“I think Vietnam made us a little bit crazy,” says Mark Rudd, a former member of the Weather Underground, the radical groupuscule that protested the war by bombing government offices in the early 70s. When you realize that your country is killing thousands of people a day for no good reason, and most of your friends and neighbors either approve or don’t care, then what do you do? Rudd’s not sure, but he doubts he got it right the first time.
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People of a certain age will remember Rudd as the campus firebrand who led the shutdown of Columbia University in the spring of 1968. Now he teaches mathematics at a community college in New Mexico. When students ask what he did back then, he tells them he was a revolutionary dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government. They look at him, he says, like he’s from another planet. Rudd hasn’t written a book and he doesn’t chase the limelight anymore. In Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, he’s pensive and rueful about the deeds of his younger self.
Having preemptively passed the buck, Ayers implicitly made the case for violence, speaking warmly of John Brown and the Earth Liberation Front while dismissing the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as moderately successful at best.
Ayers was prepared to move on, but an audience member who’d been reading a socialist paper earlier wanted to reinforce the point. He turned around to hit the Packers guy with a question clearly intended as a knockout punch: “Well, wouldn’t you have supported the American Revolution against the redcoats?”
