Alan Wieder : Bill Ayers' 'Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident'

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In his ongoing journey, and with his new memoir, 'Public Enemy,' Bill Ayers continues to bring the radical 'spark' forward.

Image from Uprising Radio.

By Alan Wieder | The Rag Blog | January 7, 2014

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn will speak at "Underground Goes Overboard," a launch party for TheRagBlog.com, at 7 p.m., Friday, January 17, at the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin. They will also be Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio earlier that same day, from 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live. Go here for other stations and times, and for podcast information.

[Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident by Bill Ayers (2013: Beacon Press); Hardcover; 240 pp; $24.95.]

“They just don’t get it.” Yes, the phrase is overused, yet, all too appropriate when addressing the continuing critiques, from both the left and the right, of Bill Ayers.

The recent publication of the second phase of his memoir, Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident (Beacon, 2013), was followed on the “SDS and ‘60s Leftists” page of Facebook by an unthoughtful conversation on Ayers, his comrade and wife Bernardine Dohrn, and the Weather Underground (WO).

Facilitated by George Fish and responding to a negative book review by Jon Wiener, 43 comments followed Fish’s post. Mostly sour, bitter, and ahistorical in tone, the comments provide the antithesis of Ayers’ book and life, that of learning from the past and continuing, in a human and life-affirming way, the ongoing struggle that began for Ayers in the civil rights movement, antiwar movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and then the Weather Underground.

When confronted by a radio interviewer who referred to the subtitle as snide, Ayers softly replied that the entire title was chosen for its irony. Missing both the breadth and depth of Public Enemy, the interviewer, as well as Wiener and other critics, fail to acknowledge the thoughtfulness and energy that Ayers brings to struggle, both past and present.

In this particular book, we alternate between the author’s recollections of first, his experience in the 2008 attempt to demonize Barack Obama because he “palled around with terrorists,” and, second, the years after he surfaced from underground beginning in 1980 from where Ayers left off in his previous book, Fugitive Days.

There are both multiple and complex events, issues, and ideas presented in Public Enemy. A sampling will be discussed in this review.

Recently, South African anti-apartheid struggle leader and Constitutional Court Justice (comparable to the U.S. Supreme Court) Albie Sachs spoke at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. Talking about his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Sachs emphasized the importance of acknowledgement for both personal and political healing.

Acknowledgement causes me to return to the radio interviewer’s portrayal of Confessions of An American Dissident as snide. In fact, irony aside, Ayers responded by talking about acknowledging one particular flaw during his time in WO. He asserted that neither he nor his comrades ever doubted their positions and that by not being skeptical they were arrogant and without reflection.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission.

Doubt is discussed in Public Enemy and Ayers also talks about apologetics within a conceptual framework of an American Truth Commission. In both the book and current media interviews, Ayers has continually repeated that neither he nor the WO ever killed anyone in the bombings of buildings.

Not only did I never kill or injure anyone, but in the six years of its existence, the Weather Underground never killed or injured anyone either. We crossed lines of legality to be sure, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense, but it was restrained, and those are the simple, straightforward facts.

The correct term for Weather Underground bombings, in correspondence to the armed struggle in South Africa, is “armed propaganda.” And like Umkhonto We Sizwe underground soldiers in South Africa, Ayers would welcome the opportunity to answer queries about his WO activities at an American TRC.

In Public Enemy Ayers writes:

America, it seemed to me, was in urgent need of some kind of truth and reconciliation process… We needed a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more balanced future… Everyone together would have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering, and the victimizers would be asked why and how they created that misery. Society would have the opportunity to witness all of it in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us and moving forward. In that setting and standing with Kissinger and McCain, McNamara and Kerry, Bush and Cheney, I’d be happy to say exactly what I did, take full responsibility, and bow deeply. But without any chain of culpability whatsoever, I’ll stand on the record, or just stand aside.

While five chapters in Public Enemy present the threats and blacklisting Bill Ayers experienced during and after the 2008 presidential campaign, I will address the topic with brevity as it has already been explored in other reviews. An in-depth description and analysis is portrayed in Maya Schwenwar’s Truthout review, “Bill Ayers Weighs in on Democracy, Selfhood, and His ‘Unrepentant Terrorist’ Alter-Ego.”

Besides endless email threats and having someone actually come to his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Ayers was banned from talking on college campuses throughout the country. At the time my colleague at the University of South Carolina, Craig Kridel, the Curator of the Museum of Education, posted a page titled “The Bill Ayers Problem” on the Museum webpage. The page title, like Public Enemy, is ironic and at the time I wrote:

The inequality, unfairness, violence, and global greed are what Bill Ayers has fought against for many years. The fight is every bit as important today as it was during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War. And while some people might call me insensitive because I refuse to enter a debate on Bill Ayers as a terrorist, I choose not to speak back to the cries of O’Reilly, Hannity, and Colmes and their nameless comrades because the work Bill Ayers is doing does not need defenders but, rather, supporters and allies that fight for a more just world. Finally, as an academic who works with teachers who fought against apartheid in South Africa, I can’t help but think that the same people who define Bill Ayers as a terrorist would have given that label to Nelson Mandela and his less known comrades during the struggle against the apartheid regime. We know now what history says about that – we can only hope that Bill Ayers and many other people continue their work as progressive educators and activists.

But Bill Ayers does not rail against his detractors in his writing. Rather, while he is critical in a political/personal way of their harassment and silencing and analyzes their actions, his emphasis is a celebration of people who continue the struggle. While the story of the cancellation of his talk at the University of Wyoming is politically important, from Ayers we learn more about the woman who fought for his right to speak. More accurately, she fought for her own free speech.

"I’m going to sue the university in federal court," she told me during our first conversation. "And I’m claiming that it’s my free speech that’s been violated – I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you." She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used – no fear, no regret. I liked her immediately. Meg’s approach struck me as quite brilliant – students (and not I) were indeed the injured party.

The University of Wyoming student won the case and Bill Ayers spoke on democracy and education with over 1,000 people at the University. In discussing the event, he also honors his sister’s father-in-law, a retired United Church of Christ minister who drove a couple of hours to Laramie for the talk and told Bill: “‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways,’ he said with a wink and a smile gesturing with his Bible. ‘If any of the crazy Christians get out of hand, he wants me to set them straight.’”

Ayers writes of other cancellations at places throughout the country. The University of Nebraska stands out but only because he was in Tapai at the time and was woken with the news from a dean at three in the morning.

In contrast to Nebraska, there are brave academics at Millersville University and Georgia Southern University where Ayers was welcomed. At Millersville administrators explained that it was their “duty and honor” to have him speak. “It’s not about you personally, it’s about the mission and the meaning of the university.”

