The tragedies of communards and Weather-bombers
by Julia Watts
Author T. C. Boyle, whether he's chronicling the adventures of a British thief in Africa or the obsessions of a 19th-century health food guru in Michigan, has always been drawn to characters on the fringes of society, outsiders who are visionaries despite (or because of) their obvious eccentricities. In his latest and arguably best novel, Drop City (Viking, $25.95), Boyle turns his witty attentions to the workings of a hippie commune circa 1970.
The denizens of Drop City (so called because of Timothy Leary's famous advice, "Tune in, turn on, drop out") spend their days soaking up the California sun, ingesting illegal substances, practicing free love, and generally getting back to nature. We follow these happenings through the eyes of three communards: Star, a kind-hearted hippie chick who questions some of the counterculture's patriarchal values; Pan (formerly Ronnie), who is Star's self-absorbed boyfriend from back home whose hippie ideology doesn't go far beyond his boundless appetite for drugs and sex; and Marco, the most sensible communard who soon replaces Pan as Star's old man.
While Drop City's members love to discuss getting back to nature, the theory comes more easily than the practice, as evidenced by their lack of will or ability to deal with the commune's mounting human waste problem. After an acid-induced van wreck involving Norm, the commune's founder, the police condemn the Drop City property and schedule it for bulldozing. The hippie tribe then gets truly back to nature by moving to some property in Alaska owned by Norm's uncle. The nature they are getting back to at "Drop City North," however, is more reminiscent of the harsh winters of Jack London's fiction than the sunshiny Summer of Love.
The hippies' experiences are juxtaposed with those of backwoods trapper Sess Harder and his wife Pamela, a couple who may not know much about the theory of getting back to nature, but know a great deal about the practice. When the hippies' story overlaps with the Harder's, it makes for a fascinating comparison of two types of society's dropouts.
I've always been a fan of Boyle's clever storytelling, but in the past his work has sometimes valued wit at the expense of emotion. This is not so with Drop City. Boyle gets into the characters' heads and hearts instead of just wittily observing his creations from a distance. He also seems more at home with female characters than he has in the past; Star and Pamela are especially well drawn.
Drop City insightfully critiques the flaws in communal culture: many of the characters are good-hearted but wrong-headed, and the few selfish and impulsive commune members pose a threat to the success of the whole group. Boyle is also sensitive to the sexism of the commune: the chicks spend most of their time cooking for the cats, and the term "free love" seems to mean that the cats are always entitled to sex on demand. Boyle shows us these flaws rather than judgmentally telling us about them, and Drop City, like Lord of the Flies, shows that human limitations stop us from making utopian ideals a reality.
While the hippies in Boyle's novel drop out of society, the revolutionaries in Bill Ayers' memoir Fugitive Days take radical measures to change society. A member of the Weather Underground, a radical organization that took its name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Ayers participated in numerous bombings to protest the Vietnam War, most famously the bombing of the Pentagon.
Before reading Fugitive Days, my knowledge of the Weather Underground was limited, and I thought peace lovers planting bombs to protest a war was as crazy as Pro-Life extremists shooting abortion providers. Ayers' eloquent writing, however, clarifies the Weathermen's position: They were not just protesting the war, but the entire system of racism and imperialism, which they felt, bred the war. Their methods were more related to Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" philosophy than to the ideals of flower power. The Weathermen's bombings were small explosions that targeted "property, not people" and that were meant to symbolize the destruction of injustice.
Were Weather members extremists? Without a doubt—Ayers himself would say so. Were they crazy? Perhaps, but Ayers does a fine job of showing their motivations. While many of their actions were rash, their belief in social justice was commendable.
The hardback edition of Fugitive Days was released in September 2001, a month in which readers were unlikely to feel sympathy for anyone who had ever bombed the Pentagon. Because of this unfortunate publication date, copies of Ayers' memoir that were published after 9/11 include an afterword in which he denounces those events of as a "monstrous crime," but criticizes the U.S. government for using the tragedy to create "a narrow, repressive patriotism" in which "dissent is un-American."
While I didn't always agree with Ayers' brand of dissent, I couldn't help but admire his conviction and think that some of his statements about the imperialist nature of the Vietnam War seem curiously relevant to the current war in Iraq.
May 22, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 21
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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