'"No Surrender: Writings From an Anti-Imperialist Political
Prisoner," Abraham Guillen Press and Arm The Spirit, Canada, May 2004.
I woke this morning from a dream about Dave Gilbert. Dave is
serving a life sentence in New York State for his part in an attempted robbery
of a Brinks truck in Nyack, New York, in 1981 during which a guard and two policemen
were killed.
I haven't seen Dave Gilbert in thirty years, nor is he the
sort of fixture in my dream life that some old friends or acquaintances become.
I knew Dave at Columbia College in the late '60s, when he was the gentle yet
charismatic center of an anti-war movement that had not yet turned to dogma. I
knew him later in Weatherman, the left splinter group of Students for a
Democratic Society that was committed to violent revolution and driven by a
potent though short-lived combustion of ideals and idiocy. I lost contact with
Gilbert when the above ground unit of Weatherman folded, to be replaced by a
Weather underground to which I did not belong. The War in Vietnam ended in
1975. Weatherman became extinct not long thereafter, as members began to
surface. But Dave stayed hidden for six more years, until flushed out by
headlines about the botched Brinks job.
I wish I could remember more of this morning's dream than the conclusion, which had something to do with a smiling Gilbert on a rowboat and some turtle (or possibly duck) eggs. It's not inconceivable that the eggs were in some sense his progeny, fertilized with his politics, and he was sending them out into the world. Or it could be that just being on a rowboat, as opposed to a jail cell, gave him pleasure. Whatever its meaning, it's obvious why I had the dream now. I've recently finished Gilbert's book, "No Surrender: Selected Writings of an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner," a collection of writings from jail. There's a picture of Dave on the cover, smiling, looking like he's hardly aged. That smile, ready to turn into a laugh, often a laugh at himself, brings back all the feelings of affection he triggered in me, in so many of us, way back when. Which is why this book was much harder to read than I expected.
I expected the slogans, and so was not surprised to find
them in abundance, preserved after decades in jail time amber. But it was
painful for me to deal with the coexistence in the book of the smile and the
sloganeering. I'm not referring to the smile in the cover photograph. I noticed
that later, in fact. And when I did take it in, it only confirmed what I had
already felt, namely that something of the deeply admirable Dave Gilbert I once
knew was alive in the sloganeering prose itself, struggling to be heard, to
make an impact, through a politics others took on in a moment of emergency and
have long since shed. Zionism equals racism. America is imperialism. The Third
World is victimhood and oppression. World revolution is the only cure. Armed
struggle is the only means.
That Dave's spirit is caught up in such views is the other
incarceration he has to deal with, besides the one represented by a picture of
barbed wire on the front cover of the book, under the photo of his face. It's true
that Dave's intelligence isn't absent from the writing. He works with old
formulae, kneads them, massages them, tries to tease something new out of them,
sometimes stretches them almost to the breaking point, but invariably falls
back and is bound by them again. His efforts to get the most out of Marxism, to
make it last, remind me of the attempts by Ptolemaic astronomers to get weirdly
spinning planets right by means of one more perfectly placed concentric circle.
I've heard it said, in Dave's defense: What can you expect? He'll be in jail
for life. But then, I remember that other '60s slogan: jails are universities.
One issue Dave wrestles with repeatedly is Lenin's idea of a
revolutionary vanguard. In Gilbert's experience, Leninist vanguards always encourage
leaders to be "manipulative and commandist," while turning cadre into
obsequious followers concerned to "curry favor." Gilbert gets to the
point of suggesting this is not accidental, and that the whole idea of the
Leninist vanguard -- the organizing principle of Weatherman and presumably the
later underground cells to which he belonged -- is "seriously
flawed." But when I read that, I want to say, "flawed," is too
soft, Dave. "Flawed" fudges it. Try "authoritarian,"
"outdated" or just plain "bad." Ditch the Leninist
vanguard, Dave, and think through the implications. What's left, at that point,
of the revolutionary cure-all? And if revolution isn't THE solution, doesn't
the problem itself need to be utterly reformulated?
The truth, though it did not manifest in my dream, is that
I'm furious with Dave Gilbert. Yes, I'm touched by the smile. I recognize the
old Gilbert when I read: "The starting point for me is identifying with
other people. That solidarity, that tenderness, mandates standing with the
oppressed -- the vast majority -- against the power structure."
When he fills out the picture, writing of:
The 50 percent of children in sub-Saharan African suffering
from severe malnutrition, the women and girls sold into sexual bondage in
Thailand, the homeless kids scavenging in the streets of Saw Paulo, the
prisoners with AIDS locked in isolation in Alabama
and concludes, "they are all precious human beings
whose lives matter," it could be 1965 again. He could be on sundial of the
Columbia campus, its rallying point, orating passionately, beseechingly in that
vein either to crowds of students or just a few passers by.
But Dave Gilbert's militant compassion hasn't worn well. The
Brinks robbery showed it to be a selective, ultimately self-serving kind of
fellow-feeling, a supremely arrogant compassion, at home with excuses, above
any law. Nowhere in this book is there anything even close to an honest
accounting of why Dave Gilbert will be in jail forever. A foreword by black
activist Marilyn Buck tells us he's being punished for "political acts and
[a] stance in support of the Black national liberation struggle." The
three people shot to death on October, 1981 in Nyack New York don't even get a
mention from her. Gilbert's capsule summary of that event is no better. He says
that with other "white revolutionaries" allied with "the Black
Liberation Army" he tried to "take funds" -- what an interesting
elocution, "take funds" -- from a Brinks truck "with the unfortunate
result of a shoot-out in which a guard and two policemen were killed."
What shallow rhetoric, as if it never had occurred to Gilbert or his comrades
where trying to "take funds" from a Brinks truck might lead.
What made the possibility of killings so easy to contemplate
in the first place, and to be blase about when the shooting was over? This
attempted robbery took place six years after the Vietnam War had ended, that
war that confronted so many of us with terrible choices, whether we were in
Vietnam fighting the war or here, fighting against it. By 1981, you couldn't
plausibly say Vietnam made you do it. You couldn't credibly say, the '60s made
you do it. What could you say, in 1981, that made you think it was sane to
employ what Gilbert calls "armed struggle (AS)" against a Brinks
truck?
When I think of Brinks, and everything Dave Gilbert doesn't
try to say about it, lacking the language, maybe, or the conscience, it wipes
the smile right off his face in my mind's eye. I lose all sense of the
gentleness beneath the sloganeering. I find myself unconflicted again, and more
than willing to say that for all his avowals of humanism and compassion, this
book by is mostly an exercise in evasion. It's a lesson in what not to let
history make you do. My instinct tells me that's not a trivial lesson to absorb
right now, what with a seemingly endless, misbegotten war abroad and fierce
polarization about it here.
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