By Emmett RensinJune 3, 2026

• Biography & Autobiography

• Politics

• History

WAS IT WORTH IT? Zayd Ayers Dohrn spends his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, asking the question in two distinct senses he keeps mistaking for one. Was it worth it for his parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, along with many of their friends, to march out of the 1969 convention of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), form the Weathermen and then the Weather Underground to engage in a decade of jailbreaks and bombing campaigns in the name of total war against the government of the United States, go on the run, and live as fugitives until they ultimately surrendered to the FBI in 1980? Was it worth it as in, did any of this in any way advance the causes the Weathermen were fighting for?

And was it worth it for them to do all those things, even if it meant that Zayd Ayers Dohrn and his brother Malik and their adopted brother Chesa—the son of fellow Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who spent Chesa’s childhood in prison—were born de facto fugitives from federal law enforcement? As in, awoken in the middle of the night to flee from safe houses across the United States, taught to throw tails before they had birth certificates, subject to the kind of psychological damage that left Ayers Dohrn “traumatized,” beset not only by “nightmares but fits of malaise” as well, drinking from a milk bottle until he was 10 years old. Was it worth it?

Ayers Dohrn, now a middle-aged playwright and podcaster who is “embarrassed” whenever he finds himself in a chanting protest march, cannot quite say. He’s a good liberal. He knows that the War in Vietnam was wrong and that COINTELPRO broke the law. He doesn’t appreciate, for example, that they illegally bugged his aunt Jennifer’s apartment for years and stole a pair of her underwear to keep as a souvenir. But he reserves words like “moral catastrophe” for his parents and their friends. He’s “uncomfortable” with “insurrection”—he confronts his father with footage of the January 6 Capitol riot as if this will prove some kind of point—and believes in the “painstaking work of the legal system and the long arc of history bending slowly, but inevitably, toward justice.” 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, he 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?

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The indictment of the Weather Underground, like the indictment against nearly all failed revolutionary (or just radically aspirational) fronts in American history is twofold: first, what they did was immoral. Second—and this is always the more damning thing—what they did made no difference. It was ineffective, or counterproductive. It didn’t work.

The moral charge is a strange one. It is strange because it is typically premised not on the principle that riots, jailbreaks, and bombs are categorically immoral and that the Weather Underground was therefore simply one bad actor among many, but on the idea, now taken for common sense, that the violence of the New Left represented a particularly pernicious and damnable possibility, that it crossed a line hitherto respected in American life. This is strange because for all the bombs they detonated—in the Pentagon, in the Capitol Building, in a New York City police station, in the office of the California Attorney General, in 25 different places in total—the Weather Underground murdered precisely nobody. The only casualties were Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, three Weathermen who were killed when a bomb detonated prematurely in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970. The other bombs caused a great deal of property damage, wherever one wants to rate that on the scale of historical crimes. They rioted, most famously in the 1969 Days of Rage in Chicago, an event that resulted in one serious injury and cost the state of Illinois roughly $183,000 (and cost the Weather Underground roughly $250,000 in bail). They broke Timothy Leary out of prison and assisted in the jailbreak of Assata Shakur.

The close affiliation between the Weather Underground and Shakur’s Black Liberation Army sometimes causes critics to count the various robberies and several murders committed by the latter group against the Weathermen, but even so included, this is penny-ante stuff. Any serious moral accounting of the Weather Underground might consider how they would be remembered had they stormed a federal facility and indiscriminately fired 2,000 rounds of live ammunition, murdering 43 people in under 20 minutes (a crime actually committed by the New York State Police and correctional officers when they retook Attica in 1971). How might we judge them had they opened fire on unarmed protestors, injuring 28 and killing three by shooting them in the back (a crime actually committed by state police and highway patrol officers in the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre)? How might we remember the Weather Underground had it been J. Edgar Hoover and not Fred Hampton who lay in a drugged haze as armed men stormed into his home and shot him in his sleep?

