Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young Review by Zed Ayers Dorn – Child of the Revolution | Biography and memoirs

eMuch of family life will seem normal to the young children within it; Only hindsight can mitigate what was abnormal. Zedd Ayers Dorn spent his early years on the run from the FBI. His parents were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground faction, a group dedicated to overthrowing the United States government.

When he was three years old, his parents trained him on how to recognize plainclothes officers on the street. “It was like playing a game, an adult version of dressing up or pretending,” he recalls. He has fond memories of long night drives between safe houses. In addition to fellow revolutionaries, his family faced gangsters, IRA members, and abortion activists, along with countless illegal migrant workers.

Parallel to his childish view of life as a fugitive, Dorn tells us the story of the Weather Underground and his parents’ role in it. The group was founded in 1969 by student activists angered by atrocities committed against civilians during the Vietnam War. They initially called themselves “the weathermen”, inspired by a Bob Dylan lyric (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing”) until they changed this, taking into account the women they excluded.

Dorn’s mother, Bernardine, was their leader, and she was also the head of her family. Dorne loved it. “I wanted to be like her,” he writes. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was less enthusiastic, declaring her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Her image on an FBI wanted poster, a young, tough-looking woman in a biker jacket, became iconic — even though she had a disdain for sexism behind much of the attention to her appearance.

The Weather Underground wanted to highlight the brutal realities of the Vietnam War by bringing that conflict back to the United States. They organized several days of demonstrations and riots in Chicago in 1969, which saw fierce battles with police and more than 250 people arrested, 23 officers injured and a large number of demonstrators injured – including six who were shot, but none killed. After a failed attempt to make nail bombs in 1970, during which three members blew themselves up next to the house they were using in Greenwich Village, the group abandoned direct attacks against people. But they continued to take violent action. After making telephone warnings, they bombed the FBI headquarters, the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

The damage was extensive, but the US government was never in danger. The Weather Underground was small in size, and lacked any mass movement to support it (although it was ardently anti-racist, and allied with the more expansive Black Panther Party). Meanwhile, Dorn’s parents faced a dilemma: how could they properly care for their children while simultaneously trying to turn the status quo upside down? Bernardine’s love for her family took second place to her political commitment, which had to be maintained “even if her children ended up as collateral damage.”

Surprisingly, Dorn’s parents got away with almost everything. His father, Bill Ayers, was never imprisoned, while Bernardine only served seven months between 1982 and 1983. Perhaps most surprisingly, Dorne doesn’t hold any of that against them. Instead of following his parents into revolutionary politics, he became a playwright and screenwriter. His book is filled with nuggets of counterculture history: for example, Dorn’s parents breaking Timothy Leary out of prison. Then there’s its compelling episodic momentum, which the book owes to its origins as a podcast series, Homeland Radicals. What excels about the podcast is the addition of Dorn’s intimate narration and reflections on his liminal childhood, including its entanglement with the state of the nation—then, as now, mired in conflict. Despite its abundance. Delivery charges may apply. With more moderate politics, he underscores the similarities between the catalysts of his parents’ activism and our own times when he declares: “We are in a new age of American tyranny and racial reckoning.”