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy.

Honoring people throughout Bill Ayers’ journey is the stuff of Public Enemy. One of the funniest yet potent tales is the reaction of Ayers’ comrade and friend, Michael Klonsky, when he was invited to give an education conference keynote address. The organization told Klonsky that they had intended to invite Bill Ayers but that he was “too controversial and too radical.” Klonsky scolded the inviter saying: “How dare you ask me to scab on Bill Ayers?” When Ayers thanked him, he replied: “Defending you? I wasn’t defending you, I was defending myself – I was deeply and personally offended when they said that your were too radical, and by implication that I wasn’t too radical. I’m as radical as you are, motherfucker.”

Bill Ayers’ book is about issues, ideas, actions, and people – it is not solely about Bill Ayers. Epsie Reyes was a colleague at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She supported Hillary, not Barack, in the 2008 democratic primaries, and she was one of many people who consoled Bill Ayers after Hillary Clinton first demonized him in a primary presidential debate.

Reyes sent strong emails to both Clinton and the Democratic National Committee “detailing how much money she’d donated and how many weekends she’d devoted to organizing on her behalf, explaining who I really was in her ‘humble opinion,’ and encouraging, then demanding that the campaign apologize to me personally and denounce the smears – or else she would have to rethink her commitments.”

Close friends and colleagues, of course, also came through in both 2001 and 2008. Mona and Rashid Khalidi were both supportive and insightful as were dozens of others. In 2008 there was a surprise call from Edward Said: “Of course it’s painful for you personally, but cringing and going quiet is the worst thing you could do at this moment. Your kids are watching you and your students too and a lot of others. Don’t let them down.”

Said’s message corresponds to the entirety of Public Enemy. Ayers celebrates political struggle and the people who try to sustain the fight. Two quotes come to mind, the first from a speech by Paul Potter referred to in the book. “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” Margaret Meade’s words correspond to Potter’s connecting the personal to the collective. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In addition to the 2001, 2008, and more recent stories, Public Enemy includes portraits from the time Bernardine and Bill came up from underground in 1980. Ayers writes admiringly about his childrens’ pre-school teacher at the time, BJ, whom he refers to as “an inspired early childhood educator.” “She was one of a kind, and everyone knew it.” Ayers’ portrait of BJ brought a response in Ron Jacobs’ Dissident Voice article, “Get Bill Ayers”: “Indeed, the truest hero in the book is the family’s New York child care provider, BJ.”

On Bill’s journey we meet Bernardine’s lawyers Eleanora Kennedy and Michael Kennedy and various other people including Ellie and Robby Meeropol who were Bill’s friends at the University of Michigan. Robby was the son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and he was three years old when his parents were executed.

Bernardine and Bill had just adopted Chesa Boudin whose parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, had been sentenced for murder in the Brinks Robbery in Nyack, New York. Robby explained that there was no road map and that times would be rough for Chesa – honest responses are very much a part of the many vignettes that Ayers presents throughout Public Enemy.

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family...

The real heart of the book, however, within the context of continuing struggle, is the authentic portrayal of the Dohrn/Ayers family – Bernardine Dohrn and their sons Chesa, Malik, and Zayd. The book depicts seriousness and humor and mostly respect and admiration. There is a story from the early above ground days that I must include in this review.

Leaving swim class one day, we were swept up into a raucous women-led march heading from Broadway and Fifty-ninth Street toward Times Square. "No more porn! No more porn! No more porn!" we chanted ecstatically, fists pumping and voices rising as we entered the pornography district. It was a feisty and colorful crowd, our attendance just a happy accident, but with Zayd cheerfully perched on my shoulders we were in high spirits and quite pleased to be in cahoots. Soon we spotted a pizza stand along the route, and Zayd was famished from swimming and ready for a slice, so we settled into a booth. Zayd reflected on the parade we’d just left: "That was fun," he said. "Why don’t we want more corn?"

Ayers tells the story of all three sons advising him during 2008 and the respect appears to go both ways. Pages 129 to 131 serve as an illustration as Malik, Zayd, and Chesa join Bernardine in coaxing Bill not to speak with the media – a disposition alien to his being. Malik warns him of ambush and it recalls Mailer’s self-admonitions of never talk to the press – they control the story.

The consensus from them, in line with Bernardine’s steady and consistent basic instinct, was that whatever happened on the web or in the press, we should simply turn away. No comment, no elaboration, no clarification, no response. "Be completely quiet," they said, "and stay calm." "It’s harder then it sounds," Zayd added, looking right at me, "especially for you." True, too true: I tend to have a lot on my mind – who doesn’t? – and I’m genetically wired to speak up and speak out, and not always with considered judgment. My default position, no matter what, is to say something… "You’ll get flattened," they now said in unison.

Bill Ayers remained silent through 2008, but of course, “palling around with terrorists” quietly lives on. There is an ethos throughout Public Enemy, consistently present in the ideas, issues, actions, and people portrayed in the book, amidst everything else – this book is homage to Bernardine Dohrn.

Her strength, thoughtfulness, commitment, and humanity is the spirit of Public Enemy: Confessions of An American Dissident. Whether it is gently chiding Bill with their children or being warmly welcomed back by the judge in Chicago when she surfaced from underground – her humanity is ever present. Political commitment is obvious in Dohrn’s first above ground statement: “This is no surrender. The fight against racism and war continues, and I will spend my energy organizing to defeat the American empire.”

Ayers writes of her actions and dispositions when she was imprisoned at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York for refusing to give Grand Jury testimony on the Brinks Robbery. The emotion of being away from her kids but at the same time focused political commitment. There is also a great story of her mother passing on contraband when she visited the prison – a chocolate chip cookie!

There is much more to Public Enemy than the samples that I present. Bill Ayers critiques the Weather Underground and provides much more breadth to the ideas, issues, actions, people, and events he portrays. He also pushes his story to the present and therein lies the further message. Ayers, Dohrn, and many of their WO (and beyond) comrades continue to work for the same issues they have pursued beginning in the sixties.

For Ayers it is education and more and the latter includes working with young activists who continue the fight for the end of racism, class disparity, and imperialism. First in the civil rights movement, then SDS and WO, Ayers was part of the “spark” for a just world. His book is a partial story of continuing to keep that “spark” alive today.

This article was first published at Dissident Voice and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was published in the United States by Monthly Review Press and in South Africa by Jacana Media. Read more articles by Alan Wieder on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Alan Wieder : Thai Jones Draws 'A Radical Line'

Generations in the struggle:
A 'retro-review' of 
Thai Jones' A Radical Line

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War.

