Family Circle : The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left

Rating:
Summary: The tragic vision of the Left
Review: This fascinating book will make uncomfortable reading for committed progressives, so I am not surprised by the many negative reviews. Progressives no doubt also loathe David Horowitz's book RADICAL SON, which was a thoughtful description of the underside of the idealistic 1960s and its aftermath. FAMILY CIRCLE covers similar material and provides much food for thought.

What both books make clear is that it was not a coincidence that idealistic progressives with a particular group of personal qualities and beliefs morphed into violent domestic terrorists, despite their early idealism and desire to help make a better world.

The key elements seem to be:

(1) Legitimate, but blown out of proportion, social grievance

The terrorists who formed the Weathermen Underground: Boudin, Dohrn and Ayers and their comrades were initially motivated by legitimate issues. Their original issue was the shameful treatment of black Americans by the white American majority, and subsequently their other major focus was their opposition to the Vietnam War.

But what was the connection between the awareness of legitimate social issues and the decision to kill other human beings? The link is by no means obvious, and few individuals who shared similar outrage over the same injustices took the step of turning to violence.

(2) Family values that justify treason or violent revolt

One of the best predicters of an individual's political party affiliation is the political affiliation of their parents. This is a somewhat humiliating confirmation of Schopenhauer's contemptuous (but overly sweeping) dismissal of the idea of free will, and it turns out to be particularly important when the political behaviour involved is extreme. When an individual decides to set out to kill people and become an enemy to one's society and government, it apparently helps to have deep, subconscious confidence in the support of loved ones for those violent acts.

Kathy Boudin's parents (like David Horowitz's parents) were Communists and her father Leonard was a famous radical lawyer who defended many Communists and traitors who have subsequently, since the opening of KGB files after the fall of the USSR, been proven to have been guilty--a fact that Leonard, who was hostile to his adopted USA, probably knew when he was defending them. Tragically, Leonard Boudin went from defending Fidel Castro in the late 1950s to unsuccessfully defending his daughter Kathy in the early 1980s from charges that arose out of her participation in the violent robbery of a Brinks truck and the murders of a Brinks guard and two policemen.

So just as Microsoft founder Bill Gates' father was a prominent and wealthy Seattle lawyer, it seems that that treason and terrorism often reach full flower in the nurtured next generation.

But what were the values that these families specifically inculcated in their children?

(3) Heroic immortality and hedonism

Boudin's father was a materialist and a Communist who was flagrantly sexually omnivorious--behaviour that was well known to his family.

The great advantage of being a materialist with no belief in the after life like Boudin and her father is that one doesn't have any eternal punishment to endure for one's earthly actions. In fact, it is a very liberating philosophy.

In fact, weirdly, this is creates a direct connection between the Weather Underground and today's Islamic terrorists--the mullahs and extremist Islamic theologians goading young men and women to their deaths are pushing the functional equivalent of materialism and atheism. Ironically, there is little functional difference between killing policemen in Nyack, New York because you think that after death there is nothing at all, and blowing yourself up in an Israeli shopping mall because you think you'll spend eternity having sex with virgins.

The multi-partner sex that was practiced as part of their political indoctrination by the Weathermen Underground had the same function as the mullahs' loopy lure to suicide bombing.

Both sets of political killers expected to be remembered for their heroic acts of violence, and to either experience extinguished consciousness after years of hedonistic sex, or to be about to embark on an eternity of hedonistic sex. A truly wierd confluence of the motivations of Western domestic terrorists and Islamic terrorists.

Of course, if Islamic terrorists and materialist Western traitors and terrorists are attracted to sexual hedonism with no fear of any consequences, so are many if not most ordinary people who don't go on to kill innocent strangers. What is the final link?

(4) Grandiosity and psychopathic narcissism

Why was Kathy Boudin a convicted killer and pleasure-seeking Mick Jagger not a killer? (Boudin denies any active role in the murders, but other witnesses claim that she played the key role of persuading the police officers to put down their weapons just before the Black Panthers attacked with automatic weapons blazing).

