Transpondster

Sure, “militant or even violent resistance” might be justified in the face of something unambiguously bad—“to fight against slavery, for example. Or fascism. Or genocide”—but, he asks, “were the conflicts of the 1960s—the Vietnam War and the assault on the civil rights movement—such a time?”

After some 400 pages, [Zayd Ayers Dohrn] can’t say. “If you truly believe human beings everywhere are just as important as those closest to you, then global injustice might start to feel unbearable,” he writes early on. “You may even become willing to sacrifice yourself—or your family—to help people on the other side of the world.” As the subject of that sacrifice, Ayers Dohrn is trapped between two possibilities: the first is that none of it was worth it, that his parents were monsters who defaced his childhood for nothing. The second is that it was all worth it, that his birth did not herald the beginning of his parents’ world, and that his life was not the central fact of theirs. Of course both possibilities are unbearable. Thus his ambivalence.

It is also a good deal easier to sell a sympathetic book about the Weather Underground if you reassure your readers every 30 or 40 pages that of course political violence is wrong. Ayers Dohrn reaches over and over for the hymnal of American Seriousness and Sobriety and intones: such behavior “risks a tit-for-tat spiral of normalized political violence, eventually leading to the breakdown of civic democracy and the rule of law.” The FBI, enforcer of that rule of law, drugged and murdered his mother’s good friend Fred Hampton in his bed, directing police to open fire on him while he slept alongside his pregnant girlfriend. But “setting off bombs, even if the targets are just empty government buildings, carries with it an implicit threat.” The “people who worked in the Capitol building, for example—or who just saw the destruction on TV” might feel “less safe.” Imagine how unsafe young Zayd felt, carried by his father out of a roadside Burger King, after he accidentally told the nice couple next to them in line that they were running from the FBI. Was it worth it?

The author’s unresolved and irresolvable Freudian psychodrama aside—despite being billed as a kind of a memoir, Ayers Dohrn’s childhood “in the revolutionary underground” mainly haunts the periphery of what is otherwise a very accomplished biography of his parents—Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young arrives just as the specter of political violence (by which we always mean vaguely left-wing political violence) once again haunts American editorial boards. The New York Times frets over “what can feel like a scary, chaotic moment.” The Washington Post bemoans “the drumbeat of violence against political figures,” one it claims “has been growing louder for years.” Nearly every Substack newsletter, subscription-based podcast, and self-identified centrist or “heterodox” pundit in the Anglophone world went apoplectic after Hasan Piker had the temerity to appear on a podcast and correctly conclude that many people cheered the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson because health insurance companies are gluttonous leeches profiting on American pain and death. The Free Press is so disturbed by the purportedly “mainstream” belief that “violence may even be justified to thwart” American capitalism that it pines for the days when “celebrated great industrialists” like the virulent and influential antisemite Henry Ford “were household names spoken with pride.” After one very close call during the summer of 2024, several people have even made cartoonishly inept attempts to murder the president of the United States. What disturbs the sensible center of American political discourse most is that, should somebody succeed, it is very likely that a huge number of Americans would only find fault with the assassin for provoking a potential backlash, if they found any fault at all.

Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s book arrives just in time: not as an occasion to seriously entertain the question of whether or not the Weather Underground engaged in justifiable revolutionary struggle against the government of the United States—come on—but to grope once again for a reflexive answer, the obvious answer, the grown-up answer, the answer you yourself may have summoned the moment you suspected this review might find its way around to defending Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. I will bet the modest but not totally insubstantial sum I’ve been paid to write this review that every mainstream assessment of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young will find its way around to telling you how dangerous and misguided the Weathermen were before suggesting—sometimes slyly, sometimes explicitly—that there’s a lesson in all of that about our own uncertain times.

They may be right. But there’s something suspicious in any automatic answer. Set aside the need to say no, of course it was all very bad. We’re here anyway. Put down the sense that it is dangerous to ask—worse, that it is unserious, unadult, vaguely embarrassing to ask—for a moment. It’s just a little essay. It’ll be okay. Consider: Did the Weather Underground have a point? Then? Now? Were they a cautionary tale? If so, what is that tale about? Whither the caution? What, precisely, is the lesson here? Was it worth it?

Roxy Music c1973, recording sessions for the album 'For Your Pleasure'

Top (L-to-R): John Porter (temp bassist), Bill Price (engineer), Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, and Chris Thomas (producer)

The Idols (and Nancy Spungen)