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / June 24, 2013

[A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience by Thai Jones (2004: Free Press); Hardcover; 336 pp; $26.]

Reading Neil Gordon’s novel and then viewing Robert Redford’s film, The Company You Keep, a fictitious portrayal of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), led me to re-read Thai Jones’ book on his family -- his mom and dad, WUO people Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their parents, Albert Jones a Quaker and WWII conscientious objector and Annie and Arthur Stein, labor movement people and both members of the Communist Party.

While I actually liked Redford’s film, and the book even more, A Radical Line is much more encompassing as it portrays generations and real lives in the continuing struggle for a democratic, socialist America -- yes, Eleanor and Jeff and I think Thai, as well as many of their WUO comrades and their children, continue the fight today.

I had no intention of writing a review as I began to re-read A Radical Line. The story, though, is so engrossing, and Thai Jones’ combination of detail, thoughtfulness, and drama pull you in as words bring depth to his extended family as well as the collective, progressive struggle in the United States.

Jones’ craft as a writer shows in the book's poignant beginning, as Jones describes his parents being arrested -- reflecting on his own memories of the event as a four year old child.

There had to be something I could do to help my parents. I made a fast survey of my possessions: a cowboy outfit, a coloring book, a stuffed Tyrannosaurus. I opened the drawer of my little desk and picked up my child’s scissors. The ends were rounded, and the blades were covered by blue plastic guards. Bouncing them in my hand and snipping at the air, I considered putting on the cowboy hat and charging into the hallway with scissors blazing to defeat these men who had come to hurt our family. Even then, I knew it was a battle against long odds. But I didn’t realize it was a question that many in my family had already faced. They had chosen to fight.

Throughout A Radical Line the progressive fights of Thai Jones’ extended families, Weather Underground and earlier, are connected to the collective struggle against class disparity, racism, and the Viet Nam War. Jeff Jones was raised in Southern California and his father worked for Walt Disney Corporation. But as already noted, Albert Jones was a pacifist, and his experience working as a conscientious objector at Civilian Public Service Camp #37 in Coleville, California, during WWII is itself a story.

 His path was not easy as his father disapproved and church people at the Methodist congregation that nurtured his views abandoned him -- Camp #37 became home:

He was surrounded by pacifists. Each Sunday they held a silent Quaker meeting, and that was the only time in the week that the men were not in heated discussions about their faith. Coming here, Albert finally felt welcome.

Jeff Jones’ early lessons were pacifism and peace and not a long leap to the civil rights movement and opposing the Viet Nam War.

Eleanor Stein’s parents were much more political. Annie was introduced to socialism in high school and was politicized even further as a student at Hunter College. Thai Jones describes her early participation in the National Student League and the Communist Party.

It was Annie who politicized Arthur. Initially she was disheartened because her husband was apolitical, but she began leaving copies of The Daily Worker around their apartment and soon Arthur was attending meetings and demonstrations.

Like Albert Jones’s lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Annie and Arthur Stein never stopped fighting class disparity and racism. In the book, Thai remembers Albert’s assertion to Jeff before the Days of Rage: “Son, I believe very strongly in your goals. But if you set out to hurt somebody, I would hope and pray that you are hurt first.”

Concurrently, Eleanor was clearly nurtured by Annie’s work with civil rights stalwart Mary Church Terrell and her political work on education in New York City. She was also nurtured by her father’s labor activism, his founding of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter in Brooklyn, and his appearance before HUAC, where he was represented by Victor Rabinowitz, the attorney who also represented Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.

Annie and Arthur sent Eleanor to Camp Lakeside, a "red diaper" summer camp. Eleanor recalled her mother’s expulsion from the CP over China and mother continued to lecture daughter throughout Eleanor’s WUO years:

“Look,” Annie would tell Eleanor, “I lived through the 1930s when the capitalist system was on the ropes. Labor unions were strong and men were out of work, on breadlines.” Pausing for effect, she would light a cigarette, sip her scotch and soda, and go to the bookshelf for her copy of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? "It was obvious in 1917,” she would say, waving the book in her daughter’s face. “The workers were in the streets. Who is going to run the means of production in your revolution? The hippies? You’ve got to be kidding.”

The heart of A Radical Line, however, is Jeff and Eleanor’s lives in SDS and the Weather Underground and their coming together as a couple. There are rich photographs in the center of the book -- especially one of Eleanor wearing her lambswool jacket with a raised fist salute in front of Columbia University Law School. Most endearing is a page with portraits of both Thai, as a very young child, and Jeff in running gear.

We learn about Eleanor quitting law school after participating in the Columbia University student takeover in 1968 and of Jeff joining SDS while a student at Antioch. There are other events that have been written about by Mark Rudd, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers, and others; but Thai Jones presents a different take, new insights, and of course issues that still leave us with questions about the Weather Underground and the struggle in general.

We learn a great deal about WUO life underground but for the purpose of this review I would like to address one particular issue.

It begins in early July 1969, when Eleanor was part of a delegation that went to Cuba to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front and of the North Vietnamese government. Others on the trip included Bernardine Dohrn and Diana Oughton.

The North Vietnamese had invited Eleanor and her comrades so that they could interact and learn how the anti-war movement in the United States might help to end the War in Vietnam. One of the first lessons was on the lack of focus of American activism. The teacher pointed out that day that anti-war slogans and chants, like

"No More Vietnams" vs. "Two, Three, Many Vietnams"
"No More Wars" vs "Bring the War Home"
"Long Live the Victory of the People’s War" vs. "Make Love not War"

were contradictory. What was the goal?

The Americans traveled Cuba with their Vietnamese mentors and one man, Nguyen Thai, stood out -- the man from whom Thai Jones inherited his name. There were hours and hours of discussions and Eleanor and the other Americans became focused on taking one message to the masses back home: “End the War Now.”

When they returned to the U.S., however, they were informed that their leadership had decided to form small collectives; their job was not to organize the masses. Thai Jones writes, “Before Eleanor had even clanked down the gangway to the shore, Nguyen Thai’s plan for an all-encompassing mass movement was sunk.”

And I would argue, that it was at this point, before the forming of the Weather Underground, before the Townhouse bombing, before the manifestos and armed propaganda, before freeing and then being betrayed by Timothy Leary, and before the breakup of WUO, the youth movement for social justice and equality in the United States was doomed. That is, doomed as a movement.

While the Vietnamese spoke of -- and represented -- a people’s movement, people on the ground weren’t included in the United States. The people of WUO and the anti-war movement in general were young -- we didn’t take the lessons that others taught us. We didn’t pay attention to how different Fidel and Che’s revolution in Cuba was from Che’s adventurist foray into Bolivia. We didn’t know how to organize a people’s war.