The answer is contained in a statement that Kathy Boudin made during her ultimately successful quest for parole after 20 years' imprisonment, which was not included in FAMILY CIRCLE but is still available on the Web. She wrote,

"Sitting with young women dying of AIDS, creating a quilt for those in our community who are no longer with us, I face the deaths for which I am responsible. As I work with mothers on rebuilding their relationships with the children they left, I am overwhelmed by my own responsibility for leaving a group of children with no hope of ever seeing their own fathers again. Now I can ask: what if it were my father, my husband, or my son who had been killed or hurt? What would I feel? I understand the rage that the victims' families may feel towards me. "

Terrorists have no regard for the feelings and sufferings of the human beings they are about to maim or kill, or for the grief of the loved ones of their victims. This is a key component of the psychological make-up of psychopaths--an inability to emphathise with other human beings, or an evil pleasure from inflicting pain. Most terrorists probably do not derive pleasure from inflicting pain--although their controllers and motivators may well be psychopaths in this sense--but they are so narcissistic that the are indifferent to the pain inflicted on others by their murderous actions.

An ordinary human being may be narcissistic, but only a criminal or a terrorist is psychopathically narcissistic to the point that they are indifferent to the suffering of the people whom they kidnap, maim or kill. This is the realisation that Kathy Boudin has apparently come to through her years in prison.

Bound up with this psychopathic narcissisim is grandiosity. This is a belief that one is so special, so gifted, such a distinguished and great person that one can affect the course of history by one's daring actions--even though those actions are condemned by one's government and society. It is interesting that Boudin pursued increasingly extreme measures precisely when it became objectively obvious that her interpretation of history was absolutely incorrect--or at least it was obvious that almost all support for her interpretation had vanished.

Boudin had started out in the protest movements of the 1960s, and she lived underground during the 70s as the US made steady progress on civil rights and the Vietnam War ended. It became clear that whatever public support for the violent Left had evaporated, and Weathermen founders Dohrn and Ayers had even turned themselves in to the authorities and escaped punishment. But Boudin persevered through the early 80s, getting mixed up with Black Panthers who were little more than pimps and drug dealers, and it was a pure criminal act that Boudin was involved in when she abetted the violent robbery of the Brinks truck and the murders of the two policemen.

Grandiosity was an element in the mental outlook of Boudin--she was so sure of her greatness, or at least the greatness of her cause, that she couldn't accept the plain evidence of reality all around her.

Taken together, FAMILY CIRCLE and RADICAL SON reveal very interesting truths about the ultimately tragic vision of the most extreme wing of the idealistic Left, despite the originally good intentions and the many sacrifices of some its most committed practitioners.

Rating:
Summary: entertaining 60s social history
Review: This story of a leftist/progressive family and their radical daughter is a microcosm of the intertwining social and political trends that helped shape the 60s. Nice insights into family dynamics and generational friction, the search for "authenticity" (black panthers, bomb-making) by white, middle class kids, and a glimpse of what life was like among the radical fringe. For a West Coast take on the same period, look at Peter Coyote's "Sleeping Where I fall." Both explore the confluence of the personal and the political in a volatile era.

Rating:
Summary: Growing up is not easy
Review: This was one of the most fascinating books I read this year. Ordinary people think that power and prestige and money would bring happiness, but this family shows this not to be the case. The book showed so much of the anguish and intergenerational hostilities engendered by the Vietnam era. I fear history is repeating itself. A young woman of Kathy Boudin's talents and background should have been able to acheive both professionall and personal happiness. The fact that she only began to realize her potential as a prison inmate is a tragic waste. Her father, though an excellent attorney, was indeed a flawed human being. I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks to better understand both the family and the times.

Rating:
Summary: I Couldn't Put It Down!
Review: Wow! A non-fiction page turner. Family Circle demonstrates
that "the libido should never be excluded from intellectual
history."