Dr. Frank's What's-it

Hey, Ya Had to be There

"People were caught up in the times, and we all did things then that we wouldn't dream of doing today..."

When all else fails, former 60s radicals and their would-be apologists always resort to a variation upon this dubious theme. You have to wonder if they really think they're fooling anyone other than themselves.

The familiar mantra is, in this case, intoned by one Derek Hanekom, a member of the South African parliament and prominent defender of SLA fugitive James Kilgore. What he's referring to, of course, is the SLA's idiotic, pseudo-political crime spree, a pointless string of terrorist publicity stunts whose destructiveness was limited only by its perpetrators' own merciful ineptitude. (Though not nearly limited enough.)

It's a good deal less surprising than it ought to be that this point of view is tacitly endorsed by the authors of this piece ("from SLA terrorist to liberal activist") in today's SF Chronicle.

Kilgore appears to have put the violence behind him, while nurturing or honing whatever political thinking the SLA originally had.

Nurturing or honing? God help us.

"The SLA represents a continuity in his thinking, but his methods have changed," said Martin Jansen, director of Workers World Radio Productions, where Kilgore has been on the board of directors since 2000. "He's quite dedicated to his cause."

Most Kigore sympathizers don't go so far as to agree that the difference between commendable labor rights activism and cold blooded murder is merely a matter of "methodology." Yet amongst those who are predisposed to think along these lines, some of whom write for major newspapers, something like a party line appears to have emerged: that in contrast, perhaps, to the other SLA alumni, James Kilgore's subsequent activist "good works" tend to redeem or mitigate the evil acts of his misguided youth. And, hey, everyone was doing it, right?

If I were a "liberal activist" trying to revive The Dream, I'd be doing everything I could to put at least a barge-pole's distance between myself and anything associated with The Movement's worst, most inane monsters. I can't quite credit it, but there are some people who even now have failed to grasp what was wrong with the SLA in the first place. That's scary.

Posted by Dr. Frank at November 17, 2002 04:27 PM | TrackBack