JAY MARTIN
73
This process, which has occurred over and over again, cer–
tainly depends upon identification - but not identification with the
actual terrorist or his stated cause and real grievances; rather, the
victim projects and then identifies with his or her own fictions, or
with the fictions offered to him by the terrorist (Carlos's "noble aims
and purposes"), with the result that identification takes place with
the fictions of the captors. Into the nexus of fictions, moreover, flow
all the other fictions available to the victim - from books, films,
television, movies, comic strips, and so on - the cliche-ridden debris
of cultural fictions.
Undoubtedly, the most notorious and widely publicized occur–
rence of this sort was the kidnapping and subsequent conversion to
terrorism of Patricia Campbell (Patty) Hearst, daughter of Ran–
dolph Hearst. Hearst was extremely wealthy, but more important,
controlled a large chain of newspapers. Kidnapping Patty, then, was
not just taking any young woman prisoner, but taking an important
sector of the media hostage. Patty's grandfather, William Randolph
Hearst, had been a pioneer in "yellow journalism" - sensationalizing
facts via fiction. Now a small group of urban guerrillas calling
themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army went all the way with
sensational myth-making. "The media princess," Frederick
J.
Hacker writes, "was a prize catch. Her possession guaranteed that
the terrorists' print-in-full requirements would be carried out with
utmost accuracy, thereby elevating a small, anonymous, insignifi–
cant group to the status of a strong, internationally known, and
feared army." This is to say, the SLA remained the same, but the fic–
tions attached to the group changed. This had real consequences in
the final confrontation between the SLA and the police, when the
police acted with a force appropriate to that for subduing a large,
well-equipped, professionally expert army, instead of the handful of
semi-professional activists they faced.
It had consequences, too, for Patty. Dragged out of her Berk–
eley apartment kicking and screaming, Patty soon appeared trans–
formed into another person, one created by her captors, but also
driven by her own vague, romantic fictions of revolution, rags and
tags of images that she had picked up in Berkeley and doubtless,
even from her own family's newspapers. On April 15, 1974, she was
filmed in the act of robbing a bank . She soon emerged, in her new
identity, with a new name, Tania, meant to identify her with Che
Guevara's Russian girlfriend. The leader of the SLA, Donald
DeFreeze , had been "born again" and had taken a new name, "Cin-
