Smiles & Slogans
by Harvey Blume
No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-imperialist Political Prisoner, by David Gilbert. Abraham Guillen Press and Arm the Spirit, Canada, 2004.
I woke this morning from a dream about
Dave Gilbert. Dave is serving a life sentence in New York State
for his part in an attempted robbery of a Brinks truck in Nyack,
New York, in 1981 during which a guard and two policemen were killed.
I haven't seen Dave Gilbert in thirty years, nor is he the sort
of fixture in my dream life that some old friends or acquaintances
become. I knew Dave at Columbia College in the late '60s, when he
was the gentle yet charismatic center of an anti-war movement that
had not yet turned to dogma. I knew him later in Weatherman, the
left splinter group of Students for a Democratic Society that was
committed to violent revolution and driven by a potent though short-lived
combustion of ideals and idiocy. I lost contact with Gilbert when
the aboveground unit of Weatherman folded, to be replaced by a Weather
underground to which I did not belong. The War in Vietnam ended
in 1975. Weatherman became extinct not long thereafter, as members
began to surface. But Dave stayed hidden for six more years, until
flushed out by headlines about the botched Brinks job.
I wish I could remember more of this morning's dream than the conclusion,
which had something to do with a smiling Gilbert on a rowboat and
some turtle (or possibly duck) eggs. It's not inconceivable that
the eggs were in some sense his progeny, fertilized with his politics,
and he was sending them out into the world. Or it could be that
just being on a rowboat, as opposed to in a jail cell, gave him
pleasure. Whatever its meaning, it's obvious why I had the dream
now. I've recently finished Gilbert's book, No Surrender: Selected
Writings of an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner, a collection
of writings from jail. There's a picture of Dave on the cover, smiling,
looking like he's hardly aged. That smile, ready to turn into a
laugh, often a laugh at himself, brings back all the feelings of
affection he triggered in me, in so many of us, way back when. Which
is why this book was much harder to read than I expected.
I expected the slogans, and so was not surprised to find them in
abundance, preserved after decades in jail-time amber. But it was
painful for me to deal with the coexistence in the book of the smile
and the sloganeering. I'm not referring to the smile in the cover
photograph. I noticed that later, in fact. And when I did take it
in, it only confirmed what I had already felt, namely that something
of the deeply admirable Dave Gilbert I once knew was alive in the
sloganeering prose itself, struggling to be heard, to make an impact,
through a politics others took on in a moment of emergency and have
long since shed. Zionism equals racism. America is imperialism.
The Third World is victimhood and oppression. World revolution is
the only cure. Armed struggle is the only means.
That Dave's spirit is caught up in such views is the other incarceration
he has to deal with, besides the one represented by a picture of
barbed wire on the front cover of the book, under the photo of his
face. It's true that Dave's intelligence isn't absent from the writing.
He works with old formulae, kneads them, massages them, tries to
tease something new out of them, sometimes stretches them almost
to the breaking point, but invariably falls back and is bound by
them again. His efforts to get the most out of Marxism, to make
it last, remind me of the attempts by Ptolemaic astronomers to get
weirdly spinning planets right by means of one more perfectly placed
concentric circle. I've heard it said, in Dave's defense: What can
you expect? He'll be in jail for life. But then, I remember that
other '60s slogan: jails are universities.
One issue Dave wrestles with repeatedly is Lenin's idea of a revolutionary
vanguard. In Gilbert's experience, Leninist vanguards always encourage
leaders to be "manipulative and commandist," while turning
cadres into obsequious followers concerned to "curry favor."
Gilbert gets to the point of suggesting this is not accidental,
and that the whole idea of the Leninist vanguard—the organizing
principle of Weatherman and presumably the later underground cells
to which he belonged—is "seriously flawed." But
when I read that, I want to say: flawed is too soft, Dave.
Flawed fudges it. Try authoritarian, outdated
or just plain bad. Ditch the Leninist vanguard, Dave, and
think through the implications. What's left, at that point, of the
revolutionary cure-all? And if revolution isn't THE solution, doesn't
the problem itself need to be utterly reformulated?
The truth, though it did not manifest in my dream, is that I'm furious
with Dave Gilbert. Yes, I'm touched by the smile. I recognize the
old Gilbert when I read: "The starting point for me is identifying
with other people. That solidarity, that tenderness, mandates standing
with the oppressed—the vast majority—against the power
structure."
When he fills out the picture, writing of "[t]he 50 percent
of children in sub-Saharan African suffering from severe malnutrition,
the women and girls sold into sexual bondage in Thailand, the homeless
kids scavenging in the streets of Sao Paulo, the prisoners with
AIDS locked in isolation in Alabama" and concludes that "they
are all precious human beings whose lives matter," it could
be 1965 again. He could be on the sundial on Columbia's campus,
its rallying point, orating passionately, beseechingly in that vein,
either to crowds of students or just a few passersby.
But Dave Gilbert's militant compassion hasn't worn well. The Brinks
robbery showed it to be a selective, ultimately self-serving kind
of fellow feeling, a supremely arrogant compassion, at home with
excuses, above any law. Nowhere in this book is there anything even
close to an honest accounting of why Dave Gilbert will be in jail
forever. A foreword by black activist Marilyn Buck tells us he's
being punished for "political acts and [a] stance in support
of the Black national liberation struggle." The three people
shot to death on October 1981 in Nyack, New York, don't even get
a mention from her. Gilbert's capsule summary of that event is no
better. He says that with other "white revolutionaries"
allied with "the Black Liberation Army" he tried to "take
funds"—what an interesting elocution, "take funds"—from
a Brinks truck "with the unfortunate result of a shoot-out
in which a guard and two policemen were killed." What shallow
rhetoric, as if it never had occurred to Gilbert or his comrades
where trying to "take funds" from a Brinks truck might
lead.
What made the possibility of killings so easy to contemplate in
the first place, and to be blase about when the shooting was over?
This attempted robbery took place six years after the Vietnam War
had ended, that war that confronted so many of us with terrible
choices, whether we were in Vietnam fighting the war or here, fighting
against it. By 1981, you couldn't plausibly say Vietnam made you
do it. You couldn't credibly say the '60s made you do it. What could
you say, in 1981, that made you think it was sane to employ what
Gilbert calls "armed struggle (AS)" against a Brinks truck?
When I think of Brinks, and everything Dave Gilbert doesn't try
to say about it, lacking the language, maybe, or the conscience,
it wipes the smile right off his face in my mind's eye. I lose all
sense of the gentleness beneath the sloganeering. I find myself
unconflicted again, and more than willing to say that for all his
avowals of humanism and compassion, this book is mostly an exercise
in evasion. It's a lesson in what not to let history make you do.
My instinct tells me that's not a trivial lesson to absorb right
now, what with a seemingly endless, misbegotten war abroad and fierce
polarization about it here.
(Web exclusive)
Freelance writer Harvey Blume is coauthor of Ota Benga:The Pygmy in the Zoo (St. Martins, 1992). His essay “WB on the Treadmill” appeared in AGNI 57, and his "Hammer" will appear in AGNI 60, to be released in mid-October. (9/04)
