Jeremy Varon (31 page)

By the same token, the increasing hostility of “the establishment” to the New Left encouraged white rebels to see themselves—and to celebrate their roles—as despised outsiders in their own right. “We are waste material,” Jerry Rubin announced in 1969. “We fulfill our destiny by rejecting a system which rejects us.”74 The use of the word “freak”

echoed Rubin’s sentiment. An originally derogatory term that condemned the dropout culture as degenerate, “freak” became a popular self-description among the young. Daniel Foss explained: “It may disturb some Americans to discover that a number of youths (as of 1967–1968) have been referring to themselves with pride as ‘freaks.’. . . But that is part of the whole point.”75 As the lines between the hippies and the politi-cos blurred at the end of the decade, the word “freak” was worn broadly as a badge of honor. Rock bands did their part in promoting the freak image and giving it a political edge. In 1969, The Jefferson Airplane released “We Can Be Together”—a lush anthem to the rebel culture on the album “Volunteers,” whose cover shows the group dressed as a deranged militia. Composing the lyrics from graffiti in Berkeley and other slogans of the left, the Airplane sang: “We are all outlaws in the eyes of America /

In order to survive we steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide, and deal / We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dirty, violent, and young . . . / And we are very proud of ourselves / Up against the wall / Up against the wall motherfucker / Tear down the walls.”76 Along these lines, some in the movement took apparent pride in the Weathermen as the left’s audacious, Excesses and Limits

165

if crazed, answer to state hostility. A cartoon in an underground newspaper shows Vice President Agnew deliberating over what epithets to hurl at the November 1969 antiwar protesters. He giddily suggests “Egregious claque of despicable snots” and “Syphilitic morons with shit for brains.”

In the corner of the cartoon a wild-eyed freak stomps away from a bomb blast, next to the caption: “Meanwhile—in a series of nighttime raids the sinister and incredible WEATHERMAN strikes again!!! What’s this crazy bastard up to, anyway?”77

Yet an air of unreality hung over the Weatherman’s menacing per-formances, further confusing just what to make of their “message.” To Carol Brightman, the theatrical quality of what she called Weathermen’s

“shenanigans” at Flint provided some comfort, as she assumed the Weathermen to be playacting identities they had neither the intention nor the means of realizing.78 Others were less assured. A reporter for the
Berkeley Tribe,
after showing how closely Dohrn’s comments matched the recent court testimony of the alleged Manson gang murderer Susan Atkins, commented indignantly that neither Dohrn nor Atkins, “has any comprehension of the horror they speak of. Both endorse horror in a weird, lame way, straight out of a Crumb cartoon. Bernadine [
sic
] is proud of it. Understanding that killing is necessary is one thing. Reveling in it is another.”79 For the reporter, Flint was a spooky episode in an elaborate fantasy life, so dangerous precisely because of Weatherman’s detachment from its content. In such moments, the Weathermen seemed to declare themselves the progeny of a sick society now turning on its creators, and to strive, however unselfconsciously, to make what was monstrous in American society apparent by themselves becoming monstrous. Attuned to this dynamic, the middle-aged journalist I. F. Stone said of the young radicals, “To understand their irrationality is to become aware of ours.”80

The
Tribe
felt Weatherman’s potential for cruelty was signaled also by what it called “the horror of inhuman logic.” While asserting that “on a perfectly logical level” killing white children is “correct” as a means of eliminating racism, it nonetheless declared Weatherman “fucked up on an emotional, supra-rational level.”81 Here the
Tribe
alluded to a pro-tototalitarian impulse in Weatherman to at least
conjure up
its own “final solutions.” At Flint, a woman pointed out that Weatherman’s cynical view of white workers created problems for Weatherman’s desired scenario of Third World peoples overrunning the United States. If the country were vanquished before “the masses” were fully organized into revolutionary consciousness, she argued, then fascism would seem to be required to 166

Excesses and Limits

keep whites in line. The Weatherman Ted Gold replied sharply, “If it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”82 Susan Stern had answered an exasperated friend:

“Are you going to fight everyone who doesn’t agree with you? . . . Do you really think every white person in this country should die, Susie, do you really?” . . .

“If they’re not going to do shit, well . . . yes, I do. If people won’t join us, then they are against us. It’s as simple as that. That includes the working class, and kids, if necessary.”

