Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The Hearst Case There are people, I believe, who cannot suppress a tingle of delight at the thought of the abominable William Randolph Hearst's money winding up as...
...There will be rallies and benefits in his behalf, at which speakers may chide his methods but will laud his ends, his courage, the inspiration he has provided to small children...
...I am that wetback...
...Where Nixon & Co...
...While others talk, the prisoner has acted...
...When Father Berrigan and his comical crew selected as their objective Henry Kissinger, who may bear some responsibility for something, even they figured out that they might have difficulty laying hands on the man...
...But Miss Hearst was an easy mark...
...One man with a stronger stomach than most appears to be Donald D. DeFreeze, identified as General Field Marshal Cinque of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA...
...When this DeFreeze or any one of 10,000 pamphleteers arrives on the scene with the news that he speaks for The People, what credentials must he produce...
...I am that nigger...
...Good Terrorists There are countries, now as ever, in which citizens must make distinctions between good terrorists and bad terrorists—not always an easy judgment if you happen to be in their path...
...the gook...
...Indeed, a soft heart is the saving grace of what passes as radicalism in America—and perhaps the saving of the rest of us, too...
...Terrorists do not ordinarily have the luxury of choosing their victims...
...the spick...
...For those who do not put America in the same league with Brazil or Greece or either of the two Vietnams, usurpation of the political process remains a cause for anxiety...
...and not be swept away by its originality or meter...
...You do indeed know me...
...It's much simpler than that: People who kick around people in the name of The People are no more friendly to the best things about this country than those who kick them around in the name of Law and Order or National Security...
...I suppose there is some goal that most people might agree would be worth Patricia Hearst's ordeal, or even her life...
...Only those who are able to accept the SLA as representatives of The People will be able to think of her as a symbol of The Establishment...
...Well, for all I know John Ehrlichman has a conscience too, though he evidently keeps it under tighter control than most people...
...Granted, for safety's sake, one's love beads ought to be kept clear of one's bomb-making equipment—but the revolutionary kit contains both...
...You may even believe that General Field Marshal Cinque is nuts...
...The prisoner, particularly if he has had the distinction of doing time in Attica, or in Soledad...
...And those who are able to conceive of flesh-and-blood individuals as symbols are ready for any sort of cruelty...
...For General Field Marshal Cinque only followed to its logical conclusion the image of America that evoked such cheers when it was advanced from platforms across the land a few years ago...
...Well, if he is young, black, and an ex-convict, and announces he is out to abolish sexism, racism and ageism, that pretty well settles the case right there, especially if he is holding a gun...
...he is an escaped convict...
...Indeed, anything less than the utmost in opposition is insufficient...
...His revolutionary credentials are patently unexceptionable...
...It's not a matter of Right and Left...
...We were taught by them that the arms of government are illegitimate, that true legitimacy resides in conscience...
...Soft hearts are welcome in public life...
...The general field marshal is young, about 30...
...One's attitude toward the 2 or 12 or 20 Symbionese soldiers in our midst hinges on one's attitude toward America...
...But numbers of the politically righteous, I fear, have been truly moved by the Symbionese proclamations and impressed by the Liberation Army's stated objectives...
...For me, and I think for most people, the issue in the Hearst kidnapping comes down to the condition of the hostage...
...In the revolutionary canon, blacks constitute a separate and morally superior nation, frontline forces against the oppressors...
...The fellow who is responsive only to his conscience may be superior in every way to an Ehrlichman—but Constitutional government was created to avoid handing out blank checks even to superior persons...
...He has put his body on the line and is so feared by the Establishment that he can no longer walk or prowl the streets...
...One inspects the present Administration in vain for the semblance of such an organ...
...Whether it is an airport in Rome or a street in Belfast, the terrorist attacks where he can, and is never without a justification that is altogether satisfying to himself...
...But from what we do know, Miss Hearst is the one human figure in the whole affair...
