The Terrorist Down the Street

[Diane Merkel]

This has nothing to do with anything we've discussed on these boards except Crazy Horse is mentioned in Appendix 3 mentioned below. I need to sort out my thoughts, so I'm doing it here, hoping someone can help me work through this. Is there a shrink on the boards?

Have you ever read something and immediately wished you hadn't? That happened to me today. I have Google Alerts set for DeFuniak Springs because I volunteer at the museum there (that's the place my book is about) and am always on the lookout for news and information about the place. Today it listed an obituary for David Sinclair who died this week. I didn't know David well because he was a solitary kind of guy and never seemed very approachable. He and his wife own the local bookstore, which is down the street from the museum. It's a great bookstore, the kind of old-fashioned place where you plop down on the floor and look through stacks of old and new books. I really like his wife and I adore his mother-in-law. She's the kind of person who will do anything for anyone. If someone is in the hospital, she is there. If you need someone to help with a project, she volunteers. She's really a wonderful person.

Unfortunately, the obituary for David came out of Ann Arbor and told of a side of life I can't fathom. I never have and never will understand people who bomb buildings to make their point.

www.mlive.com/annarbornews/news/index.ssf/2008/10/former_ann_arbor_activist_davi.html

Several years ago, I "met" Tom Powers when he wrote to ask a question about something I had on the website. I soon discovered that Tom is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting on the life and death of Diana Oughton, Bill Ayers' old girlfriend who was blown to pieces in a townhouse in New York while building a bomb. Tom's articles about Diana led to his book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, which I highly recommend. It will give you flashbacks -- literally and figuratively -- to the turbulent and disturbing days of the radical 60s and early 70s.

I don't recall David Sinclair being mentioned in that book, but Bill Ayers and his now-wife are. I spent some time today skimming the book and found it more disturbing now. In Appendix 3, there is a missive written in December 1970 by Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers' wife, on behalf of Weather Underground:

This communication does not accompany a bombing or a specific action. We want to express ourselves to the mass movement not as military leaders, but as tribes at council. It has been nine months since the townhouse explosion [that killed Diana]. In that time, the future of our revolution has changed decisively. A growing illegal organization of young women and men can live and fight and love inside Babylon. The FBI can't catch us; we've pierced their bullet-proof shield. But the townhouse forever destoyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.

It goes on at length, admitting to their bombings and other acts. They apparently had little regard for what the bombings did to others. It wasn't until they killed their friends that it suddenly became a bad idea. Do you know how Diana's "remains" were identified? The police found the tip of the little finger of her right hand -- nothing else was identifiable because they were building nail bombs -- and the fingerprint from that fingertip allowed her identification. The woman was pulverized, which is what she and Bill and Bernadine wanted to do to others who dared to have different political beliefs. Yet the country wants to look the other way. "Bill's a respected college professor now," etc., etc. Yes, and Diana once joined the Childen's Community School in Ann Arbor, which is where she met Ayers. What better way to indoctrinate the next generation?

So, I'm back to David. What I read about him doesn't change my feelings about his wife or his mother-in-law. It does leave me wondering if, had I known of his past, would I have asked him about it? Would I have been able to forgive and forget?

Most of all, it has me wondering, is there another terrorist down the street?

[biggordie]

Diane:

The Weather Underground has been "retired" for some years, although, as you have discovered, there are/were several members who were never caught or even identified. As to terrorists down the street, there are plenty of them out in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and other places. They call themselves "militia" or members of the Posse Comitatus. These are the guys one really has to worry about. They are everywhere, and there are training centers in the South.

There are probably a bunch of terrorists still in Florida whose targets would not be in the USA, but rather in Cuba and other countries south of Mexico.

If you ever see any of the footage of the town house explosion aftermath, you might notice a very young actor named Dustin Hoffman down the street.

Gordie

[Diane Merkel]

Thanks for the discomforting words, Gordie. I know you are right, but it's a side of this country I prefer to ignore. I think it's time to play ostrich again. I'll just stick my head in the sand for the next couple of years and avoid all news and current events. Life is easier when you don't give a damn.

I found that video you mentioned:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDw-r-ZRsj8

That certainly is Hoffman, laughing by the fire truck. I watched a couple parts of that documentary and remain amazed at how some people can look at the USA so differently. I don't understand them. I don't want to understand them.

