Weather Underground

[Page]

I cannot help but be reminded of Heinrich Boll's *Billiards at Half-Past 
Nine* and to a lesser extent, Vonnegut's *Slaughterhouse Five.*

Violence intended for inanimate objects, specifically not intended to damage 
life, and the unavoidable failure to protect life.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 8:53 AM
Subject: Fw: Weather Underground


>
>
>
> We have been over these bombed-out ruins of ideas before. Members (and 
> historians)
> have shown how the WUO 'harmless bombings' commitment came only after the 
> Greenwich
> Village townhouse self-murders.
>
> wikipedia:
> In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the 
> United States government, using for the first time its new name, the 
> "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and 
> pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for 
> a bombing of a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, 
> New Jersey in what Brian Flanagan said had been intended to be "the most 
> horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its 
> territory".[13]
>
> I know, through a writer who went to high school with Bill Ayers and this 
> FBI guy now in Chicago who said they had Ayers, others, on [illegally] 
> tapped phones
> describing the non-harmless bombing they were planning. Could not, 
> rightly, be used in court and the self-bombing precluded moving on them 
> with all they legally had---which was not case-making after the deaths and 
> evidence destruction.
> ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
> wikipedia
> New York City Arson Attacks
> On February 21, 1970, gasoline-filled molotov cocktails were thrown at the 
> home of New York State Supreme Court Justice Murtagh, who was presiding 
> over the trial of the so-called "Panther 21," members of the Black Panther 
> Party over a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. One 
> bottle full of gasoline had broken against the front steps, and flames 
> scorched the overhanging wooden frame until its contents burnt out. In 
> addition windows were broken, and another molotov cocktail caused paint 
> charring on a car. Painted in red on the sidewalk in front of his house 
> was "FREE THE PANTHER 21", "THE VIET CONG HAVE WON", and "KILL THE PIGS" 
> [14]. The same night, molotov cocktails were thrown at a police car in 
> Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn.[15] The son of 
> Justice Murtagh claims that the Weatherman were responsible for the 
> attempted arson,[14] based on a letter promising more bombings sent by 
> Bernadine Dohrn to the
> Associated Press in late November, 1970,[16] although that letter is 
> generally assumed to refer to an October bombing of a Queens 
> courthouse.[17] While nobody ever claimed responsibility, or was caught or 
> tried, for the arson attempt,[14] a number of historians[18][19][20][21] 
> state that the arson attempt was enacted by the Weathermen but was 
> considered a failure.
>
> Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
> On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the bombing of an officers' 
> dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia 
> University,[22] there was an explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house 
> when the nail bomb being constructed prematurely detonated for unknown 
> reasons. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in 
> the explosion. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin escaped unharmed. It was 
> an accident of history that the site of the Village explosion was the 
> former residence of Merrill Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill 
> and his son, the poet James Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently 
> recorded the event in his poem 18 West 11th Street, the title being the 
> address of the house. An FBI report later stated that the group had 
> possessed sufficient amounts of explosive to "level ... both sides of the 
> street".[23]
> The bomb preparations have been pointed out by critics of the claim that 
> the Weatherman group did not try to take lives with its bombings. Harvey 
> Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory 
> University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty 
> of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense 
> that is."[22]
> _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-
>
> I think I will argue until the day my brain is self-bombed out---no reader 
> yet has convinced me otherwise----
> that 'Against the Day" has one of the fullest condemnations in fiction of 
> violence in social action ever put on paper.
>
> Any violence. Evil in itself.
>
> Like Coetzee's work embodies.
>
> See, besides what happens to all the Traverses, the allusions to Tolstoy's 
> non-violence essays in the Vienna
> section of AtD---- later, Cyprian learns, is indebted to, inmho---which 
> came to Tolstoy thru Thoreau, Kropotkin and others.
>
> Anyone coming of age and sorting out themes of justice, etc. when Pynchon 
> was writing his masterpieces
> was aware of all the words, ideas, reissued books re violence and social 
> change that were alive then---filling the aether.
>
> No, I say in Thunder, TRP has NEVER stomached even the possibility of 
> violence as a means. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
>
> Mark
> .
>
>
>
>
>


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