Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

last week, i had to work an early morning release: get up at 3 a.m. to be to work by 4 a.m. to help make sure a big software release goes out correctly during our maintenance hours. I was doing this twice a week, to help out an understaffed QA department. After months, they cut me loose from that gig but we still go in whenever there’s a major release. When I did it regularly, it wasn’t so bad. Kind of screwed up my sleep schedule but it was nice to be home during the day with time for errands or getting major stuff done around the house.

Last week, once the sun came up and the B&N coffee shop was opened, I left to move my car from the street to the garage and get a B&N coffee which they price under a buck to grab people leaving garage through the downtown mall on their way to their jobs. I decided to expropriate the expropriator (HA! — my employer) by loitering a little among the books, coffee in hand. On the best seller shelf, I noticed Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. The book, from AK Press, was hefty, made with good, quality paper and a decent, sturdy cover. I was intrigued at such quality, since most of the paperbacks I’ve read lately have been really poor quality.

Bored to tears by Postone, I decided to splurge since this gives me yet another excuse to avoid Postone like the plague. Yes. I know. I need to finish the damn thing — and write about it. But the guy’s writing is so… how do you explain it? It’s not that the words are hard. It’s that he’s working at such a high level of abstraction and seems to refuse to run his claims through any examples that I find it annoying. I also dislike the lack of direct quotations from Marx. Too often he makes a claim about what Marx said and then simply footnotes it. I think he needed to illustrate a lot more.

But anyway, I’ve been reading Outlaws of America in every stolen movement: lunch, in between sets at the gymn, on the bus, taking breaks from hoeing out the crap in the “hot room.”

I picked up the book in the first place, intrigued because whenever the Weather Underground comes up, leftists get really pissy and spill a lot of bile about them. I have tended to avoid knowing or learning anything about sectarianism on the left: I just can’t be arsed. But it bothers me to read people calling other people Maoists or Stalinists or CPUSAers or Trotsskyists or Sparts or whatever — because I typically have no idea what that means. Usually, the words are hurled as insults, and i don’t generally understand why they are insults. And don’t much care at that point since I find such insult-hurling to be useless to the argument at hand — the argument that prompted the insult in the first place. At that point, I’m usually just annoyed with all sides. And if the insult is hurled early on, in lieu of an actual debate, I’m even more annoyed.

So, because such bile gets spilled over mention of Weather, I decided to check out the book. Plus, the author grew up in upstate NY. Another interesting quirk of the book.

So, wow! It’s a real shame that so much unenlightening bile is spilled and nothing much that’s meaningful ever gets said about Weather. They had some kick ass ideas about what a white solidarity movement was about. They actually believed in the inextricably intertwined character of theory and practice. People who went into the Weather said they often never read more in their life than they did while in the group. And at the same time, they did shit. It’s the stuff they did — blowing up statues, police stations, etc. — that causes a lot of people to be upset with them. I think.

Maybe my mind is too warped by being in the thick of things with this book. I’m finding it hard to understand why people were so pissed at them. Yes, they did some shit they shouldn’t have done, and most of them say this.

But all this bile obscures the fact that the Weather emerged out of a war in the SDS over how to address the work of the Panthers, The Young Lords, the Brown Berets, AIM, and numerous other people of color cultural nationalist movements in the U.S., as well as in Viet Nam, Cuba, Algeria, etc.

I don’t have time to detail it all, but basically Weather believed that they had to take the black liberation struggle seriously when leaders said: get the fuck out of black organizations and go work on your own shit. Your job is to let us alone, let us run our own organizations, without your leadership help. You create your own white organizations to support us. You go back and deal with white supremacist power structures.

And that is exactly what Weather was about. But all the fucking bile…. and not necessarily bile that wasn’t deserved… Who the hell knows about this these days?

Every single one of the bombings Weather engaged in had to do with acts of solidarity people of color — with their national liberation struggles in the U.S. (Panthers) as well as abroad (Viet Nam, Chile, Cuba, Algeria, etc.) The ideas was to take the heat of the people being bombed and shot to death in their sleep like Fred Hampton was. The idea was to cause such a problem with the state — with privileged white people being the ones to be hunted down, beaten, spied on, etc. — that the state had to deal with “the war at home.” The idea was that the state couldn’t be effective if it had to fight white people too.

How can anyone not admire the principle behind that?

I was moved to write, even though I’ve been stewing in my indignation about all this for a couple of days now. Moved because I’m on the chapter about the feminist movement within Weather. No time for much detail but Mountain Moving Day and Six Sisters refers to 1973 efforts to address the need for Weather to develop a feminist analysis. There had been efforts underway earlier but mostly quashed because of the events happening at the time.

MMD is an article, circulated in January 1973, calling for the autonomous development of a feminist politics in Weather. Six Sisters refers to a reading packet distributed at a 6 week summer study session to “grapple with the correlations between race, class, and gender”.

All of it resulted in the bombing of the HEW office in San Francisco. Why?

Because, among other things, the analysis identified the Office of Health Education and Welfare as a central institution that fucked with women’s lives — especially the lives of women of color. Why? Because the HEW was seen as a primary government agency that claimed it was about welfare, families and health, but it wasn’t. Why? Because women’s liberation was about decent schools, health care, food, childcare — none of which could be provided under a capitalist state.

There’s more. I’m only just reading the chapter now and have to stop to continue with my bout of weekend cleaning. But like I said, I’m kind of annoyed by the fact that all the bile-spilling has obscured what Weather was about, the whys behind its actions, and its importance as an early group dedicated to acting in solidarity, supporting the liberation struggles of people of color.