No more war

It has been a radical few days. On Saturday we watched a film I've long wanted to see, Running on Empty (1988), the Sidney Lumet-directed story of a couple of 1960s radicals (Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti) who are living underground and raising two sons. One of the sons, played by a mesmerizing River Phoenix, is about to finish high school, so the parents struggle with not only the pain of separation but also the fact that once he is in college, they can't stay close to him and maintain their cover. Sad stuff. Stories like this fascinate me, in no small part because the son of jailed members of the notorious Weather Underground was a neighbor of mine in Chicago.

And last night we watched Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, an "American Experience" broadcast on PBS. The Hearst story is an absorbing one: her captors, the Symbionese Liberation Army, were among a rapidly dwindling number of violent counterculture radicals, and her kidnapping was one of the last gasps of the 1960s. When the SLA abducted her in 1974 America's involvement in Vietnam was mostly finished, and there wasn't much left to protest. In the film what emerges of the SLA's philosophy is some unspecific plans to overthrow Western capitalism and a few details about how the early-1970s energy crisis was supposed to be a government plot to throw laborers out of work. One of the most striking things about the SLA is that at its height, this army boasted about eight members.

The Madison public television station WHA, channel 11, will rebroadcast the Patty Hearst documentary tonight at 11:00.