There is a reflex—perhaps it already tickles—to call this whataboutism: a defense of the indefensible on the basis that the other guys did worse. But all war is whataboutism. What about your enemy, what about your conditions, what is it about the state of the world in which you live that justifies armed struggle? Between 1955, when Bernardine Dohrn was 13 years old, and 1977, when Dohrn and Ayers were expelled from the Weather Underground in a fit of unavoidable leftist infighting, the United States murdered roughly two million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It sprayed over 18,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange over Indochina, causing some 400,000 additional deaths and some 500,000 birth defects in children. In March 1968, the Mỹ Lai Massacre alone saw roughly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians—mainly women, children, and the elderly—executed by American forces. The CIA’s Phoenix Program is conservatively credited with the assassination of over 20,000 people. In 1965 and ’66, the State Department provided kill lists to the Indonesian military, resulting in an anticommunist purge that produced some million bodies. In 1971, President Richard Nixon backed the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh, selling arms to the perpetrators and blocking international action while mass rape and murder produced several million refugees and another million dead. The CIA overthrew the government of Chile, installing a dictator who killed around 3,000 dissidents and tortured thousands more; it coordinated with dictators in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil to assassinate and disappear tens of thousands of left-wing dissidents. Beyond Hampton and Attica and Orangeburg, beyond the dozens of suspect encounters during traffic stops, the murders and lynchings gone unsolved by half-motivated law enforcement, the American police beat and murdered protesters in Selma, Alabama, and Chicago, at Kent State and Jackson State, at Southern University. “I was in a rage,” Dohrn told her son decades later in an interview for his book, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

If you cannot smell it, you need only imagine these bodies—these millions murdered, maimed, and tortured—not as some distant casualties of “necessary” realpolitik, but looking up, mangled in their graves, each bearing the face of your mother, your husband, your child. To ask whether or not it was morally justified—whether it was, in fact, a “moral catastrophe”—to respond to all of this by making a spectacle of bombing empty buildings, one simply has to imagine the Iraqi government, suddenly possessed of the military power to avenge itself on the United States, flattening your neighborhood, setting fire to your city, poisoning your drinking water, sending armed men to execute your aging parents in their home—they voted for Bush after all, didn’t they? Then imagine that somewhere in Baghdad, some disaffected teenagers setting off a protest bomb in an empty office park. How strenuous your objection? How tightly might you clutch your pearls before some invading soldier ripped them from your neck as a trophy before setting fire to your home? One must imagine if the Weathermen had killed a million people in the New York Tristate area with a decade’s worth of bombs. Would it have been better if the Weathermen had worn medals and planned their actions from the Pentagon?

It is possible, of course, to object to any kind of lawlessness and violence, to say that every bomb and bullet carries an unbearable moral hazard, no matter the conditions of the world. But almost nobody is so totalizing in their pacifism. What is particularly obnoxious about the moral case against the Weather Underground is the implication that their limited recourse to violence constituted some unique and inconceivable evil, that Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers crossed lines unimaginable to Henry Kissinger. After an Underground bomb went off in the bathroom of the US Capitol, hurting nobody but briefly lifting the building’s arches off the ground, President Nixon declared it “a shocking act of violence,” an “outrage” to all Americans. The Republican Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott, denounced the failure of the radicals to “persuade by reason or by logic,” resorting to “terror” instead. The next month, the first massacre would occur in Bangladesh. It is impossible to be lectured about reason by such people. It is impossible to be warned about the “devouring” dangers of political violence by the same people who believe it is legal and justifiable, if a bit regrettable, when children die in war. Rationalization of the New Left is often taken to be “unserious,” but it is unserious to object to it on purely moral grounds with one hand while waving away the unfathomable scale of American violence with the other. One may of course oppose oneself to bloodshed in all cases. But it is not serious to swim in a sea of blood and faint at the addition of another drop.

If you are reading this, sweaty with the worry that I am “normalizing” or “justifying” political violence, consider that I am only asking why you find so many forms of political violence so normal, so justifiable, so adequately met with well, it’s a shame, of course, while the specter of old radicals looms like a nightmare. Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?

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The charge that the Weather Underground was ineffective is much more difficult to dispute. If the moral critics of Dohrn and Ayers have a bit of ground to stand on, it is that at least their flavor of political homicide gets results: we really did depose all those governments, silence all those dissidents, bend the world to our will. The Weather Underground failed. If they had succeeded, we would talk about them the way we talk about the Irish Republican Army or the African National Congress. The moral questions would fade into the hazy background of so much historical contingency. But if the Weather Underground failed, we should ask: compared to what?

