In August, the Santa Monica, Calif. Its bricked sidewalks are crowded with Angelenos and tourists gawking at the antics of mimes, jugglers, break-dancers and other entertainment wannabes who put on a good show that is also free.
Last week, taking a Saturday evening stroll with my wife along this walkway, I was given the serendipity of seeing one of Bill Clinton's famous pardons in action -- outside of prison and back on the streets. In those heady times, Linda was one of the leaders of a vanguard organization known as Weatherman and had come to the university with fellow militant Ted Gold to recruit others to the cause.
In the style of New Left revolutionaries, Weatherman had taken its name from a Bob Dylan line "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" , but its substance was very much that of older Leninist factions of the time. The Weather Bureau which was the name adopted by its Central Committee knew what was good for the rest of us.
Its icons, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, had been elected to the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society in , and had promptly trashed its headquarters and announced the end of the organization.
They explained that SDS -- until then the largest student radical organization, was in fact "the pig" itself, which in those times was the symbol of the political enemy. SDS was an organization hooked on its "white skin privilege," they said, and thus too cowardly to launch the necessary war against the imperial monster, Amerikkka.
