1 Boring Old Man

The Last Revolutionary: Sara Jane Olson Speaks
By Greg Goldin
LA Weekly
January 18, 2002

^{…In truth, there was never any justification for the acts of the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was a "revolution" that had existed only in the eyes of its beholders. To many on the left, the early 1970s was an era of political disillusionment in America. In them, idealism was dying. It had crumbled as the moral imperatives of civil rights and the war in Vietnam receded. The veterans of the New Left retreated into the privacy of their personal thoughts and faded back into the middle class from which they’d emerged. Revolution was a thing of the past.}

^{Still, a dynamic of ’60s politics had yet to spin itself out — as farce. The SLA turned the paradigm of radical politics inside out. The New Left, at first, sought to fulfill the highest aspirations of the American enlightenment. It invoked Jefferson and Paine and Thoreau, and was animated by the idea that politics flows from the conscience, and not just the interests of mankind. The demise of the New Left soured radicalism into an open scorn for the common man and the uplifting possibilities of political engagement. The striving for democracy, the slow, patient, public spadework needed to win a popular following and to arouse the conscience of a nation, as Martin Luther King Jr. had done, fizzled. Stuck on the fringes of American politics — in that brief moment when Nixon’s impending impeachment raised new hopes — bands of crypto Marxist-Leninists assumed the self-righteousness of tyrants. The SLA, self-proclaimed enemy of injustice and inequality, embraced guns and the underground with the desperate fury that only total isolation can spawn.}

^{Vexed by the absence of genuine political movements, the SLA adopted Prince Peter Kropotkin’s "politics of the deed." As Communique No. 1, the death warrant against Marcus Foster, announced, "TO THOSE WHO WOULD BEAR THE HOPES AND FUTURE OF OUR PEOPLE, LET THE VOICE OF THEIR GUNS EXPRESS THE WORDS OF FREEDOM." Many thousands of white, college-educated, guilt-ridden, middle-class American kids, circa 1973, might not have picked up the guns, but the slogan had its combustible appeal. Kathleen Ann Soliah, whether or not Sara Jane Olson can admit it today, fell in love with the anger, the vengeance and the thrill of insanity.}

^{For two decades or more, the name Sara Jane Olson was fictitious, an assumed identity, a hiding place for the fugitive from the 1970s, . Within that name, Soliah built for herself a refuge, an unreal sanctuary. In St. Paul, Minnesota, she’d married a Harvard-educated emergency-room physician, was a devoted mother to three teenage daughters, read to the blind, volunteered to help victims of torture, organized soup kitchens. She reverted to her Palmdale upbringing — and proved that she was a woman of essential decency. No wonder the reality of a guilty plea gave her such a jolt. No wonder she seems to wear so many faces.}

^{How much easier it might have been for Sara Jane Olson if she’d come clean, if her guilty plea had been given without caveat. Had she admitted how enmeshed she had become in a radicalism gone amok, she might have been able to resurrect herself. This, sadly, seems impossible now. Contemplating what, exactly, was going on inside the Precita Avenue house with all those guns and explosives, Olson says, "If I had anything to do with that, that’s a terrible thing. This is something I’ve always wondered. I cling to things like the bomb expert saying that these were not signature bombs" — by which she means there might be no connection between the bombs found at Precita and those planted at Hollenbeck and the International House of Pancakes. "That’s what I believe."}

^{I ask her to address the facts which suggest she was more involved in the SLA than she has acknowledged. "You’ve had a lot of time to think about this in the last two years, and there is some factual…"}

^{She cuts in: "I sincerely hope not. I sincerely hope not. Because I don’t want to be responsible for that in any way. Not because I am afraid of responsibility, but because it’s an incredibly heavy burden to bear."}

^{"Because you might have supported people who really did commit the crimes of the SLA?"}

^{"Right, yeah," she says quietly, her voice once again trailing off.}

"To many on the left, the early 1970s was an era of political disillusionment in America. In them, idealism was dying. It had crumbled as the moral imperatives of civil rights and the war in Vietnam receded. The veterans of the New Left retreated into the privacy of their personal thoughts and faded back into the middle class from which they’d emerged. Revolution was a thing of the past." It wasn’t just a concept, it was something you could see and feel. Something died during those years. It wasn’t forgotten, it was killed from within. It had happened before. The idealism and progressive social movement of the 1930’s gradually faded and left behind "the Beatniks" – people who sang the songs and lived the lives of their predecessors, but mostly indulged themselves in the counterculture as a way of life, not as a way of bringing about social change. And the Civil Rights and anti-War movements of the 1960’s morphed into the "Hippies" and their latter-day saints, disconnected from the goals and plans of an earlier day. People like Kathleen Ann Soliah [AKA Sara Jane Olson] were trying to hold on to an ideal, and went insane in the process.