My analysis, of course, is only about a small part of Thai Jones’s book. And the people that he writes about, particularly his parents Eleanor Stein and Jeff Jones, as well as their WUO comrades, have continued, maybe not as a movement, but nevertheless continued, the fight to end class disparity and racism in the United States and throughout the World.

Their mistakes as well as their continuing commitment and passion offer important lessons. As does Thai Jones’ book, A Radical Line.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His new book, from Monthly Review Books is titled Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid.]

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FILM / Jonah Raskin : Robert Redford 'Keeps Company' with the Sixties Underground

'The Company You Keep':
Robert Redford's overambitious
take on the Sixties underground

He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 1, 2013

The Company You Keep, released in December 2012, was directed by Robert Redford with a screenplay by Lem Dobbs based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon.

Robert Redford’s new movie, The Company You Keep, boasts a huge cast of characters that includes cops, reporters, FBI agents, and former members of an organization of 1960s/1970s radicals that resembles the Weather Underground. A few of the characters are on the run and the target of a manhunt, while others have crept back into the halls of respectability and want nothing to do with their former comrades.

Redford himself certainly remembers that era of seemingly unending protest, resistance, and an invincible underground as well as anyone else in the movie industry today, except perhaps the director and screenwriter Haskell Wexler (best known for Medium Cool, 1969).

Indeed, Redford was near the height of his movie career when fugitives in the Weather Underground set off bombs in federal, state, and local government buildings to protest the war machine, the criminal justice system, along with imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and more.

Redford is, of course, also familiar with Sam Green’s 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, which tends to romanticize the fugitives and their clandestine organization. The picture was nominated for an Oscar after it made the rounds at Redford’s Sundance Film Festival.

Neil Gordon, the author of the novel that inspired the movie, had the cooperation of former members of the Weather Underground. Like Sam Green, Gordon also romanticizes the characters he portrays. He once told me he thought of the Weather Underground as the American equivalent of the African National Conference (ANC), the organization that helped end apartheid in South Africa. Like others before him, Gordon fell prey to myth.

There’s something about fugitives that makes them endearing, even when they’re desperados such as Duke Mantee, the gangster on the run played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1936 classic, The Petrified Forest. But perhaps that endearing quality has vanished in the era of terrorists and terrorism when whole neighborhoods are locked down.

I know the pitfalls of writing about fugitives, though I often found the actualities of fugitive life mundane. I remember an occasion more than 30 years ago when the FBI launched a massive hunt for the Weathermen and Weatherwomen. Curiously, they didn’t panic. Instead, they calmly and deliberately destroyed everything in their possession that might have led to their capture.

And they spent days wearing rubber gloves, wiping every surface perfectly clean in an apartment to eradicate fingerprints. That took dedication, but it certainly wasn’t glamorous. From the actualities of fugitives cleaning an apartment with Ajax you can’t really make a dramatic picture.

Mimi, the most fetching of the fugitives in Redford’s picture -- played to perfection by Julie Christie -- makes a speech in which she says that everything she once protested against is as insidious as ever before, and perhaps even more so. She’s eloquent and so is the character that Redford plays.

He’s an ex-radical who has reinvented himself as a liberal lawyer. His past catches up with him and so he goes in search of his own past to clear his name. The hunter is hunted. Mimi is the only person who can help him. By the end of the movie, he finds her and convinces her to come out of hiding and rescue him.

The character Redford plays is also a widower with a young daughter who doesn’t know who he really is or what he’s done in the past. Between the two of them, there’s a huge generation gap. Redford also has a beautiful older daughter -- his love child -- who was born underground, then adopted and raised by a police officer and his wife. (That part of the story doesn’t make any sense. When the picture tries to tie-up loose ends it only makes more of a mess.)

Both daughters are in the dark. Like the younger daughter, the older daughter doesn’t know that her real father was a Sixties radical who went on the lam. Nor does she know that she has a half-sister. The two sisters don’t ever meet. Family secrets flourish until the FBI flushes them out. Moreover, the older sister never meets her biological mother, Mimi, who has survived underground as a drug smuggler.

All the pieces in this big jigsaw puzzle of a picture don’t fit together.

Redford was overly ambitious. He clearly wanted to make an epic about then and now, about Sixties radicals and their kids, and he couldn’t pull it off. His ending is anti-climactic, though it also avoids a great many Hollywood clichés. There are no bombings and nothing is blown up -- a real virtue in a picture about bombers and bombers.

There’s a long chase by car, train and on foot. Indeed, Redford’s character is on the run most of the time, though he’s long past his prime running days. Even his designer running shoes don’t help him. An old, ex-radical trying to run from the FBI presents a rather comic figure. Old fugitives can’t run. That much is clear, though it’s also clear that the acting is stellar. Redford elicited stunning performances from his team.

Along with Julie Christie, there’s Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliott, and Chris Cooper. It’s almost as if Redford called all of his old Hollywood pals and asked them to join with him and to make a picture that would pay homage to the Sixties and bury ideological hatchets.

It’s a kinder, gentler America that Redford would like -- along with integrity in journalism and fresh organic food from local farms. But nothing bigger or bolder. Even Mimi, the most revolutionary of the characters, hasn’t any hope for revolution.

The personal is more important than the political for Redford and for the character he plays. In The Company You Keep, family and friends carry more weight than ideology, and in that sense the picture does seem to accurately reflect the lives of former Weather Underground members who have almost all married, embraced monogamy, become moms and dads, raised families, become lawyers and doctors, joined the middle class and remained loyal to one another.

But has no one really become a moral monster? Or poor? Or serve a life sentence in prison? The picture gives the impression that all the old New Leftists became solidly middle class with cars, toys, and gadgets. Perhaps so, though Dave Gilbert and Judy Clark, two Weather Undergrounders, are both behind bars.

Watching the picture, I found myself caring about the characters. I kept waiting to see whether Redford would be captured by the cops -- or if he’d remain at large. Still, there’s something musty and outdated about the picture that prevented me from getting emotionally caught up in the dramatic conflicts. The news got in the way.

Think about the recent bombings in Boston and the manhunt for the two brothers suspected of planting the explosives, and then think of Redford’s movie, and it’s clear that we’re in another era with a whole other set of rules. The Company You Keep is mostly an exercise in nostalgia.

The bombers of today bear little if any resemblance to the Weather Underground bombers of yesterday who were white, middle class, college educated, well-read in Marx and Mao, atheists or agnostics, and not motivated by religion or ethnicity.

