I saw the documentary on the Weather Underground on Tuesday with Lil’ Dy. I had forgotten how much 12 Monkeys and Fight Club refer to the Weathermen.
The Weathermen were a splinter group of the peaceful anti-war activist group Students for a Democratic Society. In “12 Monkeys,” Brad Pitt’s character and his friends decide they are tired of excessive verbiage without action, and split off from their peaceful animal rights activist comerades, forming The Army of the Twelve Monkeys. With their idealistic and proactive determination, the Weathermen made off with most of the SDS members much to the irritation of the existing leadership (late 1960s). Appalled by the atrocities being committed by the US government in Vietnam, they believed that they had to overthrow the government to stop the war that was being fought in their name. They made frequent use of a tape recorder to issue their press releases, and 12 Monkeys also refers to this. In “Fight Club,” the members of Operation Mayhem live in devoted secret “cell houses,” vowing to drop completely out of capitalist consumerism and blow up the occaisonal Starbucks. The actual Weather Underground lived in secret cell houses, only spoke to each other on a “need to know” basis, and really did blow up buildings- notably the Capital and the ferry building here in San Francisco. One woman interviewed left the Underground involuntarily- after she publicly disagreed with a senior member, she simply was not invited to the next meeting- without knowing where the next point of contact was, she had no way of reaching her friends!The film is very timely- the Weathermen were horrified by Vietnam and frustrated by how little the government seemed to care about their voice, just as the current administration chooses to ignore hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in San Francisco. Just as today’s Democratic Party has completely abandoned a huge segment of the population, the political spectrum of the late 1960s left little room for pacifism and none for the student left. Watching accounts of their idealism is sometimes painful- In one stage of their campaign, the Weathermen planned to establish themselves in lower-class urban communities, assuming that once poorer America knew the truth of the war and how they were being dominated by the rich, they would join the Movement. Of course, there were few recruits- most people are too preoccupied with paying rent to think about overthrowing the government. Interstingly, this is a familiar mistake among revolutionary student groups- more than 80 years previously, the “Narodniks” in czarist Russia believed that the Russian serfs were the key to the revolution: From Marxists.Org: “In the spring of 1874, the conflict between the kulaks and peasantry brought turbulence to Russia’s urban centres, and the Narodnik intelligentsia left the cities for the villages, going “among the people” (hence their name), attempting to teach the peasantry their moral imperative to revolt. They found almost no support.“ I think a similar effort would be even more difficult now- in the 1960’s, most of the public was simply unaware of the greusome slaughter happening in Vietnam, and had great faith in the government. Now, there is less faith in the government, but people are very aware of the kind of atrocties committed in modern warfare. Jaded, they simply do not care if innocents are killed, so long as the innocents in question are not someone they know. I remain convinced by these (repeated!) lessons of history that the only kind of revolution possible now does not involve the simple destruction of buildings or people.
