Review of The Weather Underground (2002) by Jack L — 15 Mar 2009

This is an absolutely top-notch documentary that I can't recommend highly enough to anyone who is interested in knowing about a time in American history that is often overlooked by people in our generation. While predominantly a historical account of who the weathermen were and what they were about, this is really a film about the times, times of immense rage, love, confusion, idealism, paranoia, hope, and a whole bunch of other contradictory human experiences. The central contradiction in the film seems to be about violence... specifically, how can the movement to stop the seemingly ceaseless violence of the American government be successful if that movement centers around the central tenet of, guess what, more violence?

As someone who has been subjected to violence at the hands of the police on multiple occasions, often in the context of political protest, I have often found myself with impulses to do literally the exact same things that people in this film have done. I've often been driven by the same shitty cocktail of frustration, rage, depression, and confusion that many of the people in this film describe while looking back on their lives. Through various means, I've met other people who are driven by similar impulses. I can't say they're wrong. I can't even say that on days when I feel that, I'm wrong (and I'm quite adept at thinking I'm wrong about things). The real source of the frustration, at least for me, and seemingly a lot of of the people who became weathermen, comes from the thought that the predominant techniques being employed by progressives in America have been largely ineffective at catalyzing a real political change, by which I mean fundamentally removing imperialism, corporate control, state-sponsored terrorism, systematic oppression, racism, sexism, etc. from our political fabric. The truth is, America still isn't too far from what it was then, despite everyone's excitement about the new administration (I'm going to do my best not to pop any happy Obama balloons with my needle of anarcho-sadness, so I won't go into that rant here).

As someone who likes to euphemistically claim I don't particularly identify with the platform of either political party, I struggle a lot with the dilemma presented in this film, seeing as a number of people in my range of political beliefs (left of what is commonly accepted as 'left') are often lured by the romanticism of violence and the inexplicable aesthetic appeal of militaristic posturing. The weathermen were among those people, but instead of going out to hot topic and buying a shirt of El Che, they went out and bombed shit, which on the surface makes their revolutionary posturing seem more akin to the sort of activity that has been employed by radical movements in the 'developing' world than in America. Within this context, their actions kind of make sense... they had seen the pacifist idealism of the late 60's fail with the de facto dissolution of the SDS, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Altamont, etc., and they had been exposed through media to so many successes with revolutionary movements overseas as well as the still-present revolutionary spirit in black communities at home... it seemed like a logical conclusion to emulate that strategy in the immediate wake of pacifism's failure in the U.S.

Their efforts, of course, were fruitless. The weathermen committed the sin of pride, thinking they had the support of the masses, that everything was coming to a head and that they were at the forefront of an armed revolution, when all it really did in the end was create a justification in public consciousness for government repression. People felt that they were at risk of being harmed by crazy leftists, so they invested their faith in crazy fascists. And so it was that violence begat more violence. The weathermen disbanded, counterculture all but died, and our society degenerated into the monomaniacal obsession with material wealth that was the 1980's.

Fast forward to the present day, and America is still America. Afghanistan is our new Vietnam. Pakistan might be our next. We went to a bunch of marches about the Iraq War, but the imperialist institutions in our society that perpetuated the war are firmly in place. Obama has announced that he is alotting $654 billion to the defense budget, which is the most it has spent since world war II (inflation-adjusted) and a 4% increase from the Bush administration. We are still at war, but now complacency is at an all-time high. All this while people get evicted from their homes and poor people are increasingly fucked. The weather underground is nothing more than bit of trivia in the annuls of crazy shit that happened back in the day, only mentioned briefly by the mainstream media as part of a blip during the 2008 presidential campaign, completely lifted out of context from its original intentions. We now see the totality of their failure, and we're left almost exactly as they were... a non-movement with a non-history.

So what can we do about it? Now that pacifism and violence have played out and failed, what form can our resistance take? How can we fight the war at home if neither bombs nor peace marches have as of yet proven to be truly effective in attaining peace? In the simple but immortal words of Chernychevsky, what is to be done? These are the questions that honestly keep me up at night, and every attempt I've made at answering it in my everyday actions has simply lead to more frustration, anger, depression, and all those other feelings that eventually made the weathermen who they were. Do I know the answers? Not really. Neither do the filmmakers, but they do a damn fine job at exploring the questions.