I never once met a single member of the Weather Underground who knew a thing about Chechnya or about Islam. Geopolitics have changed, and the power of law enforcement has grown exponentially. If today’s tactics had been applied to the Weather Undergrounders they wouldn’t have remained at-large for a decade.

It’s too bad Redford didn’t make his picture in, say, 1980. It would have seemed a lot more relevant then. Now, it’s a curiosity, though it’s also a reminder that older actors such as Nick Nolte, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon can still give strong performances. The young Shia LaBeouf does a credible job as an idealistic, fledgling reporter carrying on the tradition of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

You remember those guys don’t you? Redford starred in the picture, All the President’s Men, as Bob Woodward of The Washington Post and Watergate fame who helped bring down President Nixon. And surely you remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), another movie about outlaws and fugitives that stars Redford and Paul Newman and that inspired the Weather Undergrounders. All the guys wanted to be Butch or Sundance and to go out in a blaze of glory.

What hasn’t changed, of course, after all all these years, is the chemistry of the company you keep. The title of Redford’s movie about fugitives on the run seems to suggest that one ought to be careful about choosing one’s associates. Guilt by association goes a long way.

In the era of Homeland Security, the company one keeps can be as harmful to one’s health, as it was during the Salem witch trials more than 300 years ago or during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. So, if you’re going to conspire, make sure you conspire with the ones you really love.

[Jonah Raskin, a long-time journalist and activist and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, was involved with the Yippies and, tangentially, with the Weather Underground. He is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Rick Ayers : Gilbert's Memoir Helps Us Understand Our History

Love and Struggle:
David Gilbert’s memoir helps us
understand our history and the world today

By Rick Ayers / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2012

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

This is the third review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle published on The Rag Blog. We have run multiple reviews of the same book in the past, when the articles have covered different territory and when we have considered the material to be of special interest to our readers. And we consider this to be a very important book. Also see the Rag Blog reviews of Love and Struggle by Ron Jacobs and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

As I write this, four presidents in Latin America are veterans of revolutionary guerrilla struggles of the 1960’s. Pepe Mujica of Uruguay was a member of the Tupamaros and among those political prisoners who escaped from Punta Carretas Prison in 1971; Mauricio Funes of El Salvador is a member of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) and his brother was killed fighting in the Salvadoran civil war; Daniel Ortega was a leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front which fought an 18-year guerrilla war; and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil was a member of the urban guerrilla group National Liberation Command (COLINA) which carried out armed attacks and bank robberies in the late 60’s.

David Gilbert, who is of the same aspirational generation, is living a dramatically contrasting life -- presently doing life in a New York prison. His recently released memoir, Love and Struggle, My life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, opens the door onto a world that mostly exists as some distorted corner of the political imagination of the U.S. in 2012.

But it’s a world and a story that is vivid and compelling -- and one worth paying attention to at precisely this moment as a young generation of activists is generating its own stories on Wall Street and beyond.

Like Mujica, Funes, and Rousseff, Gilbert was a militant fighter in the 60s and 70s -- but he found himself at war from within what Che Guevara called the “belly of the beast.”

The actor and activist Peter Coyote had this to say about the memoir: "Like many of his contemporaries, David Gilbert gambled his life on a vision of a more just and generous world. His particular bet cost him the last three decades in prison and, whether or not you agree with his youthful decision, you can be the beneficiary of his years of deep thought, reflection, and analysis on the reality we all share. I urge you to read it."

Written under the appalling conditions of imprisonment in the massive U.S. prison-industrial complex -- under the endless dangers, harassments, and frustrations of life in various New York prisons -- the existence of this volume is itself an amazing accomplishment.

Gilbert explores crucial issues of the 60’s and today: racism, imperialism, the oppression of women, and the crisis of capitalism. The fact that it is self-critical without being maudlin or self-pitying, the fact that he has crafted a reflective, modest, and ultimately hopeful picture of his life and times, makes Love and Struggle particularly welcome.

We were, as a generation, born into war. After the “good war” to defeat fascism in the 1940’s, the U.S. continued a series of military engagements designed to defeat liberation movements and assure its economic dominance in the world. While most everyone today agrees that the war on Vietnam was at best a mistake and more accurately a genocidal horror, it is curious how the American narrative has twisted even that memory.

Those who seek to draw the U.S. into more military adventures cynically extol the veterans of the war as heroes while leaving a record number of homeless vets to fend for themselves on the streets or to populate the prisons. At the same time, they denigrate the veterans of the resistance. Those who were right, in other words, are never honored in the corporate media -- they are erased and disappeared

While David Gilbert represents an extreme of the resistance movement, and while the Brinks robbery which landed him in prison was thoughtless and harmful, Gilbert reminds us that it is essential to confront the many war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam -- and continues to commit here and around the world -- with no consequences.

David’s life sentence does not square with Lt. William Calley’s sentence of three years house arrest for the massacre of 104 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1971 or John McCain’s record of bombing civilians from the air, wanton crimes against humanity; and it does not make sense against the other My Lai’s that occurred on a weekly basis.

Beyond the actions of troops on the ground, a just society would have prepared war crimes trials for top military and political leaders who ordered carpet bombing of civilian areas, the vast deployment of napalm and Agent Orange, the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” assassination program, the decade-long, “secret” aerial bombardment of Laos, as well as the Cointelpro attacks against African American and Native American activists in the U.S. that resulted in hundreds being killed and imprisoned.

David Gilbert does not ask us to forget the costly human consequences of the 1981 Brinks robbery in which three people were killed and which landed him in prison. But his memoir forces us to encounter and understand much more about the struggles of the 60s and 70s.

Since the release of Sam Greene and Bill Siegel’s film Weather Underground in 2002, there has been a resurgence of interest in those in the U.S. who went from protest to resistance and from resistance to clandestine actions. Five or six “Weather” memoirs have come out in the past decade -- each with a different approach or take on the history.

Two excerpts will perhaps capture some of the intensity of his insight and analysis. In discussing the work of the Weather Underground to build a clandestine movement against U.S. international wars, he reminds us of the example of Portugal:

"1974 brought an unanticipated but exhilarating boost to the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism. On April 25, the dictatorship that had ruled Portugal with an iron hand since 1932 was overthrown. Popular discontent had been central and radicals, including socialists and communists, were major forces in the new constellation of power. The new government soon ceded independence to all of Portugal’s remaining colonies. The series of colonial wars in Africa had drained Portugal’s resources and economy, and that created the conditions for radical internal changes.

We saw the relatively poor imperial nation of Portugal as a possible small-scale model of what could happen to the far more powerful U.S. after a protracted period of economic losses and strains brought on by "two, three, many Vietnams." The costs of a series of imperial wars could crack open the potential of radical change within the home country."

