Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Stormy Weather


Flint is so radical, dude...

"At a 'War Council' in Flint, Michigan in 1969, [Weather Underground] leader Bernardine Dohrn praised the serial murderer Charles Manson: 'Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild.' She then proclaimed that the time had come to launch the war against 'Amerikkka' (the Weathermen always spelled America this way) and to form Linka Weather Underground to carry out terrorist activities.

"The Weathermen claimed credit for 25 bombings over the next several years. They set bombs at the rebuilt Haymarket statue; a bathroom at the Pentagon; the Capitol barber shop; the New York City police headquarters; and a variety of other targets."

(Courtesy of Something and Half of Something.)

UPDATE: What does this have to do with the presidential election? Go here.



4 comments:

  1. Just curious, are you attributing the homicidal behavior of a member of the Weathermen to Flint? It appears so from you comment above the opinion.

    Flint had nothing unusual to do with the development of that nut-case. As you may have noted, those murders were bred in all parts of the country.

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  2. No, that was just a little joke. It is odd that they picked Flint to declare war on the United States, but it was just a coincidence. Flint's got enough problems without taking the blame fro the weatherman.

    There's a great documentary about the Weather Underground, by the way, available here:
    http://www.amazon.com/Weather-Underground-Brian-Flanagan-II/dp/B0001LYFKO

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  3. I think I'll pass on that documentary Gordon. If there were any attempt in it to justify the actions of these criminals I'd just get angry and throw something at the tv.

    Sort of ironic, I ran across this op-ed that personalized the actions of the Weather Underground.

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  4. It's a pretty straight forward account, although it is not a film that goes out of its way to criticize, even though several former members attack their own actions. The glow of nostalgia that tends to hover around the Weatherman and the SLA is very strange. They've become like cartoon characters for many people, with the reality of the idiotic things they did all but ignored. It's like people associate them with their youth, regardless of their horrible actions, and look back on them with fondness. Very weird.

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Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.