Radical and revolutionary movements—the failed ones, at any rate—are typically held up for comparison with the work of ordinary politics, the slow boring of hard boards by which the ambitions of the revolutionary actors are eventually realized with a little organization and patience. Let us set aside for a moment that this is not an either-or proposition, that there is no central committee anywhere that disciplines the political activity of entire nations, and that there has never been a significant lurch, forward or backward, anywhere, at any time in the history of organized civilization that did not involve both lawful and unlawful agitation (if only so that the reformers could say, in essence, you deal with us, or you deal with them). The end of the Vietnam War (an event it is difficult to imagine coming about in response to an exclusive campaign of lofty petitions) heralded the end of the New Left. Without a central, organizing conflict, the Weather Underground (like the SDS, the Black Panthers, and the others) fell into infighting, aimlessness, and impotence. By the time Dohrn surrendered herself to law enforcement in 1980, the United States had already begun to regard those two decades as a kind of hysterical mistake. A few odd riots aside, we had some 25 or 30 years of relative peace: the Reagan Revolution, the New Democrats, the return to normalcy.

History feels inevitable in retrospect, but it would be difficult to convince an ambitious liberal activist in 1982 that by the year 2026, the United States would not have any kind of social healthcare program, that the diminished welfare state was significantly more precarious than a generation prior, that Roe v. Wade (1973) had been overturned, that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had been rendered largely moot, that the environment continued to degrade at pace, that the poverty rate remained stubbornly trapped above 10 percent. While they might be heartened to learn of some marginal and mainly technological improvements in quality of life, they might be less heartened to discover that the most significant technological innovations of the past generation were the creation of a digital surveillance apparatus unimaginable to the FBI agents of 1975 and the replacement of CIA operatives tasked with in-person assassinations with unmanned drones capable of carrying out civilian massacres via remote control. The age of reasonable and ordinary politics had proved so effective that the liberals had joined the reactionaries in their enthusiasm for spying, lawfare, and ideological policework and had voted, via their representatives in the allegedly liberal party, to support bombing campaigns, dissident liquidations, and outright invasions of El Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya again, Bolivia, Iran, Panama, the Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan again, Yemen, Iraq for a third time, Pakistan, Somalia again, Iraq for a fourth time, Syria, Yemen again, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia again, Afghanistan again, Somalia again, Yemen again, Venezuela, Ecuador, Gaza, and Iran (again).

Perhaps ordinary politics will succeed tomorrow. But it could not undo these crimes; it could not retroactively prevent them. The failure to act sooner—to act urgently, preemptively—is a perfectly mainstream grievance in American political life so long as the perpetrators of preemptive violence are the Pentagon or the police. It is only the Left that is accused of irrational impatience. It is helpful, once again, to resolve the abstract into the particular. One must imagine a sensible and centrist columnist, bloody hands clawing desperately through the rubble of his recently bombed-out DC town house in search of his child, buried below. One must imagine him desperate, carrying that child—still alive, thank God, but both legs reduced to shredded, bleeding stumps—through the smoky streets, desperate to reach an emergency room. You must imagine him dodging several additional air strikes, slipping past the ground forces deployed to sweep up any men between the ages of 16 and 55 found out in the streets, and finally reaching a field hospital where his child’s life can be saved. You must imagine him finally sitting down, catching his breath, and composing a newsletter about how the counterproductive thing would be for anybody to try to avenge this crime, about how people need to accept that this is just how things are, how dissidents in whatever country bombed his house should moderate some of their social positions, then wait a decade or two for the right electoral opportunity.

FBI poster for members of Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society, 1970 is in the public domain

The Weather Underground was ineffective. What isn’t? To say they failed is to say that what they did was as effective as anything, that it was roughly equivalent to all other forms of political change, that a better world is not possible. Perhaps it isn’t. The world is violent and futile; progress, when it comes, comes neither from revolution nor from ordinary politics but from the boards eroding themselves, the slow, inevitable transformation of all things in the face of technology and contingency. Near the end of his book, Ayers Dohrn notes how, “once it became clear that violent revolution hadn’t succeeded in overthrowing the system, most of the members of the revolutionary undergrounds rededicated their lives to a slower, more incremental sort of progress.” It is difficult to blame them, or to find fault with that decision. They are all past 80 now. They are very likely to die while the United States, unmovable by any tactic at all, tries to dig its way out of a bloody and futile war in the Persian Gulf. Again.

