother, 70 years old, wanted to attend a Black Lives Matter protest, and the only reason she didn't was because of COVID.
01:06:22
Speaker
And I think that was very much a result of, you know, this has become inescapable. I can't look away from it anymore. So I think you can certainly argue that, well, on January 6th, I mean, you know, a bunch of MAGA assholes storming their way into the Capitol is also pretty in your face and look at, you know,
01:06:40
Speaker
the right just denies that that ever happened. They say it was a false flag operation. So you could certainly argue that Nixon numbed us in a way so that the excesses of the Trump administration seemed less appalling, I guess, on the whole, but then that's tied into the self-delusion that the right has to maintain to fuel its own rage all the time.
01:07:08
Speaker
But, you know, I made a comment, it might have been on the very first episode of this this podcast. I made a passing comment about how the left will always come for itself. Right. That the left is always falling out in disputes and virtues, signaling as competition and trying to outwoke itself.
Internal disputes and collective action challenges
01:07:28
Speaker
And so it is difficult for me having sort of come of age politically in that environment to see
01:07:35
Speaker
the left being able to organize itself that well. But all the same, I am still surprised at the lack of a coherent, organized, militant response. Maybe it speaks to the efficacy of the federal government in terrifying all of us, right? Yeah, I don't know.
01:07:57
Speaker
If I had to make a guess, it would be more in the apathy department that it would be in the fear department. Like what, what will this possibly accomplish to go out in the streets and carry a sign or to go in front of a detention center that has been flagged by the ACLU as engaging in human rights violations and just protest in front of it, you know, make a stink. And, um,
01:08:21
Speaker
I think that's probably mistaken. I know, for instance, in the state of New Mexico, we have detention centers. It might take me an hour, maybe two at the most, and I could be in front of one. It's essentially right at my front door. Certainly, one of the penitentiaries is right at my front door. I could drive 25 minutes from my house and be in front of it. Why don't I?
01:08:50
Speaker
I don't know. There's a part of me that thinks that I don't know how effective it is to stand in front of those buildings with signs and protest in the name of any number of reasonable causes.
01:09:06
Speaker
At the same time, I think I have to hold myself accountable and say there's probably a certain degree of indolence involved in that, and laziness and apathy, maybe cynicism. But I also, to be a little more charitable, wonder, like, we're not all built to be doing the same things, even within
01:09:28
Speaker
parties or organizations that hold the same values, political convictions, and are in theory fighting for the same goals. So what my role is on the left in relation to another person, in relation to another person, I guess it's for each of us to figure that out and then decide inwardly on many levels whether we are
01:09:54
Speaker
making decisions that are genuinely in keeping with our abilities and are speaking to a mode of living or a mode of carrying out or living your values that feels actually genuine and that feels like you're really putting in real effort.
01:10:16
Speaker
I think there's a part of me but i'm open to the fact that i might be deluding myself that just does not self identify as one of the like on the ground protesters with a sign.
01:10:29
Speaker
But that doesn't mean I disrespect them or I certainly do respect them. And I think it's important and necessary why I haven't, why I continue to resist that. I don't know. I need to think more about that. But I do think at least I'm holding out the possibility that
01:10:48
Speaker
We all can serve a very valuable functions in, uh, trying to achieve, I think fairly unanimous aims. Maybe part of, if not the bulk of that hard work is, uh, consists in just figuring out where you fit. What do you think?
01:11:07
Speaker
I don't know. One of the downfalls of the Underground was certainly its inability to recognize for a long period of time that different people had different roles and there was room in the tent for everyone if you weren't an asshole about it. Another question that I raised preparatory to this was, is it possible to be a revolutionary without a dogmatic faith that amounts to religion?