“Everybody has to die?”

“Everybody has to die.”83

Gold’s and Stern’s comments were hardly official statements of Weather ideology. Gold, in fact, was among those who argued shortly after Flint against putting a picture of Manson on the cover of
FIRE!
he felt, and most concurred, that there was ultimately nothing progressive or even political about Manson’s violence. Even so, their comments reveal how the group could be bedeviled by a conspicuously instrumental rationality absent any moral compass. Gold had actually
lauded
fascism, while Stern sanctioned virtually infinite murder. Viewed historically, such “inhuman logic” echoes Arthur Koestler’s “grammatical fiction”—the cold reasoning used by the Stalinists in Koestler’s novel
Darkness at Noon
to measure the value of individual lives based on how well they “objectively”

served the unfolding of the laws of History.84 Weatherman, in short, added its own iteration to a dystopian formula, all too familiar to the twentieth century, that combines shrewd reasoning with a morbidly transgressive imagination.

Marcuse’s notion of the “Great Refusal” offers additional perspective on Weatherman’s transgressions. Convinced that “administered societies”

quickly neutralized or assimilated all forms of local resistance, Marcuse counseled the rejection of “the whole.”85 Yet neither Marcuse nor the New Left had any fixed sense of when one was being authentically radical, rejecting the system in its totality, truly subverting the mainstream.

The escalation in militancy over the course of the 1960s was, in part, an experiment with new and more provocative forms of refusal. The Weathermen appeared intent on being the opposite of everything they felt the dominant culture valued. Years later, Roth described Weatherman’s core message at Flint: “We spit on all your values, on all your sensibilities.”86

Stern conveyed the intensity and narcissistic quality of the group’s “refusal” in the threat made at Flint that “there would be no peace in America as long as one Weatherman was left standing.”87

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From a deconstructive perspective, Weatherman’s “refusal” seems a rather crude strategy of reversal. In opposing chaos to order, destruction to the status quo, the Weathermen simply inverted the hierarchies within a binary structure, leaving the structure intact. In a Marcusean vocabulary, the Weathermen practiced a
non
dialectical form of negation that naïvely equated
transgression
with
transcendence.
Marcuse defined negation, most broadly, as the refusal to accept the rationality and necessity of the given.88 But according to Marcuse, truly dialectic negation also had to contain a moment of affirmation—a vision, however prefigura-tive and itself negated by prevailing “reality,” of liberated utopian possibilities. Marcuse developed this view mostly with respect to aesthetics, but his aesthetic theory provides useful analogies for politics.89 To Marcuse, emancipatory art must express, through its commitment to form, a beauty that testifies against and transcends the contradictions, ugliness, or even the obscenity of the established order. He therefore praised certain works of “high” bourgeois art and some of the creativity of the counterculture, such as Bob Dylan’s more soulful songs, for pointing toward a transcendent realm.90 (As if in agreement, the folksinger Phil Ochs penned the line, “In such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.”)91 Marcuse was, by contrast, highly critical of the ostensibly radical “anti-art”

of the 1960s that seemed to attack all aesthetic forms as pejoratively

“bourgeois” and tried to dissolve entirely the distance between art and life. Criticizing Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty,” which influenced the experimental theater of the decade, he wrote:

Today, what possible language, what possible image can crush and hyp-notize minds and bodies which live in peaceful coexistence (and even profiting from) genocide, torture, prison? And if Artaud wants . . . “sounds and noises and cries, first for their quality of vibration and then for that which they represent,” we ask: has not the audience . . . long since become familiar with the violent noises, cries, which are the daily equipment of the mass media, sports, highways, places of recreation? They do not break the oppressive familiarity with destruction; they reproduce it.92

Beyond a critique of art, Marcuse offers a model of failed resistance as the repetition or mirroring of the very tendencies the resistance seeks to oppose. Flint, as Weatherman’s own grisly theater, conformed to this model, insofar as it failed within the terms of Marcuse’s analysis to
truly
shock and gloried in a destructiveness the Weathermen presumably sought to overcome.

