Windy City reconciling The Weathermen and Barack Obama
analogues | chicago by dick averns
opposition wars imperialism protest durée
Immediately following 9/11, there was a sense that never before had America been subject to such large-scale terrorist bomb- ings on home soil. Al Qaeda’s World Trade Centre death toll certainly bears this out. But in looking further, one discovers there is an American home-front history of ter- rorist bombings that is much broader in scope. During the 1970s The Weathermen conducted a string of continental bomb- ings that wrought both symbolic and lit- eral collapse – architectural, cultural, social and political – across the United States. 1 These contestations, portrayed cogently in Sam Green’s 2002 documentary The Weather Underground , from which this article draws much material, reveal The Weather- men as a homegrown operation. 2 While Al Qaeda and The Weathermen come from dif- ferent hemispheres, they are not disparate entities: both have contested Western capi- talist imperialism. Connecting these enti- ties, one can chart a textual weather map locating Weatherman Bill Ayers and Presi- dent Barack Obama on the same occluded front. The outcome is not directed towards 2008 Republican electioneering theories that couch Obama as a synchronic terrorist fraterniser 3 , instead Ayers and Obama are connected diachronically by political im-
peratives around winds of evolved conflicts: on the one hand Vietnam, and on the other, the War on Terror. Obama’s critics have accused him of frat- ernising with Ayers, attending his house for a function in the mid-90s and sitting on the same Woods Fund of Chicago board. 4 Whilst Ayers, a self-admitted radical, has undoubtedly transgressed law and order, he has since reintegrated to society and works as a professor at the University of Illinois. 5 I imagine Obama considers such reconciling factors as key for achieving broader peace and social justice, a desired climate change dovetailing with the aims of The Weather- men then, and for Obama, now. The Weathermen mapped their name from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues : ‘you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ 6 – apt, as both The Weathermen and Obama have their roots in Chicago, aka the Windy City. It was at the 1969 annual conference of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), held in the Windy City, that individuals such as Bill Ay- ers, Bernadine Dohrn and Brian Flanagan, feeling that years of non-violent protest had done little to change American imperialism, forged The Weathermen. Their split from the SDS is framed by Ayers’ subsequent
characterisation: ‘the sense was that we had to do whatever we had to do to stop the war’. The Weathermen’s core issues in the 60s and 70s were a call for racial equal- ity, US troop withdrawal from Vietnam and civil rights. During this era, The Weather- men fought to live up to the slogan of the times –Bring the War Home – with a string of domestic bombings. 7 ‘Our strategy was that we would make the war visible in the United States; that people couldn’t just ig- nore it’. While it would be faintly facile to say America’s eventual withdrawal from Vietnam – including Saigon’s aptly named Operation Frequent Wind – was due to The Weathermen, their sustained efforts un- doubtedly added pressure. This leads to the first of three key fronts. Obama, as the first black US president and the embodiment of a collective striving for racial equality, in early 2009 announced a timetable for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. 8 Hence a diachronic relevance: The Weathermen’s aim to curtail US occupations of foreign soil forms a continuum with Obama’s con- temporary policy. The Weathermen’s bombing campaign struck at targets representing justice, de- mocracy, the military and government op- erations. Courts, corrections offices, po-
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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