Like some macabre fulfillment of McLuhanism, the bloodiest and most suspenseful act in the tragedy of Patricia Campbell Hearst became a public event. Millions of Americans watched last week as television carried live the Shootout in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood between lawmen and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnaped—and claimed to have converted to radical terrorism—the 20-year-old publishing heiress. The TV images seemed plucked from old Viet Nam film clips: street fighting in Danang perhaps, the helicopters wheeling overhead, the hissing tear-gas canisters, finally the flames of...
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