BARACK OBAMA'S MENTORS?

Yes, 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin probably made too much of that "pallin' around with terrorists" remark, and yet Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, Book Review N^o. 14, suggests there might be echoes of that forgotten age in today's politics.

That such a book even exists testifies to Mr Burroughs's persistence.  He notes the difficulty of cold-calling a former terrorist, confessing to not sharing the terrorist's politics, and asking to comment on a bathroom bombing.  That noted, he was able to put a creditable book together, in part because some of the best known figures of the insurgency, the vanguard of the Weather Underground that split from the Students for a Democratic Society, live among us peaceably today, holding respectable bourgeois professional jobs, and they're willing to chat, and a number of the members of the other factions were also willing to chat, if under conditions of anonymity.

What happened?  Mr Burroughs writes, in his prologue, "And even if the movement's goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists who clung to utopian dreams of the 1960s, this in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time, and even fewer remember clearly today."

The movement of which he writes was not about protesting the Vietnam War, even though it emerged at about the same time Richard Nixon was simultaneously escalating and winding down the war, and it was not about protesting Republican governance, although its activities might have provoked the Watergate burglaries, looking for evidence of connections between the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party and the radical underground.

It's unlikely that any such connections existed, as the Democratic Party was way too conventional for Weather Underground and the schism in Students for a Democratic Society arose when the vanguard of what became Weather Underground came to believe that only more militant actions could ever end the mistreatment of black people, the best efforts of Civil Rights and all the rest notwithstanding.  That's the common theme among all the cells noted in Days of Rage, including the Black Liberation Army (the Black Panthers being too moderate), the United Freedom Front, the Mutulu Shakur Group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Armed Forces of National Liberation (for Puerto Rico, generally referred to under the acronym FALN).  The Weather Underground got most of the attention, but they come off as a bunch of privileged kids setting off bombs in bathrooms; a number of the other organizations had more authentic ethnic and proletarian backgrounds, and they took a greater toll on The Man.

What happened, though?  On one hand, it is the way it always is with True Believers.  One former Weather member confesses, page 230, "We realized we had pissed too many people off."  Yes, party purges are like that.  Or the epistemic closure got out of hand, that comes out throughout the epilogue, in particular this remark at page 538, "The sixties drove them all crazy, all of us.  All they did is listen to their own people, their own opinions."

But Mr Burrough goes on to note, page 539, "What matters most about the underground ... is simply that it existed, that it demonstrated the lengths to which passionate Americans would go to confront what are now viewed, correctly, as Richard Nixon's corrupt government, an unjust war, and rampant racism at large in America."

There might be more at work: look at this tu quoque argument that just hit conservative media last week.  "Obama Pardoned Terrorist FALN Leader Oscar Lopez Rivera."  Hillary's husband pardoned a few others (to help his wife's Senate chances?)

But is it a Seventies revolutionary or a Culture Studies professor who seeks to "abolish prisons, marriage, and rent while attacking 'racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, fascism, individualism, possessiveness, competitiveness and all other institutions that have made and sustained capitalism?'"

Is it a Seventies revolutionary or a Diversity Trainer who notes, "Only a black or a Third World person can understand the plight of the oppressed masses?"

Is it a gathering of Weathermen or business as usual at Oberlin when a facilitator complains, "I was almost lynched by a group of vegetarians because I hadn't provided enough nonmeat meals in the cafeteria.  There were a lot of little things like that, stuff I just didn't understand.  Every time something went wrong, I was constantly accused of being a racist.  That was just devastating to me."

Is it a passage from a Thomas Wolfe satire, or something for Rush Limbaugh to seize on, when an urban drug clinic becomes unmanageable?  "White doctors and nurses had long avoided [the clinic] and [the community organizers'] main targets were the foreign-born staff members who had taken their place, many of them Korean and Filipino, who now found themselves being cursed as they scurried to tend patients.  The [organizers] demanded more Puerto Rican staff members.  In response, doctors and nurses resigned in droves."

Pissing off too many people?  That's all part of the job description.  By their fruits and all that.  History rhymes, dear reader.  Be governed accordingly.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)