When Activists Attack!

Remakes, sequels, cover tunes, and counterfeits.

Twenty-five years ago this week, the Symbionese Liberation Army temporarily rescued Patty Hearst from a life of tedious bourgeois rebellion. One day, the 19-year-old, University of California at Berkeley sophomore was aggravating Mom and Dad via halfhearted, post-hippie fornication with a fatuous gold-digging intellectual named Steven "Let's Burn Another Fatty" Weed. Two months later, brainwashed or converted, depending on whom you ask, the newly minted revolutionary was brandishing a sawed-off automatic and helping her righteous comrades battle jive-ass capitalist Enemies of the People by robbing small neighborhood banks and sporting-goods stores staffed with minimum-wage-earning, pig-agent oppressors.

Kidnapping the granddaughter of the visionary vulgarian who invented yellow journalism was a sure-fire guarantee of frenzied, all-caps coverage. And indeed, over the course of Hearst's 20-month, heiress-cum-terrorist odyssey, she appeared on the covers of the nation's newsweeklies with greater frequency than any other newsmaker of that era, Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, and Evel Knievel included. But while Hearst's tabloid-ready tale of .30-caliber celebrity violence and titillatingly interracial fuck-The-Man sex was the SLA's greatest publicity stunt, it was far from the army's only one.

Indeed, everything the ragtag crew of rebels did was informed with the unerring instinct of natural-born flacktivists: Nominally versed in the writings of jail-house polemicist George Jackson and Regis Debray, whose book Revolution in the Revolution offered urban guerrillas For Dummies-style insurrection instruction, they were also the world's first TV-raised terrorists, with an intuitive talent for concocting the dramas that the news industry demanded.

Start with the group's compellingly mysterious name, which had Archie Bunkers everywhere cursing the obscure African nation of Symbia when, in fact, no such place existed: "Symbionese" was simply a euphonious neologism, derived from the word symbiosis and meant to evoke the group's dissimilar-but-cooperative constituency of runaway convicts, dissident lesbians, and upper-middle-class Che Guevara manqués.

Then there were the members' names -- Cinque, Tania, Teko, Zoya, Kojo, Fahizah. Could Quentin Tarantino himself have come up with a cooler collection of monikers? Add to such mackadelic appellations a cartoonishly over-the-top slogan -- Death to the Fascist Insect That Preys on the Life of the People -- and a seven-headed-cobra logo that remains unaccountably unappropriated by today's retailers of recreational transgression, and you have an expertly branded cast of characters that was definitely ready for prime time.

Young, attractive, integrated in a reassuringly restrained style (although Cinque, the group's black leader, was unable to successfully recruit any other blacks), it was perhaps inevitable that the SLA would migrate from its original stronghold in Berkeley to Los Angeles. They were the revolutionary group as invented by Aaron Spelling, a soap opera-ish cadre of gun-toting, partner-swapping, disguise-wearing drama queens who would have raised no suspicions had they filled a vacancy at Melrose Place. Unfortunately, the group set up camp in South Central, where six of them were ultimately surrounded in a small house by more than 500 Los Angeles police officers and FBI agents and a seemingly equal number of reporters and TV cameramen.

All those who believe that the era of lurid, gruesomely protracted newz-snuff began with Reginald Denny should watch the footage of the shootout that ensued that evening. For more than two hours, shows like Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie were preempted as the cops pumped more than 9,000 rounds of ammunition into the little house in the ghetto, until it exploded in flames and its inhabitants all burned to death. While Hearst and two other SLA soldiers were not there for the deadly conflagration, the incident essentially marked the group's demise.

And now, two-and-a-half decades later, despite the SLA's unprecedented talent for attracting media attention, it's all but forgotten. Why? Part of the reason, no doubt, is the element of buffoonery that often marked the group's exploits. Among the 14 corporate oppressors it singled out for assassination was an individual who would have been an easy target for even the most novice hit man. But unbeknownst to the SLA -- despite its diligent intelligence efforts -- the man had died from natural causes more than a year earlier.

The food giveaways that the SLA required as ransom for the kidnapped Hearst were also colored by an aspect of black comedy. While Cinque and his cohorts initially called for the distribution of US$70 worth of groceries to every poor person and ex-con in California, an outlay that would have cost Randolph Hearst anywhere from $100 million to $400 million, the actual giveaway ended up being relatively modest and incredibly disorganized. At four distribution points around the San Francisco Bay Area, approximately 9,000 people received boxes of crackers and cans of tomato juice. A few unlucky recipients were injured by frozen turkeys tossed from the distribution trucks. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, added to the bathos by displaying the kind of compassion toward the poor that would later get him elected president. He hoped the free food would engender "an epidemic of botulism" among those who accepted it.

