This Thurbsday, learn which way the wind blows with Zayd Ayers Dorhn

My late friend Jimmy Weinstein started In These Times magazine in 1976 with the dream of matching the accomplishment of Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that reached over half a million readers each issue at its height in 1910. The dream was a radical politics not for the rarified few, but for folks next door. Jimmy had a cousin who joined the Weathermen in going “underground” after a bomb they were building to massacre hundreds of soldiers at a New Jersey Army base blew three of themselves up instead. Once, at one of our regular lunches in the early 2000s, I asked what he would do if his cousin ever knocked on his door, seeking refuge. Jimmy scowled back, “Turn him in to the FBI, for destroying the left!”

Today’s Thurbsday blurb concerns the “Weather Underground,” which was what Weatherman dubbed itself during the years its surviving members lived one step ahead of the law, under assumed identities, plotting “revolution” all the while. Two of them, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, are now fixtures on the Chicago left, who you always see swanning about town. I’ve never been particular fond of them. When Bill was making the promotional rounds for his self-serving autobiography, he told the New York Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” It was his bad fortune that the interview appeared the morning ofSeptember 11, 2001.

He had always been morally evasive, and the evasions started with the book’s title, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist. Because, bluntly, Ayers was not an “antiwar activist.” He was a war activist. Weathermen literally declared war against the United States, fantasizing that that could spur a mass rebellion to overthrow the federal government and transform America into Marxist republic by directing, from their secret redoubts, a guerrilla army of Black militants, white juvenile delinquents (they would prowl around working class high schools to try to recruit them), pre-dawn mad bombers, and…well, just to type it is to descend into giggles.

Seven years later, after Ayers’ acquaintance with Barack Obama became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign (everyone in the Chicago progressive nonprofit world has an acquaintance with Bill and Bernardine, their house being the setting for dozens of right-thinking receptions, galas, and cocktail parties over the years), Terry Gross subtly ground him to dust on Fresh Air for his slippery moral and political reasoning

I wrote something about all of that here. But the story was never told better than from an unlikely source: Ayers and Dohrn’s son, playwright Zayd Ayers Dorhn, in his magnificent podcast Mother Country Radicals. It took a loved one to get B&B to speak with something close to the candor that they have always owed the rest of us fighting for justice and peace, if not for“destroying” the left, for at least greatly hindering its potential mass appeal—and mass power.

Now, Zayad has given us the gift of a memoir. It’s not an indictment of his parents; there is way too much love for that, and it is way too much an actual work of art for that. Here was my original blurb, as drafted:

““One of the strangest tales of our times, the rise and fall of the Weathermen, has been told so often it can feel almost..stale. Conjured into the present by a genuine literary master, recollecting what he saw as an sensitive child, it catches fire again, illuminating a strangeness with which we all wrestle: the mysteries of filial love and resentment.”

I like it! What I was getting at is that, while book is most decidedly useful as a richer retelling of the Weatherman story, what makes it literature transcends the historical specifics: stuff that will resonate with anyone who, well, has had parents—even those who did not teach you how to shake a police tail by the time you were out of toddlerhood.

Blurbing also, alas, being marketing, the blurber’s own literary intent can get sacrificed along the way. Here’s what they ran:

“Conjured into the present by a genuine literary master, recollecting what he saw as a sensitive child, the oft-told tale of the Weathermen catches fire here.”

Zayd’s doing three events in Chicago to celebrate its official May 19 publication date:

• MAY 21 - party at Haymarket House

• MAY 22 - reading/q&a event at City Lit Books

• MAY 26 - in conversation with Alex Kotlowitz at Bookends and Beginnings