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?
[note: the book title comes from a Jefferson Airplane lyric found in the song We Can Be Together on the ‘Volunteers’ album, which, in it’s original packaging, had a quote that read, “Everything we do either makes noise or smells.”]
If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger.
At risk of getting too pedantic up here, one thing I’ve noticed is that often when we talk about metaphor, we’re actually talking about simile. We’re poetically likening one thing to another thing. And similes are very handy—I myself have bandied about more than my fair share along the way. But I’ve come to prefer the quiet authority of a true metaphor. Not saying that something is like another thing, but saying that it is that thing. And performing this feat of semantic transmutation so vividly and so concretely that the reader accepts it as truth.
[…] simile requires little more than imagination and intelligence. Simile by dint of its phrasing seems to doubt itself. It’s polite and socialized and it leaves room for the possibility that others see the world in a different way.
Semantically speaking, metaphor doesn’t apologize or try to justify itself. A proper metaphor hurtles its audience deep into the private mythological landscape of the writer. It imparts upon its audience a sudden, bracing fluency in the writer’s private symbolic language. Metaphor is artless and unaffected and feral. You could say it’s raised by wolves, but more to the point, it’s raised outside of words.
A good metaphor makes me shiver, as if a ghost has passed through my body, because in a way it has. Metaphor is a kind of immortal certainty. You might not agree lastingly with the words you’re reading, you might not even be able to later recall the electric sensation of summoning and possession and resurrection that shot through you when you encountered this writer’s words. But in that one moment, you walked freely within their symbolic domain, preserved and untouched and momentarily more tangible than your own. In that moment, the fog never could have rolled in on anything besides little cat feet.
– Joanna Newsom, City Council, Nevada City declares May 27th 'Joanna Newsom Day'
finished this drawing over the weekend, processing several month’s worth of inner turmoil and stress dreams, inspired by/with imagery borrowed from the sublime song ‘Go Long’ by Joanna Newsom 🗡️💐🏰
“I think all literature has ideas. […] Ideas about the human condition, and love, and God, and sex, and all of these things are ideas, but the truth is fiction is not a good vehicle for presenting abstract ideas. I mean, non-fiction, journalism, my profession, in which I had my professional degrees, is actually a better way to explicate if you have an idea about some political or scientific method. That’s why scientific journals are full of research reports, they're not full of science fiction stories. What fiction is good about is presenting emotion. Fiction is good about replicating the human experience, and the human heart in conflict is central to all of that. If the story you're telling me doesn't have characters in it that I care about in a situation that's going to engage my emotions, I'm not gonna find it very interesting.”
Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct.
Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried).
Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like.
I don't recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It's none of their business. All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like-what's going on-what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
"The truth against the world!"-Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
-Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Ten Favorite Movies (2/10)
╚ CLUE (1985) dir. Jonathan Lynn
Well, someone's got to break the ice, and it might as well be me. I mean, I'm used to being a hostess, it's part of my husband's work. And it's always difficult when a group of new friends meet together for the first time, to get acquainted. So I'm perfectly prepared to start the ball rolling. I mean, I-I have absolutely no idea what we're doing here. Or what I'm doing here, or what this place is about, but I am determined to enjoy myself. And I'm very intrigued, and, oh my, this soup's delicious, isn't it?
“And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.”
Do you remember when you said that I was the one who was going to change things? It wasn't me. Oh, my darling… It was never me. It was always you.
WIDOW CLICQUOT
2023 — dir. Thomas Napper
izzy806
kianamaiart
2087
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