01:11:33
Speaker
that's often what happens with revolutions is that they turn into, you know, whether it's the, the Russian revolution or Mao's cultural revolution or whatever, is that they turn into effectively religions and you have to parrot the dogma exactly or you are heretic and you are burned at the stake. And it seems to me that the, the level of conviction that you need in order to
01:11:59
Speaker
power revolution to sustain revolution to lead revolution, that level of conviction in order to be sustained long term has to come from a place that sooner or later is essentially sort of straddling the line between conviction and fanaticism. And fanaticism makes me nervous. Having said that, though,
01:12:30
Speaker
What do I do to make the world a better place or to make society a better place? Basically, nothing. Absolutely nothing. I used to argue in good faith with people on Facebook.
01:12:43
Speaker
which sounds like such a ridiculous thing to do, much less to bring up. But I, you know, I had some success changing some minds here and there about important issues. And the end result of it was that I got exhausted and I was tired of making the same arguments to people who really I thought should have known better already and shouldn't need me to explain things to them. And I'm glad that I was able to help, I guess a little bit during the time in my life when I was engaged in those things.
01:13:10
Speaker
I'm not on social media anymore. I just leave the people on Facebook to post whatever hateful shit they want. I'm not going to see it. I'm not going to argue with it. And I have a conservative neighbor who flies flags out in front of my house that I find offensive and my way of dealing with it is to ignore him and to try not to engage with him.
01:13:28
Speaker
Overall, I think inside I've just kind of succumbed to this sort of nihilism. It's not that I think it doesn't matter because of course it matters. In a way it matters more than anything else. In a way it matters more than anything I will ever do. But I don't.
01:13:47
Speaker
I was listening to a podcast today, one that you and I both listened to, and they kept using the word progress and progressive causes. I think we both recently read Jean-Ameriz's At the Mind's Limits, which we mentioned on a previous episode. He points out that progress is like a 19th century invention.
01:14:10
Speaker
Martin Luther King comes along and says the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. No, it doesn't. I don't believe that at all. Progress is a recent human fiction, and the moral arc of the universe does not bend towards anything whatsoever. There is no moral arc of the universe.
01:14:32
Speaker
When I say that progress is an invention, I don't mean for a second to imply that granting rights to marginalized people is not a kind of progress. I just mean that it is an illusion to think that that's some sort of inevitable unfolding that is going to happen and that represents some fundamental truth about the universe it doesn't.
01:14:57
Speaker
And I think in the face of those things, I have succumbed to a kind of paralysis. And I don't know that it's a permanent paralysis and it doesn't mean that I'm going to go kill myself, but it is not a motivating force. It's not a catalyzing force that makes me want to go join up or make a sign or pick up a weapon or write a letter or do anything like that, really.
01:15:27
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that I'm with you and I relate to that kind of feeling of impotence and feeling of potential jadedness, right? And like, what can I possibly do here? But I think this actually might be an opportunity to then return to like, what critiques of any can I come up with, uh, regarding the underground, um, and their activities or even their, their, their mode of orientation. And I would say a big one could be.
01:15:57
Speaker
When you're confronting these kinds of questions at the individual level, what can I do as the not president, as the not head of the FBI, as the person without any perceivable political power? I'm just a normal person. What can I possibly do to bend history towards justice or work in the service of humane causes?
01:16:28
Speaker
I think that we could probably level the critique at some of the underground members as they have against themselves, Rudd most notably.
01:16:39
Speaker
that there was a kind of arrogance involved in their way of answering this question for themselves. And the arrogance led to a certain arguable sense of grandiosity and narcissism that ultimately compelled them to think they needed to do grand things in order for those actions to count.
Role of major actions in achieving outcomes
01:17:04
Speaker
And I think when you
01:17:07
Speaker
wind up in that kind of thinking, you run the risk of that townhouse situation. Where it's like, if I'm not blowing up a fort, if I'm not doing something fucking absolutely out of the bounds of normalcy, I'm therefore not doing anything at all. And I think that
01:17:29
Speaker
I don't say that to then negate or condemn extreme responses to extreme situations like we could go back to the Civil War and just say, hey, I know that that shit developed over a long period. It didn't all just happen at once. But I think we can safely say that courteous discourse was not going to be the way to destroy the institution of slavery, which needed to be destroyed on moral grounds.
