LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Weather Underground: Vietnam War
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The volume's poems by Weather Underground women are an attempt to shore up Weather's reputation in an area where Weather itself has acknowledged great weakness -- the organization's alienation from the Women's Liberation Movement. But it's hard to see how these poems will help Weather's reputation for feminism. This section includes poems celebrating a bombing at MIT, the Symbionese Liberation Army (this poem appears twice in the book), and the hijacking of a Pan Am jet; another condemns American POW's in Vietnam, and an especially peculiar one celebrates "Our Men" as "sinewy warriors" with "long hair curling and straggling down your backs . . . " This is feminism?
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The Weather Underground's flagship web site includes extensive international conditions, comprehensive U.S. search capabilities, timely severe weather warnings, and a tropical storm center. Visitors can create a personalized weather information page which lists current weather conditions in their favorite U.S. and international cities.
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Sam Green's powerful film is edited together from archive footage and modern interviews with members of the SDS, the FBI, and the Weather Underground themselves, including Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, and Bill Ayers. The film begins with the creation of the group and an analysis of how the enthusiastic idealism of the hippies turned into a bad trip with the violent flare-up at Altamont, Charles Manson, and the escalation of Vietnam. The activities and philosophies of The Weathermen are traced as they go underground and become clandestine celebrities of the revolution. The fall of the Weather Underground is as anticlimactic as it was in real life, a combined effort of covert FBI counterintelligence forces and changing priorities for the individual members.
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Over the next several years, Weatherman would change its name to the Weather Underground, form all women cells, bomb the Capitol building, the Pentagon (among other attacks), and release several communiques. Some of these described their reasons for a particular action or series of actions; some cheered on youth and black insurrections; some memorialized fallen revolutionaries such as George Jackson and Ho Chi Minh; and some discussed the organization's theoretical approach and/or its role in the anti-imperialist movement. The organization finally imploded in 1976-1977 after a series of splits and recriminations which came in the wake of its attempts to re-define itself after the 1975 Vietnamese victory. Despite its small size, Weather influenced many a conversation and, ultimately, the direction of the New Left in the late Sixties through the mid-Seventies. Although some would argue otherwise, they were not responsible for the destruction of the New Left. In fact, their attempts to adjust to the post-Vietnam reality of the mid-Seventies showed the weaknesses of the movement while pointing (in writing, at least) a possible direction the Left could have gone in order to not only maintain its relevance, but become a potentially powerful force in U.S. politics.
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This documentary film follows the rise and fall of the Weather Underground -- a group of several hundred young women and men who tried to spark a socialist revolution in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, the Weathermen battled police in the streets, bombed two dozen buildings (including the US Capitol), broke Timothy Leary out of prison and issued communiqués that were printed everywhere from The New York Times to the underground press. For almost a decade, they evaded one of the largest FBI manhunts in history, until the group fell apart at the end of the 70s. During their time, the Weathermen were extremely controversial -- they were revolutionary outlaws whose Bonnie-and-Clyde style and radical politics inspired many young people. At the same time, most of America -- and much of the Left -- thought they were criminals and that their violence was wrong. This film looks at the past in order to make sense of the present.
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It's important to note that the Weather Underground were radicals who had protested non-violently in the past, but felt that the democratic process had failed them by not recognizing their objections. They took up violence as a last resort to call attention to the murder of the Vietnamese people (as well as charismatic civil rights leaders) under the motto of "bring the war home." Because the slaughter of the Vietnamese populace was happening out of sight and out of mind, the group felt that confronting Americans with perceptible violence would force them to face up to the issue. The Weather Underground only desired to damage property in this respect, and their bombings were painstakingly planned to avoid killing or hurting innocent bystanders.
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