Truemors
Zayd Dohrn, son of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. When speaking with Ayers and fellow Weather Undergrounder (and present-day wife) Bernardine Dohrn, one gets a sense that the old punk anthem, "Question Authority" is an American duty. During [a recent] interview, both took time out from the conversation in a Park City hotel to speak to their son, who was at an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. They beamed with pride over his activism. Image Credit: Boston University via Rotten Tomatoes Film Review by ReallyBadEgg
Review of movie - Weather Underground - found on Rotten Tomatoes
ReallyBadEgg < Moldy Tomato > 07-01-2004, 08:20 PM - Post #4
The Weather Underground staked out the most extreme-left position in a student movement that was hurtling leftward. Although always numerically tiny, the cadre's members were charismatic, provocative, articulate, and intelligent. They commanded news media attention (at the expense of other leftist groups) with their brash rhetoric, violent actions, and, in the eyes of many, romantic allure. Coming mostly from affluent backgrounds, they seemed almost "to the manner born," in the words of Todd Gitlin, the former SDS president who appears in the film to deplore how they hijacked the remains of his once-proud (and vast) organization. Chic radicals, they seemed to treat their violence at once as very serious business and as kind of a lark.
The well-bred Weatherman leaders, miscomprehending the origin of their own radicalism, somehow imagined that working-class kids would embrace their extremist creed more readily than bourgeois college students. From Seattle to Detroit to New York, they set up urban communes as bases for organizing the would-be rank and file of the revolution, but predictably they failed to rouse the proletariat. So they turned to what even they themselves now recognize as terrorism. They began building bombs to detonate at sites of their purported oppressors, like a hall in Fort Dix, N.J., that would be hosting an Army dance. But on March 6, 1970, the bomb meant for the American soldiers went off prematurely, blowing up the Greenwich Village town house where its violence-drunk manufacturers were living. Three of them were killed.*
Despite my recent obsessions and emotions regarding certain national issues, and despite the fact that I'll never understand or forgive the motives behind anybody's terrorism, I do relate to the romantic allure affluent kids have with radicalism and revolt. It's all very chic, very trendy.
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