01:17:58
Speaker
And eventually somebody had to pick up a gun, and it wound up being that tens of thousands of people had to pick up guns in order to destroy the institution of slavery. I would say a civil war, if there ever was a grand gesture, that's a grand gesture, right? And one that was necessary to end a repugnant institution. With that being said,
01:18:23
Speaker
to pivot back to these young folks in the 60s, I think they're looking at the situation going, we need to do something too that really demonstrates we mean business. But I think you can run the risk if you're not careful in thinking those are the only gestures that count as something that's valuable or worthy. And I don't think that's how reality really works, even if I myself
01:18:53
Speaker
feel the tensions inherent in this problem as a single person wanting to be thoughtful, wanting to be in solidarity with those who are in much more fucked positions than I can possibly imagine, but wanting to do that in a, again, critical, reflective way. I don't want to be so hasty in my desire to show solidarity
01:19:22
Speaker
with movements or groups that I fail to properly think through if what I'm doing is or is not a sound tactical action. And I do think that that is where those weathermen and women found themselves at certain points. They fail to really think through in their hastyness to identify with
01:19:49
Speaker
those that they wanted to show their support to, and in doing so, I think they made some very big mistakes, you know? I have two things to say in reply to that. One of them is abstract or general, the other is personal.
Differences in certainty between left and right
01:20:04
Speaker
The reason that the right is militant and is so willing to engage in activities that the left is not is that
01:20:14
Speaker
the defining characteristic of the right is a lack of self-awareness, a lack of awareness in general. And so you are therefore immune almost from the beginning from self-doubt. And so certainty comes easily to you and you then proceed to wield certainty like a weapon, right? The personal thing is that when I was young, I read a lot of C.S. Lewis. I was raised in a Christian environment and Lewis was a
01:20:41
Speaker
Christian intellectuals, so in my struggles with trying to reconcile my own personality with the religion I thought I needed to be a part of, I gravitated towards Christian intellectuals. I haven't touched Lewis in years. The man was an idiot because his thinking was entirely shot through with religious nonsense. I just said he was an idiot, but he was also a very smart man.
01:21:05
Speaker
That's what things like religion do to you if you're smart. You can have smart idiots. I think that counts. Yeah, it's totally a real thing. And we've all been one at some point or another in our lives. But I remember Lewis at one point citing a scene in King Lear. And I've not read Lear in years, but I think it's Gloucester who is watching Lear. Lear is growing increasingly paranoid and he's making increasingly poor decisions. And at one point, Gloucester stands up to protest.
01:21:35
Speaker
Lear orders that his eyes be put out and Gloucester is then blind for the rest of the play and Lewis singles that out as an example of a man who knew an atrocity when he saw it and was not going to stand for it and
01:21:49
Speaker
I remember thinking that's the sort of person that I want to be. I want to recognize an atrocity when I see it, and then I want to stand up to it. I don't think that is the sort of person that I turned into, and I don't mean that in a self-flagellating kind of way. It's something that I think is that I need to remember about myself, and that's not to say that there never will come a time in my life when I
01:22:17
Speaker
won't be able to be that person, but I don't know that in the course of this conversation that I'm going to find the answer to the question that I want to ask about myself. And if nothing else, reading about the weather underground, talking about the weather underground makes me think about myself.
Influence of history on political convictions
01:22:37
Speaker
I struggle with this man as a teacher.
01:22:40
Speaker
You know, like I've taught in a public school for eight years and I do think that there actually is a genuine difference and probably greater value in teaching at a public versus a private for reasons that I think are self-evident.
01:22:56
Speaker
And I went into it essentially apolitical, and I'm happy to confess that, but I had history foisted on me. I don't have a background in history, but I was asked to do it because I have degrees in the humanities, and that's how it went. They needed someone to teach them history classes. They asked me, and I immediately developed gluten intolerance and insomnia at the chronic level upon accepting that request. It was intense.