Ostrich

[BrokenSword]

A generation raised on Dr. Spock's book?

B(elted)&(Spanked)

[BrokenSword]

Actually, it's a little difficult to say whether Hoffman is laughing or grimacing as he looks up into the light of the sky.

BS
P.S. Ostrich - Life isn't waiting for the storm to pass by, it's learning to dance among the raindrops.

[crzhrs]

Isn't there a little bit of a Terrorist in us all?

Anybody remember the MC5 (Motor City Five) the proto-punk, hard rock band that was run by David Sinclair's brother, John (who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover agent!)

They performed during the Chicago DNC convention ('68) and were "politically" active.

Kick-out-the Jam!

[Dark Cloud]

It's puzzling to have the vapors over the remarkably incompetent Weather Underground and a veteran of that idiocy in his currently employed, public dotage, visible to police and assassins, working with the poor.

Do you have the same fears over former - or allegedly former - KKK members in Congress, statehouse, jury or police? They killed many more than the Weather Underground literally could count (their technical bomb making incompetence rivals the IRA's) and sometimes deliberately killed women and children for the terror. Not a few refuse to repent. It was impossible in the South within my lifetime for virtually ANY politician, black or white, to rise without dealing with former or current members in some, often but not always remote, capacity. Are/were you as upset about that? The lynchers down the street?

In Boston, the revolting IRA was a decided if distant presence in my life and experience, extorting contributions, melding into the drug gangs and racist thugs of the Southy slums and times. No Boston politician could rise without dealing with them at some point, Democrat and Republican both. Dealing with the tentacles of the now Honorable Gerry Adams (or his Protestant counterparts) stains your hands with blood, some of it American. Do you recoil from them or those who deal with them?

No Hispanic politician - or Anglo - could rise in certain cities and places without dealing with former/current Mexican or Hispanic drug lords or gang leaders who offed their share of competitors and innocents in their time, and went mainstream later.

Or, for that matter, more prosaic anglo gangs.

The Big Dig in Boston and innumerable construction projects in New York and New Jersey are in the hands of Mafia based unions and gangs, and don't think Trump and Giuliani haven't dealt with them at need in their careers. Politicos who make their reps as 'against the mob' really do so against 'part of the mob', leaving part in stronger and more silent power when the competition is in the brig. Not always. Often.

The leaders of Israel, including Begin, were murderers and thugs in their day, killing the innocent. Noted Americans gave them lots of money, not all of them Jewish, and knowing that Arab and British (perhaps American tourist) blood would be spilled. They murdered US personnel on the Liberty. Do you shun the politicians who support Israel, which never really explained that attack on its prime ally?

The FBI figures for which church camps provide the most sexual assaults on children through the decades never seems to make it to the papers, but they have the records. Would you be as terrified of nice Pastor Smith down the block if you knew he and his church had knowingly shuttled Youth Leaders and clerics from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction to avoid publicity and punishment and, well, a cessation of public donations? Not just the Catholics, we know, don't we.

The Weather Underground was a clown college of violent privileged punks with no clue, really not much different from the pathetics that kidnapped Hearst. They and Nixon fed off each other, just like the remarkably incompetent and ineffectual American Communist Party was only important in the minds of Gus Hall and J. Edgar Hoover, who needed each other to fan their political bases.

There are far more violent and disturbed people of which we ought to be aware, not excluding right wing militia thugs and anti-abortion bombers, ricin and anthrax spreaders, and bozo religious zealots familiar in both tribal and state histories. That Obama dealt with Ayers early on enrages those not bothered by violent former Black Panthers who became GOP politicos sharing BBQ recipes and cookbooks under Reagan.

[biggordie]

Thanks, Mac. I can rest more easily now, knowing that the world is such a peaceful refuge.

Gordie

[Dark Cloud]

As I told you, Gordon, you cannot be Canadian forever.

The world is still a great place, absent hypocrisy, the only attribute exclusive to humans.

[Diane Merkel]

DC, I don't know who you mean by "violent former Black Panthers who became GOP politicos sharing BBQ recipes and cookbooks under Reagan," so that is lost on me as my post was apparently lost on you. My point was that I didn't know the background of the man, and its discovery was disturbing to me. If I find out someone down the street was a KKK member or any of the other possibilities you mention then, yes, I would most likely have the same reaction. I'm not much of a Pollyanna, but I don't like to think about the darker side of life.

