The rebel without a cause http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/14/crime-politics-patty-hearst-books
Why Patty Hearst turned terrorist has been a puzzle for 35 years, but the answers in this book are unconvincing, writes Sam Leith Sam Leith The Observer 14 December 2008 When did Patty Hearst cross the line? The decisive moment - the flabbergasting moment - in the story of this wealthy newspaper heiress's journey from suburban square to self-declared 'urban guerrilla' surely came on the afternoon of 16 May 1974. Hearst had been held prisoner by the Symbionese Liberation Army for more than three months. During this time she had been kept locked in a tiny closet in her own shit and piss, raped, ranted at, and finally offered a choice between joining this incoherently revolutionary organisation in its 'struggle', and being killed. On the afternoon in question she was sitting in a VW camper parked up on a six-lane street in Los Angeles while two other members of her 'combat unit', Bill and Emily Harris, went shopping in Mel's Sporting Goods across the way. Patty was dressed in an afro wig and horn-rimmed spectacles, and she was reading the newspaper. Shopping consisted of helping yourself, and Bill Harris wasn't very good at it: she glanced up from her paper to see him being wrestled to the ground by several members of the shop's staff after being seen pocketing a cartridge belt. Did she leap from the VW and head for the hills with yelps of grateful relief? Did she hurl off her afro wig and shout: 'It's me, Patty! Please call the police!' Unfortunately not. Rather, she pushed a sawn-off carbine out of the window of the van and hosed down Mel's Sporting Goods with automatic fire. When she'd emptied the clip, she dropped it, grabbed another gun and squeezed off three more shots. Her captors took advantage of the confusion to run across the street, and the trio squealed off round the corner. They remained on the run for another 18 months - Patty travelling not as Patty but as her nom de guerre 'Tania'. Coercive persuasion, duress, brainwashing, 'Stockholm syndrome' (not, contrary to bar-room wisdom, a theory even mentioned during her trial), or a sober reconsideration of the important things in life - what on earth made her do it? Reading William Graebner's clever and well written but sometimes idiotic little book on the subject leaves us no closer to an answer. You look at the Patty Hearst story and, like someone contemplating an optical illusion, you see: candlestick, two faces, candlestick, two faces. Was she affectless and suggestible, or 'strong willed' and rebellious? There are two contradictory accounts of what was going on in her head, more or less equally plausible - or more or less equally bewildering - and both of them come from Hearst herself. One is her 1982 memoir, in which she explains her actions as what a terrified girl did to survive; the other is the 'Tania Interview' - her contribution to a book the SLA was writing about itself. Her conversion to the cause had been, she said in those pages, a 'process of development, much the same as a photograph is developed', and any talk of brainwashing was 'cheap sensationalism'. In her book about the trial, Anyone's Daughter, Shana Alexander wrote, rather hauntingly: 'The manuscript means that Tania exists or, at least, that she once did.' What's so maddeningly impossible to get at is why Tania existed. It's unlikely even Tania knew. Patty Hearst is presented to us here as a palimpsest within a palimpsest. Her mind, apparently, was a blank slate on which, first, bourgeois America and then the SLA were free to inscribe their bad craziness. Her story was another blank slate - one on which an America caught midway between two ages of anxiety was able to inscribe its larger cultural paranoias. Graebner sees the timing of her trial as the key thing - caught 'midway between the liberal zeitgeist of the 1960s and the emerging conservatism of the 1980s, between a culture that valued the endurance of the survivor and had compassion for the victim and one that longed for the transcendence of the hero'. That's schematic but it is in many respects spot-on. 'Pathology has been used often, and effectively, to marginalise social and political dissidents,' Graebner writes. This is true. But you can't apply it syllogistically. The fact that the SLA were regarded as vicious wackos is not in and of itself proof that they deserved to be taken seriously as political theorists. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. On the other hand, one of the gloriously weird, catch-22 aspects of the Patty Hearst trial is that the prosecution, in order to establish that she was in her right mind, also had to make a plausible case for why the SLA's ideas might be appealing. They had to persuade the jury, in effect, that the SLA had a point - that their case was arguable. Graebner's book is divided into two halves. The first half, 'The Story', is gripping, succinct, extremely well told and filled with little details that resonate interestingly: Patty as Stepford Wife gone wrong, being mortified by the SLA 'communal toothbrush', grumbling about the alias 'Pearl', or passing her time in jail crocheting a 'clemency blanket'. The second half of the book - 'Reading Patty Hearst' - is much patchier. A lot of 'scholars' are quoted but there's little adjudication between them, the line between scholarship and speculation is often vanishingly thin, and the pages fill with tenuous pop culture references. Patty as the model for Ripley in Alien? Well, perhaps. Patty's 'cultural link with punk rock and its New York scene'? Perhaps not. Everything from Bee Gees lyrics to the fact that Paul McCartney plays all the parts on 'The Lovely Linda' is brought before the court in evidence. Graebner falls victim, too, to that current in academic theory that gets so intoxicated with a single big idea that everything becomes an epiphenomenon of the idea. The tail wags the dog. 'The problem of the mutable self is an old one, a product of modernity's disruption of a premodern round of life built on community, tradition and bedrock expectations about one's life and what one could expect from it,' he says at the outset, which is woolly but sensible enough. He goes on to describe the 1970s - Tom Wolfe's 'me-decade' - as an era preoccupied to an unprecedented degree by the idea of self-actualisation, writing that the Bay Area at the time was 'home to new movements offering a variety of non-mainstream ways to "choose oneself"', which included 'the People's Temple, a religious organisation that would become infamous for the 1978 mass suicide of its members in Jonestown, Guyana; a powerful lesbian and gay community that in 1977 elected the city's first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk; Redstockings West and other radical feminist groups ... ' It seems to me that a sociology that finds the similarities between the Jonestown cult and the West Coast gay community more illuminating than the differences is a pretty eccentric one - and not as liberal as it imagines. Later, quoting some of Betty Friedan's more absurd rhetoric with approval, Graebner slips in a jaw-dropper of a parenthesis about 'the enormous power that closed, totalising systems - the concentration camp, the slave plantation, the suburban home environment - brought to bear on their inmates'. That's not just silly - it's offensive. -- Patty Hearst: A life Born 20 February 1954, San Francisco. Her father was Randolph Hearst, son and heir of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army from her home in California on 4 February 1974. After two months' imprisonment, Hearst released a taped message that she sympathised with her captors and had joined the SLA. Apprehended by police in September 1975 with other members of the group and arrested for an armed robbery of a California bank. Convicted in 1976, Hearst served 22 months in prison; her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter. Pardoned in 2001 by Bill Clinton. She married bodyguard Bernard Shaw in 1979; they have two daughters, Gillian Hearst Simonds and Lydia Hearst-Shaw. Hearst now raises prize-winning French bulldogs in her home in Connecticut. She said: 'For me, my awakening came when I was kidnapped.' They said: 'She was caught up in something extraordinary but she was not extraordinary herself. It's hard to get beyond her celebrity' – film director Robert Stone. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