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It is strange to revisit the Weather Underground now, at least for me, a decade past my own dalliance with revolutionary politics. I spent years in and around what passed for radical and socialist organizations in the early 21st-century United States, most notably the (pre–snaps-not-claps) Democratic Socialists of America. I mean that I used to believe a better world was possible. Reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, what struck me most was what utter pussies we all were. We never did anything that would put the president and the director of the FBI in fits or provoked them into dedicating the full force of federal law enforcement into disrupting our activities, assassinating our leaders, or breaking up our meetings by force. I suppose that we were more committed to the Left’s own version of slow boring—the endless work of education, organizing, labor solidarity—work that has proved precisely as effective as its liberal cousin, not that any of that spared us from the same dismissive criticism: we were ineffective, counterproductive, getting in the way of the sensible Democratic agenda just around the corner, just dorm room–bull sesh idiots for finding the state of the world appalling, for believing that something must be done. It is difficult to take the idea that the Weather Underground just went too far seriously when a far less radical era of the American Left met precisely the same ridicule and bullshit moral panic.

The FBI didn’t need to lift a finger: the weight of all of that embarrassment killed whatever hope or solidarity existed on the left 10 years ago, splintered it into the remaining terminally woke dead-enders and the various retreats into liberalism, reaction, or total disengagement that befell the rest of us. Indeed, beyond their relatively larger impact, what impresses most about Dohrn and Ayers and the other Weathermen you meet in Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s account is how unembarrassed they were, how unembarrassed they remain. They have regrets, of course, tactical and moral calculations they would figure differently in retrospect, more ambivalence over what Ayers calls the “contradiction” between one’s obligations to the small world of the family and the large world of global struggle, but not one of them, even now, comes across ashamed for believing that they could change the world, or bowed by the consensus of a country even more at peace with its own sins.

The funniest part in the whole book comes when Ayers Dohrn loses track of his father during a protest, only to find the 50-year-old man impulsively helping a few anarchists drag a trash can into the street and light it on fire. How embarrassing for both of us to discover we will never be as cool as father, biological or merely spiritual. It’s a little juvenile, a little pointless, but it is difficult to read this book and not prefer the pure, misguided heart over the cynical and cautious one.

In the past few years, the American Left has reformed once again, largely in protest of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Like the Vietnam War a generation ago, those protesters have been aided by a central, clarifying conflict—there has been, relative to the DSA of yesteryear, a bit less getting sidetracked into pointless internecine conflicts over the progressive stack—and unlike the Weather Underground, they have been free of any organized Action Faction, of any real effort to cross from building occupation and protest into violence. Of course, this has not spared them the same accusations of pointlessness, unreasonableness, and bigotry for failing to adequately appreciate the glorious incineration of children by US taxpayer-funded bombs. Merely protesting outside of sites dedicated to the auctioning of violently seized land is treated as a kind of violence itself, met with the same yowls and fainting that would meet actual efforts to resist the flattening of Gaza City, the illegal settlement of the West Bank, or at least the United States’ insistence on providing political and material cover for the ethnic cleansing of a captive population. They are still called childish for believing that the world does not have to be this way.

But if it is childish, if any of this—the outrage, the horror, the belief that something must be done—is childish, it is only because a child could see it. It is only adults who find comfort in the reassuring sobriety of pessimism. I keep reading that these protesters—like us, like the left wing of the Weather Underground—have been seduced by anti-American propaganda, by the nefarious infiltration of subversive “ideology” into feeds and articles and schools. If you believe that, you must imagine 9/11 with a twist: hours after the towers fell, as FDNY and NYPD officers swarmed the scene looking for survivors, a second wave of al-Qaeda hijackers brought another plane held in reserve, crashing it into the smoldering ground to kill the rescue workers they had lured there with the first attack. This is ordinary business in Gaza and Lebanon. What dastardly “ideology” is required to find this fact appalling? What far more common ideology is required to shrug, to accept that this is the way the world must be?