Marcuse, in addition, suggests the importance of a tension between

“acting out” and “working through” for the New Left. In their narrowly 168

Excesses and Limits

psychotherapeutic usage, these terms indicate different responses in an individual to trauma. Acting out is a way of remaining within trauma by falling into melancholic inertia or by blindly repeating the source of the trauma. (A clear case of the latter would be an abused child then abusing his children or spouse.) Working through entails coming to terms with trauma by acknowledging its impact and resisting troubling or dangerous tendencies associated with it, while not aspiring to fully overcome it. The terms, though initially developed by Freud to interpret psychic phenomena in the individual, may illuminate the response of groups to instances of trauma or crises within politics and culture. More generally, they may aid in understanding the relationship of critical modes of thought and action with the objects of their criticism.93

Kenneth Kenniston, in one of the few intelligent psychoanalytical analyses of the New Left (facile tales of Oedipal revolt abounded), implicitly drew on the categories of acting out and working through by describing the “genuine agony” of the New Left as “the discovery that violence lies not only within the rest of American society, but in the student movement itself.”94 Kenniston had praised the optimism and vitality of the New Left in his 1968 book
Notes on Committed Youth;
by 1971, he sought to account for the malaise and relative inactivity into which it had fallen. According to Kenniston, that malaise owed not only to the grinding violence of the war and racism but also to the traumatic confrontation of the New Left with its own capacity for violence, typified by groups like Weatherman. Interpreting this violence in psychocultural terms, he surmised that the rebelliousness of the 1960s provided a context for the desublimation of a “rage, anger and destructiveness” among middle-class white youth that they had previously denied or channeled into less obviously violent forms.95 Such aggression, he felt, was “no less a symptom of the pathological violence of American life” than police repression and the bombings of Vietnam.96 He counseled that the left neither fall into a melancholic form of political resignation nor plunge deeper into violence. Rather, he urged that New Leftists work through their disturbing discovery by renewing their commitment to social change in full recognition of their own destructive impulses.97

New Leftists were at times alert to this danger of assuming the likeness of their enemy. Jerry Rubin complained of the New Left’s debilitating competitiveness by asking, “Are we creating a New Man, or are we a reflection ourselves of the bullshit we hate so much?”98 Dave Dellinger asserted that Yippie culture was, in its pronounced egotism, “distressingly like the mirror-image” of the dominant culture.99 To the
Berkeley Tribe,
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Altamont revealed that “we were the Mother Culture,” that the “the horror show is in all of us.”100 The White Panthers proclaimed that their goal was to “kill the inner pig.”101 Stern characterized the Manson comment as an expression of “the last putrid drop of American poison still flowing in the blood of the Weathermen.”102 A Weather collective admitted, “to change the pear we had to bite into it, but in our overeager-ness, we often got some bad mouthfuls.”103 The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” sung by Mick Jagger just before the Altamont murder, was widely seen as a kind of negative anthem to demonic tendencies in the movement. Robin Morgan, a leading feminist, charged that the militancy of the New Left reproduced the aggressiveness and will to dominate of the reigning chauvinist culture.104

Nearly all these formulations cast the left as suffering from a bad im-manence, in which features of its adversaries were recognizable in itself and vice versa. There is, however, some variation in the images, conveying different levels of self-awareness. By implicitly arguing that the corruption of the New Left reflected the corruption of America, New Leftists acknowledged that they remained products of their society, inevitably marked by deficiencies such as “racism” and “egoism.” By extension, New Leftists saw themselves failing politically to the extent that they did not eliminate or distance themselves sufficiently from those deficiencies.

As a corollary, New Leftists were generally loath to credit any of their virtues to their “Amerikan” socialization. Instead, they rooted their strengths in the inspiration of African-American and Third World revolutionaries, in the cathartic experience of protest itself, in the devious sensuousness of drug and sexual experiences, and in the new forms of community they created with one another. Some appeared to believe in the possibility of
complete
self-reinvention—of a kind of purification or exorcism of their “Amerikanness” achieved through transformative rituals such as criticism-self-criticism and the passage through “good” otherness. Abbie Hoffman gave that otherness figurative boundaries by insisting at the conspiracy trial that he was a citizen not of the United States but of a “Woodstock Nation.” Rubin drew more dramatic lines of separation, stating: “Our search for adventure and heroism takes us outside America, to a life of self-creation and rebellion. In response America is ready to destroy us.”105