Crazy, I didn't know about John's band. I read in that obit that he served time for bombing a CIA office, but I didn't know about the other time. It sounds like they were determined to get him for something.

BS, I like your "dance" line, but I'm still bummed.

[Dark Cloud]

The 1960's Black Panthers were, often enough, very violent and fought the police, sometimes with cause, often not. The late Eldridge Cleaver, who was guilty of serious crime and served time, eventually became a Republican politico. 'Reformed', etc. Bobby Seals, also once a violent prone thug, now has Ben and Jerry respectability and, like William Ayers, teaches, and leans left politically, we can assume.

The "terrorist down the street" meme is a McCain motif to imply that Obama was hanging around with a bomb thrower at the time of their interactions, as so isn't qualified by that association to be president. Dubious. My point was, in his time, Cleaver met with top GOP figures in the same way that Ayers met and meets with Chicago pols for neighborhood issues. Nobody suggested it was wrong then or of much interest beyond ironic.

I understood your posting, was just sharing the information that there were far more dangerous people to fear than relics of the ludicrous if once dangerous Weather Underground. And most of my choices live 'down the street' and are presumably still at it. There are reasons to be doubtful about Barrack Obama, but that isn't one of them. Since you used a McCain slogan as the title of the thread, there was reason to assume a connection was to be made.

[BrokenSword]

Dear Sweet Trembling Goddess (11)

It doesn't stop with the fringies on the political edges. I'm afraid that child molesters, murders and 'most wanted' violent types of all descriptions can be found living double lives, or even reformed and secret ones while not yet having paid the price of past transgressions. And, found anywhere at anytime.

When one is discovered and exposed, neighbors, ministers and co-workers all often express shock, even to the point of refusing to believe that such could be the case with someone they have come to know in so different a way.

I have no methods to offer which would guarantee insulation against being fooled by, or misjudging any person that any of us might interact with in our lives. We can’t hide behind locks and peek out at the world from behind a curtain. Not that you do, and not that all of us don’t at least want to at some point.

You’ve had a personal disappointment in someone that you thought you knew better than you did. That’s not a failing on your part, but it can cause a disillusionment with our species as a whole - casting a gloom over the unseen future, and biasing attitudes towards others you may know, or have yet to meet. But I do not think it will. As sad is it makes you feel right now, you’ll be ‘dancing’ again soon. At least, that’s the Diane I think I know.

Michael

[Melani]

I once attended a picnic for graduates of a developmental program that my son had been through with the reformed and respectable Eldridge Cleaver, who spend the time playing tetherball with his Downs Syndrome seven-year-old. Nobody was so rude as to mention any past criminal activity--hey, it's Berkeley, what do you expect?

[Diane Merkel]

Thanks, BS. You made me feel better. I stopped by the bookstore today. A few old guys were there, talking about David. He did a lot of good here. He was a vocal member of AA who apparently helped a lot of people. That's the man I need to remember.

DC, thanks for explaining the Cleaver situation. I wasn't aware of it. If the "terrorist down the street" was a phrase used by McCain, I'm not aware of it and must have unconsciously picked it up. I didn't mean it to be a political statement although all the talk about Ayers recently has certainly brought the whole 60s-thing to the front of my mind. I don't know if it's still true, but kids in the 80s seemed to think the 60s were really cool. I think they were a nightmare, a very confusing time.

I've only talked with one guy locally -- my token leftist friend --about David's past. He made a lot of points BS and DC made, and it was the first time we really talked about politics without getting PO'd at each other. We both agreed we wish the damn politicians would have such talks. Maybe they would find they have more in common than they think.

Thanks guys.

[bc]

My post from yesterday that didn't go through when the website went down:

BS, I think you are short changing all the people who have made mistakes in the past and have changed or become born again who wish to live a new life while either forgetting or regretting their promiscuous past. If the dude was just running a bookstore with people having conversations with him on a regular basis and none of this past beliefs come to the forefront, then it sounds to me like a changed person. If he was still preaching overthrow, then Diane and others would have noticed. Don't automatically condemm people cause of some discretions done in their youth and ages beyond.

bc, a changed and reformed nail-biter, who quit other bad habits to numerous to mention. I judge people on how they act and what they say around and with me and not what others may say about them.