I attended part of a January 20, 2006, "day workshop of interventions" -- aka "a day of dialogic interventions" -- at Columbia University on "Radical Politics and the Ethics of Life."1 The event aimed "to stage a series of encounters . . . to bring to light . . . the political aporias [sic] erected by the praxis of urban guerrilla groups" in Europe and the United States from the 1960s to the 80s.2 Hosted by Columbia's Anthropology Department, workshop speakers included veterans and leaders of the Weather Underground Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, historian Jeremy Varon, poststructuralist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a dozen others. The panel I sat through was just awful.3
Veterans of Weather (as well as some fans) seem to be on a drive to rehabilitate, cleanse, and perhaps revive it -- not necessarily as a new organization, but rather as an ideological component of present and future movements. There have been signs of such a sanitization and romanticization for some time. A landmark in this rehabilitation is Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Beacon Press 2001; Penguin Books 2003). This is a dubious account, full of anachronisms, inaccuracies, unacknowledged borrowings from unnamed sources (such as the documentary, Atomic Cafe, 17-19), adding up to an attempt to cover over the fact that Ayers was there only for a part of the things he describes in a volume that nonetheless presents itself as a memoir. It's also faux literary and soft core ("warm and wet and welcoming"(68)), "ruby mouth"(38), "she felt warm and moist"(81)), full of archaic sexism, littered with boasts of Ayers's sexual achievements, utterly untouched by feminism. (Among Ayers's many errors are some that betray ignorance of the Women's Liberation Movement: he repeats the media-generated myth that 1968 Miss America protesters burned their bras (117).)
Ayers is the perfect Weatherman: "Hostility to feminism," writes Dan Berger in a new history of Weather, "characterized the organization from the beginning"4 -- and this at a time when radical feminism was growing. Weather kept its distance from one of the most vibrant movements of its time, taking such archaic positions as "The Women's Question is a Class Question," just a part of capitalism rather than patriarchy.5
There are too many inaccuracies in Fugitive Days to list here. Some are petty: Howdy Doody fans will wonder whether Ayers's "Uncle Bob" (24) is the same as "Buffalo Bob." But some of the errors reflect political blind spots. One such error concerns Marion Delgado, who was a kind of a Weather saint, but Ayers can't even keep his hagiography straight. A photo of Marion, a five- year-old Chicano boy, smiling and holding up a piece of concrete, appeared in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) weekly paper, New Left Notes, with a caption indicating that he had caused a train wreck with his concrete. Weatherpeople began, in hommage to this act, to sign and present themselves as "Marion Delgado." But Ayers (144) places this event in Italy -- with all of Weather's third worldism, he can't tell the difference between Italians and Mexicans (or Californians) -- and says that the train that Delgado derailed was a freight train, and that nobody was hurt. Inaccuracies aside, it's bizarre for a political group to admire this child's act. In a learned disquisition on Marion, Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York 1973), 605n explains that Marion had derailed a passenger train in California in 1947. Ayers's changing a passenger train to a freight train, and his stress on the claim that there were thus no injuries, is one of many sanitizations in his book.
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