And he often counters narrow and stupid characterizations of the 60s and 70s, reminding us of the human faces behind the mythology of the radical movements.

In discussing the death of Teddy Gold, his old friend from Columbia University, he seeks to set the record straight:

"When Teddy and two other comrades were killed in the tragic townhouse explosion, J. Kirkpatrick Sale immediately published a piece in The Nation defining Teddy as the epitome of "guilt politics." I don’t think Sale ever met Teddy; he certainly didn’t know him. Sale’s rush to judgment probably came from his urgency to discredit any political push toward armed struggle. The "guilt politics" mantra just didn’t fit the deep level of identification we felt with Third World people; and far from feeling guilt, with its condescending sense that we are so much better off than they are, we were responding to their leadership.

The national liberation movements were providing the tangible hope that a better world was possible. Those who caricatured him never saw Teddy on his return from Cuba -- the very picture of inspiration, energy, and hope. The word that captures Teddy’s psyche as he built the New York collective was not guilt but exuberance."

Whether you agree with much that David says or very little, Love and Struggle is a book you won’t soon forget.

[Rick Ayers was co-founder of and lead teacher at the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and is currently Adjunct Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco. He is author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom, published by Teachers College Press. He can be reached at rayers@berkeley.edu. Read more articles by Rick Ayers on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : David Gilbert's 'Love and Struggle'

David Gibert's Love and Struggle:
A brother with a furious mind

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2012

Also see Mumia Abu-Jamal's review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle on The Rag Blog.

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

In 1981, a group of revolutionaries robbed a Brink’s armored truck near Nyack, New York. In the ensuing confusion and attempt to flee, three people died from gunfire. A couple days later, one of the revolutionaries was killed by law enforcement.

The robbery itself was planned and carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army: a group of former Black Panthers who had chosen armed struggle, and the May 19 Communist organization, which was founded by white revolutionaries also dedicated to armed struggle. One of those members was former Weather Underground member David Gilbert.

Gilbert is currently serving a sentence of 75 years to life in the New York State prison system. Other May 19th members arrested in relation to the robbery have been paroled or pardoned.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, California, publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of U.S. history known as the Sixties.

There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past 50 years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the U.S. South.

That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the U.S. war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the U.S. was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life -- his loves and failures, his relationship with his family -- with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution.

This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war U.S. left to the Brinks robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text.

In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the New Left as the U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end.

For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the U.S.; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego.

The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States.

Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary.

his does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely.

Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also proving interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune.

That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

[Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. This article was also published at CounterPunch and Dissident Voice. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com.]

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BOOKS / Mumia Abu-Jamal : Days of Rage and Revolution

Author and former member of the Weather Underground, David Gilbert, is a prisoner at the Auburn Correctional Facility, Auburn, N.Y. Photo from Indybay.com.
David Gilbert's Love and Struggle:
Days of rage, rebellion, and revolution

By Mumia Abu-Jamal / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2012

Also see Ron Jacobs' review of David Gilbert's Love and Struggle on The Rag Blog.

[Love and Struggle: My Life with SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, by David Gilbert. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, December 2011); Paperback, 384 pp, $22.]

Perhaps it is the times: the election of a Black president. The renewal of the right wing, or even something so prosaic as the press of age, but there has been a resurgence of Weather Underground material of late.

David Gilbert, a published author (No Surrender), a long time prison AIDS prevention activist, and a founding member of the Weather Underground has joined that number.

Without commenting on the nature and/or motivations of many of the other works, Gilbert’s reason for writing this volume, which he has strongly resisted in the past, is clear.

First, he pens it because his adult son, Chesa, requested he do so, announcing his previous work “almost all analytical.” Like many men and women of this new Twitter-age, what seems most important is the personal, rather than the political.

Secondly, hundreds of activists in various movements have written to him, and while they seemed to be looking back at Weather as an almost mythical organization, Gilbert felt the need to demythologize both the movement and the era, and speak openly of the mistakes made as well.

This is not Glory Days. It is a reflective, critical (and self-critical), gripping, and, yes, tragic account of an important and pivotal movement in the 20th century. How it came to be, the forces which brought it into being, as well as the internal and external forces which ripped it asunder, are here for all to see -- naked as a newborn.

What theory should we follow? What principles should drive our working inter-organizational relationships? Should we adopt Maoism? Marxism-Leninism? How do we fight the State? These questions and more are hashed out; some more thoroughly than others.

Gilbert is a fine writer, and despite the understandable reluctance to write this kind of movement memoir (many in the movement looked down on such things as individualistic), he does so with remarkable honesty, sensitivity, and insight.

What makes this work shine, however, is its forthright take on an issue that, even today is regarded with alarm -- race.

Race -- that is, the reality of race as lived by real people, in Vietnam, and in Harlem, opened an idealistic Jewish boy’s eyes into the dangerous knowledge that things weren’t as his teachers -- or even his parents (not to mention his rabbi) -- said.

Inquisitive, intellectually curious, questioning by culture and training, he sought his own answers of why the world was the way it was -- and thus, albeit unknowingly, he began his trek towards the revolutionary road.

We learn, as was is the case with many of his generation, that the powerful, uncompromising orations of Malcolm X stirred him from his slumber. While a student at Columbia, Gilbert attends a speech by Malcolm -- three days later the Muslim minister was assassinated. He also recounts the hypnotic and captivating power of Black music (rhythm and blues) that opened up a young, sensitive soul to the humanity and beauty of Black people. (We can only wonder what message lies encoded in today’s Black music, and what resonates in the minds of today’s white youth who listen.)

Gilbert has trod this ground before (of shortcomings of the white radical movement of the era) in some of his essays in No Surrender, but here, he recounts the missteps, the supremacist attitudes, and yes, the betrayals that occurred on that long, red road, one which has substantial echoes in American history whenever whites and Blacks opted to join hands against the rulers.

With Love and Struggle, David Gilbert adds heart and bone to the stuff of distant (mid-20th century?) history. He, in a sense, explains why we are where we are, in this schizophrenic nation, where our stated claims of equality fall lifeless and as dead as turned leaves before they hit the ground. In a sense, this work is a testament to the road not taken -- against racism (in fact and not merely in symbol) and anti-imperialism (as the nation grapples in a slew of imperial wars).

To illustrate by way of example and pure serendipity, this very day, when I have completed the manuscript, a news report interrupts from a tinny whining local radio station. A 60-ish prison guard at SCI-Pittsburgh has just been indicted for over 90 counts of sexual abuse of prisoners, many of whom are themselves in prison on sexual abuse charges (usually of children).

