ARGUMENTS
THE POLITICS OF TERROR
Much has been made recently of the growing appetite for
political histrionics in some sections of the New Left. The line separat–
ing the counterculture from the counterpolitics, it has been observed, is
becoming more and more blurred. To use a phrase of Richard Gilman's,
there has been a confusion of realms in which the traditionally separate
worlds of art and politics have been merged, to the detriment of both
(the Yippies' circus at the Chicago trial was perhaps the clearest ex–
ample). Yet what's been called "revolution for the hell of it" and "Dada
Politics [of] comic relief" has in fact had some limited success. With the
unwitting complicity of our Julius Hoffmans, it has revealed the latent
charade of much of our "normal" judicial and political practice, and
it has prompted a healthy and long overdue skepticism about the
bombast and pretense of traditional American politics. Still, it's been
argued, one of the primary dangers of Yippie strategy is the ease with
which all politics, including the radical variety, can be confused with
its parody. The Yippie politics of the put-on risks trapping itself in its
own world.
Almost as if in reaction, another segment of the radical move–
ment has taken a drastic step in a different direction. Shin'ya Ono, a
Weatherman writing in
Leviathan
in December, 1969, sounded the new
note: "The time is past when tens of thousands of 'movement' or left–
liberal people can 'dig' revolution, Che, Malcolm, Cleaver, put revolu–
tionary posters on their walls and listen to revolutionary songs, 'enjoy'
the
Battle of Algiers
and consider themselves to be 'hip' and on the right
side of the revolutionary struggle - while living bourgeois, chauvinist,
racist, white-skin privileged lives...." And so, in March of '70 while
people were complaining about the left's rhetorical overkill, headlines
were made by a rash of bombings in New York and elsewhere, as
rhetoric about bringing the war home became real.
The advent of deliberate terrorism, still infrequent, is due in part
to the exhaustion of symbolic action itself. It is indeed extraordinary
how swiftly yesterday's verbal outrages become today's bromides. The
