August 19, 2026
After the death of my friend Harley Lond, I began to try to salvage my blog. Whether or not I have managed to do so remains a problematic conjecture. I have spent dozens of hours on the phone with GoDaddy representatives the past two months, yet for all I know, this blog will disappear in one week or one month. All I know is that I’m tired of being put on hold for hour after hour after hour, only to have the representative “drop” the call.
Among other projects, I have been typing up a list of books that have to find another home. The CSULB library has expressed interest in a “Bill Mohr Collection,” and I would be happy to donate my books, even though I have my doubts about whether CSULB would respect their provenance twenty years down the road. In any case, since I will turn 80 years old in less than a year and a half, it is imperative that I begin “dostadning.” The more books I move out of the house Linda and I rent, the easier it will be to move when the landlord’s son sells this house after she passes.
Also of note is that Linda and I went to LACMA recently with Michael Docherty, who was in town to do research. We had heard favorable reports of the museum’s new design, but all three of us thought it was a major disappointment. I find it impossible to believe that the people in charge of LACMA actually thought this design was an improvement. It certainly didn’t inspire whoever curated the current exhibition in the wing that straddles Wilshire Blvd. to mount something that is an advance on what might have been on exhibit in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, in Exposition Park.
In getting the blog started again, after this hiatus, I thought I would start by addressing a book that asks difficult questions about the historical context out of which the Democratic Socialists of America will be recruiting the next generation of political leaders.
“DESPERATE, CLEAN, NON-VIOLENT, AND YOUNG”
Perhaps the most compelling piece of writing I’ve encountered the past several months is an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous Dirty Violent & Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground. This memoir reveals the tunnel vision that a handful of opponents of the Vietnam War succumbed to as any possibility of the United States recognizing its errors steadily diminished between 1963 and 1975. I use the term “tunnel vision” to describe the choices made by the Weather Underground because I truly don’t understand how the Weather Underground ever could have fantasized that a left-wing revolution was possible in the United States. It’s absolutely ludicrous to believe that a small cadre of white revolutionaries could align themselves with the Black Panthers in such a manner that it would inspire a massive insurgency on the part of the American populace against the most powerful military-industrial complex in the world.
What other options did “Desperate Dirty Endangered & Young” people in the 1960s have? By “endangered” I initially mean those subject to the draft, who had three options: into the military; go to prison; or go to Canada (unless of course they flunked the physical exam). I suppose there might have been a fourth option: one could set oneself on fire, either literally or metaphorically. The literal instance was, in fact, a choice made by several Americans, including one in Los Angeles. Her name was Florence Beaumont. The metaphorical self-immolation is a far, far less arduous trajectory, but it offers a person a way to retain some measure of inner equilibrium in the face of monstrously devouring power. Smoldering choices, on a daily basis, must be made with a quiet discipline. Perhaps kindness is the most revolutionary act of all.
In any case, I recommend a thoughtful perusal of Emmett Rensin’s review of Ayers Dohrn’s memoir. Rensin brings to his critique a harrowing awareness of the multitude of impositions that the United States of America should have o its conscience. The U.S.A. is, at the present moment, an empire unlike any other seen in human history. How long it can sustain itself without imploding under the weight of its success will only be determined by the willingness of its populace to fully comprehend what it means to have that global stature. American citizens don’t merely have enormous privileges that they have done little to deserve other than win the lottery of birth; they have very little sense of what they should do to exploit those privileges, other than casual consumption. It is perhaps in this disparity that one can find the crevices in which to practice a metaphorical self-immolation. A “better” world may not be possible; a more remunerative world of shared knowledge, however, is still attainable. At the very least, a memoir such as Ayers Dohrn’s allows us to partake of a history too many wish to prefer had never happened.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dangerous-dirty-violent-young-ayers-dohrn-weather-underground/
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dangerous-dirty-violent-young-ayers-dohrn-weather-underground/
A Better World Is Not Possible
Did the Weather Underground have a point?
About Bill Mohr