The United States commands the world from atop a mountain of skulls. That other empires have done the same—will do the same—is no more a defense than that of a murderer who tells the court that homicide is common, unavoidable. There is no nation we will not bomb; no children we will not incinerate; no civilian we will not maim; no people we will not turn to ash if doing so serves some minor interest; no persecution, surveillance, or exploitation we will not tolerate abroad or at home so long as we are not too troubled by it in our ordinary lives. Much of it does not even make the headlines. In the first months of 2026, the United States has bombed nearly 20 sovereign nations. I do not believe that you could name two-thirds of them without consulting your favored LLM.

In May 1970, Bernardine Dohrn released the first communiqué from the Weather Underground. In it, she declared that “all over the world, people fighting American imperialism look to America’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.” Trying to “reform this system” led to nothing but “frustration and impotence”; despite years of effort, “protests and marches don’t do it.” Given these facts, she said, “revolutionary violence is the only way.” She spent the rest of her youth learning that revolutionary violence doesn’t do it either. The empire remains; the daily ambient horror show goes on. Perhaps the Weather Underground was immoral, but it was ordinary immorality. Perhaps they failed, but it was an ordinary failure, the failure of everybody who has ever tried by any means. A better world is not possible. The stench only grows stronger.

In light of these facts, if one can admit them honestly and forthrightly, then three options are available to us. The first, chosen by nearly everyone, is to retreat into the psychic defense of unconscionable acceptance. One engages in the dumb, insulating cynicism of finding any kind of hope embarrassing, of hemming and hawing as if a ruined police station or Capitol Hill bathroom is a stain on an otherwise manageable world. If one is sufficiently reactionary, this attitude involves adopting the position that the empire is good, actually, that the hellfire and murder inflicted on every populated continent in the world is the clear-eyed price of Western civilization; in other words, to say it is worth it, to adopt the Weather Underground’s precise justification of efficacious violence for the ambitions of the other side. If one is liberal, Sensible and Sober, then one only needs to adopt the fiction that only babies get too worked up, that the hopelessness of resistance is the same as the immorality of resistance, to acquire a taste for wine made from sour grapes. It requires only deadening one’s heart to the deaths of someone else’s children, clutching your pearls tightly, and accepting unlimited political violence so long as it is the kind that all the other grown-ups have made peace with: the kind carried out in the name of your ongoing comfort. Denial: That is option one.

The second option is pure Christianity, the total and radical acceptance of these facts, of the impossibility of salvation in this life, of the inevitable passage through the veil of tears with eyes wide open. This option is the most difficult by far. It allows one to hold firm in one’s objections to violence, to disorder, to depravity of all kinds at the cost of one’s complete destruction. It requires one to adopt the total and sincere willingness not only to look directly at the immiseration, destruction, and murder of millions without raising a hand, but also to accept one’s own death by the same terms, to imagine what we have inflicted on the world inflicted suddenly on us and to turn the other cheek, not to a slap but to a bullet, to a bomb.

The third option, of course, is to try to blow up a police station. To run wild through the streets. To scream and not stop screaming. To do this knowing that you are very likely to lose, that you are certain to be mocked and feared, discredited and persecuted; to endure the relentless, reflexive, and stupid double standard of a cynical world, and die and be forgotten. Or worse: to live a long and inexplicable life, comfortable in your second act once all the legal matters have been resolved, sitting as your son—who clearly loves you—reassures his readers that everything you ever did was just a fit of pique. Sure, the government set millions of people on fire, and sure, they murdered your friends, and yes, they even have tapes, somewhere, of your sister having sex (just in case she shouted out your hiding place mid-coitus), and yes, all of that was bad, no doubt, they shouldn’t have done it, but that the real catastrophe, the real history in need of reckoning, the real beyond the pale radical act is your misguided belief, once upon a time, that you could do anything about it. That you could stop it. That the horror of it all might move you to make a spectacle of your resistance—taking care, each time, to call ahead and warn the switchboard, to make sure the building will be empty when the bomb goes off, lest somebody get hurt while you register your silly, childish discontent.

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Featured image: Kathy Boudin FBI wanted poster issued 1 May 1970 is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.

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