days of rage with crosby, stills, and nash

I. The Underground Movement to Overthrow the U.S. Government
I recently finished reading Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough, which is basically a true-crime account of Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), and other activists who went rogue from the late sixties to late seventies. Patty Hearst remains the most famous touchstone of this movement, having been kidnapped by the SLA only to spend a few years as part of their group. (She robbed a bank and when she was arrested gave her occupation as "Urban guerrilla" - brutally treated and repeatedly raped and only 19 years old, her own status is continually in need of re-evaluation.)

All that to say, did you know there were thousands of bombs set off across America for almost a decade, maybe more? Remember all those grade-school "I hope someone calls in a bomb threat" jokes or was that only my neighborhood? Bomb threats used to be so routine they became something akin to an idiom for students one generation removed from the actual phenomenon. They entered the cultural consciousness even as the facts were forgotten. The underground groups were categorically unsuccessful - except for periodically murdering some people, often the wrong people in the case of the SLA - although what's striking is that their politics track almost perfectly with sizable portions of today's political left. They predicted the future, to some degree, including a sensitivity to groups so severe that harm is difficult to parse and the NEED to react (especially for those of us who feel complicit, who are complicit) difficult to ignore. It doesn't hurt that they were responding to Nixon as president, who was in many ways simply an intelligent version of the shag-rug currently in office.

The book was an excellent introduction to the subject for someone like me, and a priceless catalog of specifics. It runs aground at the end, a bit, where the list of crimes becomes so endless that it can feel like the author has published a very well-structured Wikipedia article for long stretches. This generally negative review also acts as a nice framework, admitting exactly the ways in which the book is important and offering some (implicit) boundaries on the book's scope. Even so, I can't think of many books that better put our own moment in perspective. Hell, if nothing else it's a fun history narrative from the inside-out. As such, the author probably grants the violent underground too much gravity and importance, but then that's how they saw themselves - ascendant Che Guevaras.

II. Should've Just Repented
In my opinion, of course, the below-grounders' emotional-cum-political outburst was more personal and far more spiritual than any of them could apparently understand. This isn't just me inventing a reason to say spiritual! Read this quote from the end of the book by someone who spent time in jail for her crimes with Weather Underground and tell me she isn't actually talking about original sin and penance:

The good German metaphor hung over us - what happens if one doesn't pay attention, how easy, almost inevitable it was to be complicit with the death and poisoning and starvation that resulted from exploitation. That is still true. To be complicit made us feel desperately unclean, rotting from within.

She actually continues in that vein for some time, insistent that the underground violence grew from a desperation for cleansing. 
  III. Speaking of the Left and the Temptation to Violence
I suppose I should clarify at this point that I think one of our only hopes for the next two to six years is a strong leftist movement against the consolidation of power by corporations and the wrong parts of government (military, police, executive whim; there's even a burgeoning movement against the Supreme Court that recalls 90s conservatives and should be supported by them). And yet Days of Rage was so fascinating to me for the same reason the below article caught my eye: violence.

During the last 150 years or so, the American left has advanced in a nearly mathematical pattern of waves.. . . There have been four of those waves in the past—in the 1870s and ’80s; in the 1910s; in the 1930s and ’40s; and in the 1960s and ’70s.. . . A fifth such wave is unmistakably upon us right now—the new insurgency that got underway with Occupy Wall Street in 2012 and continued into Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution and the Women’s March and has lately brought a lot of people, the progressives, into the Democratic Party. And each of these waves has engendered its own destructive undertow.

The left-wing undertow over the many generations has consisted of a turn to violence, or a dream of violence, or a support for the mass violence of faraway movements on other continents, or a dream of mass elimination—with the actions and dreams supported by just enough people to inflict a terrible wound on a larger left that was never really guilty. [...] It is an impulse to outdo the excitements of rebellion by cultivating the forbidden thrills of violent transgression. It is rebellion, transformed into nihilism.

Dude needs to cite some actual and prominent (or prolific) examples when characterizing the left's modern calls for elimination. However, when both illicit (KKK, Proud Boys) and licit (border camps) political factors are set in violent opposition to the welfare of yourself or others, the temptation to violence must be hard to resist. That's definitely been the case historically, and not always in easy-to-condemn ways. In fact, guns were arguably a vital part of the Civil Right's success. They weren't, however, the guns of the radical underground. 

IV. Opinion
I finally saw Annihilation and thought it was both deeply flawed and deeply great and loved that it introduced me to this Crosby, Stills, and Nash single. Natalie Portman chooses roles that she doesn't have the chops to perform, but her star-status makes the movies possible and she's certainly more convincing as a cynical veteran than I ever expected. The material of this and other recent forays stretch her, even as they remain (in my opinion) a little beyond her range. Which is pretty nit-picky considering the movie is in some ways just a pedant's creature-feature. 

That's a compliment.