However difficult it would be to fashion a hagiographic biopic or commemorative cafe out of such stuff, what really condemned the SLA to its current obscurity was the same thing that garnered the group so much publicity during its heyday. Unlike the legions of coffeehouse Marxists who cluttered Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue during the '70s, the SLA favored violent action over theory, killing over dialectic. Its various declarations and communiqués were perfunctory and vague, puffed up with gassy term-paper rhetoric about guns, unity, and "capitalist value systems." But specific goals were never clearly articulated, and the group never attempted to initiate any kind of substantive, long-term community programs, as the Black Panthers had with their "breakfasts for schoolkids" or their health clinics for the elderly.

Instead, the SLA simply committed crimes and attached nebulous agendas to them. From a TV news director's perspective, this made the group pure gold: Its superficial political valence gave it a zeitgeisty significance, but in the end, the group was as rivetingly disposable as any random fire or triple murder, just one more clown act in the burgeoning media circus.

Today, of course, its influence is everywhere -- from the band-on-the-run vérité of Road Rules to the TV-ready activism of the latest crusader against corporate oppression, the Biotic Baking Brigade. It is made up of loosely organized bands of finger-waggling hissidents who toss politically correct, vegan-only pies at evil politicians and corporate scalawags. Recently, three tossers were convicted of battering San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown with a relentless fusillade of cherry, pumpkin, and tofu-cream pies.

Their defenders say they were merely practicing a form of harmless theatrical free speech; their detractors say that if all it takes is a little dessert to make an overtly violent act harmless then perhaps we'll soon be seeing Tomahawk cruise missiles slathered in Cool Whip. While the debate regarding the harshness of the penalty they received has been brisk, what's obviously clear is that pie-ing has replaced flag-burning as the definitive political act for those who consider Michael Moore the Regis Debray of his era.

The Biotic Baking Brigade has specific reasons for choosing its victims: Brown was hit in an effort to publicize his regressive policies regarding San Francisco's homeless population. Other victims have included unrepentant economic deregulator Milton Friedman, shady forest destroyer Charles Hurwitz, and Douglas Watson, head corn tamperer at diabolical agribusiness giant Novartis AG.

Like the SLA, the group appears to favor mediagenic action over theory or more organized efforts to effect change. "No bosses, offices, foundation grants, never-ending consensus meetings, or CFLAs (Confusing Four-Letter Acronyms) are needed," a recent Biotic Baking Brigade communiqué urges. "Just Do It!"

As poignant as it is to see one more collection of well-meaning anticorporate freedom fighters unable to articulate their opposition in anything but the language of their oppressors, we can't summon too much pity for the Biotic Baking Brigade. While on some level its operatives appear to recognize that the recent media coverage the group's received has about as much impact on the people watching it as Jerry Springer's end-of-show homilies do on his audience, on another level it seems depressingly eager to trivialize itself to whatever extent TV news directors demand. Case in point: the group's latest missive, which announces the Biotic Baking Brigade's plans to pie those "who are responsible for the Year 2000 computer bug (Y2K) mess."

What, one wonders, happened to San Francisco's homeless people? Or what's the fate of California's old-growth redwood trees? It's not as if Mayor Brown's bum-rousting policies have suddenly gotten less malevolent or the Pacific Lumber Company has started hugging trees instead of clear-cutting them. Is the Biotic Baking Brigade simply moving on because it understands the media's insatiable need for new scenarios and new victims? And it knows that anything Y2K-related is sure to pique the interest of news directors and editors? Or does it actually believe a few tofu cream pies will make the legions of corporate ostriches who continue to stubbornly ignore the Y2K dilemma address their problems with the attention they truly require?

In short, the Biotic Baking Brigade has, in targeting Y2K "technocrats," achieved a level of inanity even the SLA never attained. In protesting a "problem" for which there is no solution other than the myriad ones that are already being implemented, the group absolves itself of even the notion of having to do some kind of follow-up work and, thus, enters the realm of pure, context-free, dairy-free media spectacle. As the fat cats dine on Biotic Baking Brigade pie, the cathode Olestra we downtrodden viewers are left to feed on has us feeling kind of queasily empty inside -- and longing for acts of more substantive political dissent, like the sensationalistic kidnapping of a beautiful young heiress.