...operated from strength, the political terrorist operates from weakness—but his effort, too, is to circumvent the political process, or subvert it, or demolish it...
...If their mission leads them into "excesses"—a rampage here, a certain amount of trashing other people's property there, an inadvertant casualty or murder . . . well, what is that compared to Southeast Asia...
...If you believe that this nation is a sink of vice, heir of Fascism, pioneer in technological genocide—a characterization that comes straight from radical rallies of the 1960s—why, then anything goes...
...It strikes me that such people have failed to take to heart the messages that our mostly sedentary revolutionaries have been passing along to them for quite a few years...
...When we place our trust in an individual at the expense of even so imperfect a system as our own, we are asking for trouble...
...Those who have paid attention to these messages have by now either lost their capacity for queasiness, or else they have lost their stomach for such spicy political food and can find no pleasure in even so benign an employment of the Hearst treasure...
...For without the soft hearts, the radical movement might well be tinier than it is, but it might actually go about acting out its slogans and manifestoes, like the Symbionese, and numbers of nonradicals would end up bathed in blood...
...You may find yourself worrying more about the plight of Patricia Hearst than the hungry masses, the revolutionary act having, in your case, boomeranged...
...He will compel our attention, until the gun is wrestled from him, whereupon he can count on becoming a cult figure...
...Oh, nobody wants harm to come to the girl . . . but let's keep the affair in perspective...
...His conscience is his rod and his staff...
...The young, we were notified while DeFreeze was in his impressionable 20s, have been invested with the mission of regenerating and redeeming American life...
...he is black...
...You may be able to read General Field Marshal Cinque's prose...
...like De-Freeze, is the preeminent symbol of revolution...
...he has bravely mugged, courageously robbed, heroically murdered...
...Black men who do not share this view may be hooted down as Uncle Toms, or may be gunned down like the Oakland Superintendent of Schools, as a lesson...
...Yes, indeed, you know us all and we know you...
...So finally it is the victims who count...
...for it cannot serve his interests or his ideology...
...If the foregoing sounds to you like rubbish, then you are probably not tuned into the revolutionary circuits...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The Hearst Case There are people, I believe, who cannot suppress a tingle of delight at the thought of the abominable William Randolph Hearst's money winding up as packages of free food for California's poor, yet who remain queasy about the way the largesse was produced . . . the kidnapping and all that...
...Having been subject to much violence, it is now their perogative to use violence for the ends of justice, or at least retribution...
...The terrorist is fueled by his conscience...
...Even radicals seem to recognize that what makes Richard Nixon's record in the White House so deplorable is not that he played the game at its lower levels, exchanging ambassadorships for contributions and such run-of-the-mill stuff, nor that he used his position to enhance his creature comforts, but that he built a power center outside the established channels of political control, that he gave large portions of authority to a clique whose primary loyalty was to him, not to the office he holds, and assuredly not to the system of which that office is a part...
...Bad Radicals If yesterday's nominal militants are not at this moment rushing to the support of the SLA, that bespeaks soft hearts, not ideological consistency...
...Ah, who can forget those conscience-mongers of the 1960s...
...Naturally, where criminals are political prisoners, then policemen, prosecutors, judges, guards, and everybody outside the walls are the true political criminals...
...No doubt there are elements of the case still unknown to us...
...For myself, I prefer not to conjure up such a bargain...
...Posters will be distributed...
...President Nixon is very hard to get at...
...Remember that Ross Macdonald novel, in which a wealthy young California girl arranges her own kidnapping for the sake of the ransom...
...But I fault nobody for that kind of inconsistency...
...In contemplating the horrors inflicted over the generations upon the wretched of our land, how many sighs are we to spare for the indignities inflicted on one well-to-do young lady and her big-shot parents...
...The black, we have been given to understand at least since Frantz Fanon was taken up as a prophet, occupies a colonial position in his own country...
...his large-as-life picture, showing him manacled and defiant, will adorn the rooms of radicals...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7