The reporter, reading a wire service account, quotes the Allegheny County DA as saying “at least” 11 other guards will be arrested shortly for similar charges stemming from the rapes of imprisoned men -- or their activities in forcing other men to sexually assault other prisoners. Now, one wonders, why is this even remotely relevant to the review of Gilbert’s book, a trek through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s?

Because Gilbert and his cohorts, idealists all, sought to transform American society, in part because 40 years ago, they saw the savagery the State unleashed at Attica, the upstate New York prison, where 43 people -- prisoners and guards alike -- were slaughtered by state troopers on orders of then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Gilbert and his comrades sought to wipe that kind of racist violence from the nation’s history.

Forty years later, we have rape prisons -- unofficial, yes, but no less real. And for millions of Americans who pride themselves as reasonable, good, Christian folks (well, white folks), they could not care less.

They fought, imperfectly, to be sure, to bring forth another future -- certainly not this.

For that, they should be studied.

For that, they should be taken seriously.

For that, Struggle should be read.

For that, they should be remembered.

[Celebrated political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is an African-American writer and journalist, author of six books and hundreds of columns and articles, who has spent the last 29 years on Pennsylvania’s death row. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book -- Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the USA -- is available from City Lights Books. This review was first published at SocialistViewpoint.]

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Rag Radio : Academic/Activist Bernardine Dohrn, Former Leader of Weather Underground

Academic/activist Bernardine Dohrn, former leader of Weather
Underground, on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio this Friday, October 28, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP 91-7-FM in Austin, will be singer/songwriter and community activist Charlie Faye. Stream it live here.

Bernardine Dohrn, activist, academic, and child advocate, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio Friday, October 21.

Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of the Northwestern University School of Law, and founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center. Bernardine was a national leader of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Weather Underground, and was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for over a decade.

Dohrn writes and lectures on war and peace, racism and justice, reconciliation and restorative justice, children in conflict with the law, human rights, torture, and family violence. Bernardine Dohrn is also a contributor to The Rag Blog.

On the show we discuss the historical importance of SDS and Bernardine looks back on the Weather Underground and her role in the controversial group; she discusses the declining status of the American empire and the differences between the Sixties and today; and she offers a critique of the criminal justice system and the effect of incarceration on our young people, especially those of color. She is upbeat about today's youth, the possibilities for social change in America, and the mushrooming Occupy Wall Street movement.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Also see:

• Jonah Raskin's interview with Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.
• Articles by and about Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.

Thorne Dreyer, 2011 Eddy Award Winner

Thanks to Kerry Awn and the Uranium Savages for naming Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer the 2011 Eddy Award Winner for "Radio Personality of the Year." Our congratulations to the other winners, including Jim Franklin, Bubble Puppy, and the South Austin Popular Culture Center. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.

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Jonah Raskin : A Rag Blog Interview with Bernardine Dohrn

Bernardine Dohrn. Photo by Thomas Good / Next Left Notes.
Never the 'good girl,' not then, not now:
A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 20, 2011

Bernardine Dohrn will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin (and streamed live on the Internet), Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT). Also, go here to listen to Thorne Dreyer's Oct. 7, 2011, Rag Radio interview with journalist/activist Jonah Raskin.

Who doesn’t have a reaction to the name and the reputation of Bernadine Dohrn? Is there anyone over the age of 60 who doesn’t remember her role at the outrageous Days of Rage demonstrations, her picture on FBI “wanted posters,” or her dramatic surrender to law enforcement officials in Chicago after a decade as a fugitive?

To former members of SDS, anti-war activists, Yippies, Black Panthers, White Panthers, women’s liberationists, along with students and scholars of Weatherman and the Weather Underground, she probably needs no introduction.

Sam Green featured her in his award-winning 2002 film, The Weather Underground. Todd Gitlin added to her iconic stature in his benchmark cultural history, The Sixties, though he was never on her side of the ideological splits or she on his. Dozens of books about the long decade of defiance have documented and mythologized Dohrn’s role as an American radical. Of course, her flamboyant husband and long-time partner, Bill Ayers, has been at her side for decades, aiding and abetting her much of the time, and adding to her legendary renown and notoriety.

Born in 1942, and a diligent student at the University of Chicago, she attended law school there and in the late 1960s “stepped out of the role of the good girl," as she once put it. She has never really stepped back into it again, though she’s been a wife, a mother, and a professional woman for more years than she was a street fighting woman.

Since 1991, she has served as the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law. At the same time, she has never been admitted to the bar in any state in the United States and has never practiced law. Her past might not haunt her, but it certainly has haunted character committees established by the legal profession to keep lawyers in line.

I first met Dohrn in the late 1960s when she worked for the National Lawyers Guild, and from afar began to follow her radical activities as reported in underground newspapers. It wasn’t until she was on the lam, a fugitive, and went by the name Molly that I spent days with her in discussion and debate about all the global and local issues of the 1970s, and began to see the woman behind the image.

She turned out to be much more vulnerable, nuanced, and sensitive than I had been led to believe. Since then, I have heard her speak at conferences, visited her in Chicago, and continued our conversation that began more than 40-years ago.

I don’t know any other woman of her generation who has been as controversial, as optimistic and hopeful, and as committed to what I’d have to call “political struggle” as she. The word alacrity fits her better than any other single word in my vocabulary.

While many of the men around her -- her husband, Bill Ayers, her former Weatherman comrade, Mark Rudd, and her own son, Zayd -- have written accounts of their experiences in, around, and after the revolution, Dohrn never has and perhaps never will. Probably someday someone will write her biography and attempt to reconcile what The New York Times described, in an article about her published in 1993, as “the seeming contradictions” in her life.

That author might also attempt to show how her own personal contradictions have reflected the larger contradictions of the society to which she belongs and at the same time has opposed, confronted, and aimed to reform as well as overturn. On the cusp of her 70th birthday, I asked her if she’d be willing to be interviewed. “Sure,” she said without missing a beat. “Love to have a reason to be in touch with you."

Bernardine Dohrn, a leader in the Weather Underground (originally the Weathermen) that grew out of SDS in 1969, was on the FBI's most-wanted list for more than a decade.


A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn

What would you say is the predominant thread that runs through your life?

The great good fortune to have come of age at a time of revolutionary upheaval at home and abroad, which opened a path to lifelong justice and antiwar activism. The equally predominant thread is the joy and challenge of raising our children and now, grandchildren.

Why is 2011 not 1968?

U.S. economic and social domination of the world is now obviously declining, although fierce military dominance continues to exercise a cruel grip. We now know that the damage done to the planet from unlimited plunder and exhaustion of oil, coal, and non-renewable resources may not be reversible. That reality weighs more heavily, perhaps, than the bomb in our childhood. As Dr. King said in 1967 -- "the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own country." That gives us all a great responsibility.

