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Learning to forgive oneself. Very important nowadays for revolutionaries with a criminal bent. What a pathetic trajectory from the '60s to the '90s: from revolutionary slogans to New Age psychobabble, from Frantz Fannon to Robert Fulghum, from the thrill of the underground to the banalities of the couch.
But the banality does not stop there. This revolution has not just gone into therapy. It is heavily into food. When Bobby Seale, co-founder and chairman of the Black Panthers, finally produced his oeuvre, it was Barbeque'n with Bobby. Karleton Lewis Armstrong, jailed for a 1970 University of Wisconsin bombing that injured four and killed one, now runs a fruit-juice business in Madison, Wisconsin. And Katherine Power, expert chef and cooking instructor, was renowned in her adopted Oregon for her recipes. Power's therapist, reports the New York Times, found it impossible "to believe that this bespectacled cook with the terrific polenta recipe . . . had spent 14 years as one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 10 Most Wanted fugitives."
It starts with people power. It ends in polenta. A fitting finish to the radical '60s.
But it is not quite right to close the book with this touch of cute domesticity. Let's remember who Katherine Power was and what she did. This was not a flower child caught up some wild afternoon in a robbery. She was found to have in her apartment three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun and a huge store of ammunition. She is accused of having fire bombed a National Guard armory. She took part in a bank robbery in which a hero cop, father of nine, was shot dead. This is someone very hard who has now softened -- out of feelings of loss, principally for herself.
"After all these years," concludes Newsweek, "it's hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for: the ((Schroeder)) children who lost a father . . . ((or)) the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the '60s."
That's a hard one? Reflecting on the man who learned to like himself in prison, Bloom notes that in the mind of this ex-con, "the problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending."
Except for the orphans.