01:23:24
Speaker
I just want to point out that you actually, before you became a teacher, were notorious for being completely well adjusted in every conceivable way to the fact that people were like, well, I guess I can't call Robert. It's 1030 at night. He's already sound asleep. And then someone thrust a history book into your hands and now you're just a shuddering
01:23:46
Speaker
jangle of nerves. I'll accept that narrative rendition of my life and that's a that's a hagiography as they say but anyway I essentially went in apolitical and in reading history intensely I think anyone who does that whether you're a professional historian or otherwise high school teacher whether you're just a curious person that wants to learn stuff
01:24:12
Speaker
it will force you to confront your own political convictions. I think it has to. And so it absolutely transformed me. And it absolutely transformed me to be able to spar with this material with young people in a public school. And I think there's a part of me that wants to be
01:24:36
Speaker
let myself off the hook and say, well, hey, I'm not like a Bitcoin miner. I'm not a investor in, uh, raw materials in foreign countries that are fucking up their own people in order for me to profit from that resource extraction. You're not David Berman's dad. I'm not David Berman's, uh, yeah, cigarette, uh, tobacco and firearm lobbyist, uh, dad. No.
01:25:05
Speaker
And I could make that argument and say, well, okay, so on the spectrum of people who fuck up the world, I'm certainly not a professional activist or urban guerrilla revolutionary, but I'm certainly not a lobbyist for tobacco and firearms.
01:25:26
Speaker
All right, maybe the argument could be made, I've got a little less work to do than some, you know, in further cultivating, clarifying and figuring out how to make my values and my politics actionable and consistent with how I live.
01:25:42
Speaker
But I've been constantly dogman and in some ways the more I've read it's like the more you know the more you realize you don't
Privilege, skepticism, and meaningful activism
01:25:49
Speaker
know. I feel like the more history you read and the more your politics are clarified the more you realize you aren't doing enough but you don't necessarily know what doing more looks like.
01:26:03
Speaker
And that's where I am today. I'm sort of like, I can't really let myself off the hook, nor should I, nor should we. And let's call it the white middle class privileged contingency of the left, right? We can't let ourselves off the hook. And I think Dorn and company remind us of that for all of the faults of their organization, for all the mistakes that they made. That is correct.
01:26:26
Speaker
But I've been really stuck, man, unlike I don't think it's enough to just clock in even to a public school and give your students your all and try to not force your opinions onto them, but to maybe do a little bit.
01:26:43
Speaker
in moving them towards critically minded engagements with the world and therefore also living in ways that hopefully make the world better. I don't think it's enough and so what to do beyond that? I'm scratching my head as we speak and I've been figuratively scratching my head
01:27:05
Speaker
with differing degrees of intensity, I think it's become more intense, not less, as I've learned more about the world and US involvement in the world and how I fit in the world. On the one hand, I reject the potentially sort of like narcissistic
01:27:22
Speaker
grand gesture, John Wayne-ism, or as Fred Hampton famously put it, the custurism, the custuristic tactics of smashing up ritzy neighborhoods that the underground engaged in with the days of rage. But on the other hand, I'm far from comfortable with my own level of contributions to making the world better. And I don't have a clear view of how to concretely
01:27:52
Speaker
and substantively go about clarifying that. I'm trying, but I don't know. So we're going to be, next episode, we're going to be talking about something a little less deadly serious than this, but we're going to come back to this, man. Like this is not our first time talking about this, this topic. So let's, let's kind of consider this part one.
Future exploration of Weather Underground
01:28:15
Speaker
Well, actually it's like part four since we've botched the previous three attempts.
01:28:20
Speaker
Yeah. This is like Star Wars. This is like episode 17, phantom, anti-capitalist menace. Capitalism, the phantom menace. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Our podcast is very poorly written, but has some interesting special effects. That's good.