Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Nation on the Weathermen: What could be as quintessentially American as a work accident?

The Nation currently has a a review essay of Weatherperson Cathy Wilkerson's Flying Close to the Sun. Besides actually referring to Wilkerson as a "terrorist," and also reminding us of the history of nail-studded bombs meant for dancers, the essay reflects on the "American" character of the lovable SDS:
[...] The movement's revolutionary turn was not so much a measure of its un- or anti-American character, as conservative critics would have it, but rather an indication that, if anything, the New Left might have been a bit too American for its own good. Its impatience with the half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk ("putting your body on the line," as the saying went) revealed the movement as an exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant antinomian tradition of radical individualism--one whose adherents defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings of God's voice wherever they might lead. "John Brown is a good symbol for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to attack Harper's Ferry." [...]

Wilkerson's fame, or rather infamy, was bound up with a single moment five months later, on March 6, 1970, the date of the "Townhouse Explosion." The building in question, on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, belonged to Wilkerson's father, a well-to-do New York City advertising executive who had no idea that his wayward 25-year-old daughter was using it in his absence as a temporary safe house and bomb factory. While she was upstairs on that March morning incongruously ironing sheets, three of her comrades were in the basement putting the finishing touches on a nail-studded dynamite bomb they intended to plant and set off that night at a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Their desire to "bring the war home" with a homemade antipersonnel weapon outstripped their understanding of electrical circuitry, however, and instead of killing others, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Diana Oughton killed themselves. [...]
Thereby sparing us memoirs (and reviews in the Nation), no doubt. Towards the end the essay comments:
An entire page is devoted to a poem written in 1970 commemorating Ted Gold, one of Cathy Wilkerson's three comrades who died in the Townhouse Explosion, including the line "he is dead/Of a bomb meant for better targets." Really? Would the "better targets" have been just the soldiers at the dance at Fort Dix, or would they have included their girlfriends and wives as well?
Can you imagine the Nation asking this about Hamas terrorists? I thought not.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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