How do you think living and working in Chicago has shaped you?

I'm such a Midwest gal, summer lightening over the lake, city-stopping snowstorms, the spirits of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel -- all the real deal, unpretentious and intrepid. Always an immigrant city but characterized by Black and white, and now Chicago has one million Mexican-Americans, plus newcomers from everywhere. Here, you can make a difference. Visiting the coasts and the south is essential but this is home.

What are your main impressions of Occupy Wall Street?

Smart, savvy, horizontal, participatory, resisting leaders, spokespeople, and demands, growing, listening, innovative and zesty. I'm in!

How have your feelings about Obama changed over the past four years?

The President was and remains a centrist, intelligent, compromising politician, first in Illinois and since in DC. As the highly financed hard right, finance titans, and the military machine have gained influence and consolidated power, politicians who try to occupy the center move right. Howard Zinn explains it perfectly, writing about JFK.

In what ways does this generation of protesters remind you of yourself and the young rebels of the 1960s?

They are smarter, more global, curious, courageous, and diverse, and open to elders at the get-go. But yes, they do remind me of our generation in their determination to act, to make meaning, to be smitten and inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, Madison and Greece, but to be local, to make art by shifting the frame of the possible.

Once upon a time we read Che, Mao, Marx, and Malcolm. Who do you read now that gives you insights and inspiration?

Vijay Prashad, Barbara Ransby, Adam Green, Martha Biondi, Grace Lee Boggs, Rashid Khalidi, James Bell, Charles Dickens. Lots of murder mysteries and spy novels.

What lessons about an underground organization do you think are worth remembering now?

I have no idea. Maybe that what looks invincible and dominant can be also vulnerable.

Sexism, racism, imperialism seem awfully powerful today. What differences, if any did we make on the society?

We helped remind people that white supremacy is tenacious, takes new forms, and has not been uprooted. The big "we" could not end the Vietnam War, but our resistance helped limit U.S. military intervention options from 1975-1990. Ditto modest constraints on the FBI and CIA, totally unleashed since 9/11. And our progeny have transformed the world we know: women, LGBTQ, Native Americans, the disabled, environmental activists, new stirrings among labor.

Why do you think Americans are so docile and so deferential to the 1% that owns 99% of the wealth?

Not docile, I don't think. Mad, cheated, scared, self-doubting, and envious. But also poking fun, using humor to ridicule the 1%, savvy about the naked theft. The trick is to avoid cynicism. Ordinary people have the wisdom but they don't know they have the power.

You’re about to celebrate your 70th birthday. How has aging surprised you?

Are we really still on our feet? Aren't you 35 Jonah?

I never understood why so many 1960s radicals became lawyers and judges. Can you explain that for me?

Lawyers, teachers, and midwives, I thought. Because we needed great lawyers and we cared about justice. Law's a great place from which to fight the power. I still love our work of representing individual youth accused of crime and delinquency and working to downsize, close, and abolish the mass incarceration/prison system.

What is your most vivid memory of the 1960s?

Meeting with the Vietnamese in Budapest and Cuba. Grasping the gravity of our location and our responsibility.

[Jonah Raskin is a regular contributor to the Rag Blog and a professor at Sonoma State University. He was active in SDS and the Yippies in the Sixties. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

• Find articles by and about Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog.

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THEATER / Jonah Raskin : The 'Reborning' of Zayd Dohrn

Scene from Zayd Dohrn's Reborning at the San Francisco Playhouse.
The Reborning of Zayd Dohrn:

A fascinating piece of theater from the son of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers that speaks to our time now and where we've come from as a society...

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 16, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- What do you do if you’re a young, rising playwright and you’re the son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? You write plays about parents and children and about parenting.

That’s what Zayd Dohrn, the oldest of three sons raised by Dohrn and Ayers, has done in his one-act play Reborning, which is on stage off, off, off Broadway at the San Francisco Playhouse.

If you don’t live in the city or nearby it might be long way to go to see a 75-minute play that races along, but if you can go in the next month or so it’s a fascinating piece of theater that speaks to our time now, and that also shows where we’ve come from as a society.

Part comedy, part tragedy, Reborning mixes satire with real pathos, and makes for laughter and for tears. The play features only three characters: a young woman who has been abandoned by her mother; an older woman who has lost a baby and wants a replacement; and a young man who brings them together tenderly in a kind of family.

The older woman might in fact be the biological mother of the younger woman, but the play leaves the relationships ambiguous, as though to say that we can choose or not choose our parents and our children, and make the families we want to make.

The narratives we tell ourselves and one another are all-important. Nothing is fixed or unalterable in Zayd Dorhn’s world and everything is possible. Secrets come to light, the past is peeled away, and scars are healed almost overnight.

It’s tempting to read Reborning as an autobiographical work, and there’s no doubt that Zayd Dorhn drew upon his own emotional crosscurrents to write his play. Growing up an underground kid with fugitive parents wanted by the FBI gave him plenty of sensational material and dramatic, real life characters to mirror.

Still, his characters aren’t copies of his parents or their contemporaries. Unlike them, his fictional people are pulled to art rather than to ideology, and express themselves in creative work rather than in political struggle.

Reborning takes theatergoers through a kind of emotional hell that includes dumpsters, death, and denial, but it’s a therapeutic work that ends on a note of reconciliation. The characters clash with one another; they shout and they argue, but they don’t hit, shoot, and bomb, and the play offers no big blow-up.

The final scene is an unclimactic kind of climax, but nonetheless genuinely heartfelt. It reflects a world in which mistakes are unmade, and seemingly irreconcilable differences are resolved peacefully.

The tensions between the two women -- the mother/daughter figures -- drive the play, but it’s the male character who brings them together. He’s also the comedian of the piece and he supplies the sexual energy that can be as funny as it is steamy.

In the first scene of the play, he walks around on stage holding a huge phallus in his hand and that irreverent image sets the tone for much of the play. Could the male character be inspired by his father and could the women be inspired by his mother? Maybe so.

Zayd Dohrn was in the audience the evening Reborning had its premier in San Francisco -- the celebrity in the crowd. His parents were in the audience, too, though no one seemed to recognize them. They might still have been anonymous underground fugitives out on the town for the evening, not the infamous Dohrn-Ayers duo in the media at the time of Obama's election.

Like many of the sons and daughters of former Weather Underground fugitives, Zayd Dohrn has come of age, and put the underground behind him. “Reborning” seems an apt metaphor for his own evolution as a playwright who dramatizes the theater of the human heart.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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