"Viva la Revolución!" circa 1973

In the mid-seventies I was infinitely more fascinated by the Patty Hearst story than Watergate. The story of Tricky Dick and his crew of crooks was just plain confusing, and worse, boring. The SLA story was pretty confusing, but it was also weird, and I remember wondering about all sorts of angles: 'This woman was kidnapped, so why is she now shooting up department stores?', 'What does 'brainwashed' mean?' and maybe most of all, 'Yeah, they're violent, but why do they seem so pathetic?' Christopher Sorrentino (author of Sound on Sound) has written a well-reviewed novel about the whole sorry affair, and evidently it's pretty good. At least according to Evan Hughes of the NYRB, in a piece so long and thorough I hardly feel the need to read the book. And I have to wonder if the novel is as well written as this paragraph:

'What turned public fascination into a kind of mania was Patty's apparent transformation into a committed member of the Army itself. In a series of audiotapes sent to radio stations within a two-month span beginning a week after her capture, she changed—or was it seemed t change?—from a scared and pleading teenager—"Mom Dad, I'm okay.... And I just hope that you'll do what they say, Dad, and just do it quickly"—to a different kind o parental nightmare

I have been given the choice of, one, being released in a safe area, or, two, joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people. I have chosen to stay and fight.

Accompanying this last recording was a photograph of Patty, now using the name "Tania" after a woman who fought alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia. The young woman who weeks earlier had selected for her wedding china a Herend pattern of hand-painted flowers and butterflies now wore a jumpsuit and beret, and carried a cut-down M-1 carbine loaded with a fully automatic banana clip. She wielded the same weapon later that month while participating in the robbery of the Sunset branch of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, during which two people were shot and injured by an SLA member, Nancy Ling Perry. In a series of security camera photos taken four to a second, Patty Hearst seemed to be saying, according to students from the Berkeley School for the Deaf brought in to analyze the pictures, "I'm Tania. Up against the wall, motherfuckers."'