TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT0337> <title> Oct. 04, 1993: From People Power To Polenta </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993 Oct. 04, 1993 On The Trail Of Terror </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> ESSAY, Page 94 From People Power To Polenta </hdr> <body> Charles Krauthammer When Katherine Anne Power--'60s radical, bank robber, fugitive--turned herself in last week after 23 years on the run, she added another entry to her already crowded resume: unwitting historian. Her brief explanatory statement released upon her surrender to Boston police is a document historians of the future, puzzling over what happened to the '60s, will find useful. They will ignore the usual mitigating phrases about actions she now characterizes as "naive and unthinking." One does not ordinarily think of a bank robbery in which a policeman, father of nine, is shot in the back, as an act of naivete. "My intention was never to damage any human life," she says. It apparently never occurred to her that when robbing a bank in the company of three ex-cons, a shotgun and a submachine gun, somebody might get hurt. Nor is there anything unusual about her spirit-of-the-age defense, wherein she insists that her deeds should be seen in the context of a time when many others--she cites, for example, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon papers--were breaking the law. There is a certain moral gap between unauthorized leaking and armed robbery that this defense does not bridge. No matter. These run-of-the-mill self-justifications are window dressing. What everyone wants to know is not why Katherine Power robbed a bank in 1970--we know: she wanted to save the world--but why she finally gave it up in 1993. It is her account of the return that yields the one truly memorable line in this text, the one historians will ponder to their benefit: "I know that I must answer this accusation from the past, in order to live with full authenticity in the present." So Katherine Power came in from the cold in search of "full authenticity." Not out of remorse or resignation. Not seeking forgiveness or repentance. "She did not return out of guilt," explained her husband. She just tired of telling lies, of living as Alice Metzinger, wife, cook, restaurateur, but with a shrouded past and troubled future. "She wanted her life back," said her husband. "She wanted her truth back. She wants to be whole." That Officer Schroeder will not get his life back troubled her ("his death was shocking to me"), but that is not why she surrendered--or she would have done so 23 years ago. In fact, as elaborated in a front-page New York Times story about her psychotherapy for depression, her surrender--for the sake of "full authenticity"--was a form of therapy, indeed the final therapeutic step toward regaining her sense of self. Allan Bloom once described a man who had just gotten out of prison, where he had undergone "therapy." "He said he had found his identity and learned to like himself," writes Bloom. "A generation earlier, he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner." In an age where the word sin has become quaint--reserved for such offenses against hygiene as smoking and drinking (which alone merit "sin taxes")--surrendering to the authorities for armed robbery and manslaughter is not an act of repentance but of personal growth. Explains Jane Alpert, another '60s radical who served time (for her part in a series of bombings that injured 21 people): "Ultimately, I spent many years in therapy, learning to understand, to tolerate and forgive both others and myself." Learning to forgive oneself. Very important nowadays for revolutionaries with a criminal bent. What a pathetic trajectory from the '60s to the '90s: from revolutionary slogans to New Age psychobabble, from Frantz Fannon to Robert Fulghum, from the thrill of the underground to the banalities of the couch. But the banality does not stop there. This revolution has not just gone into therapy. It is heavily into food. When Bobby Seale, co-founder and chairman of the Black Panthers, finally produced his oeuvre, it was Barbeque'n with Bobby. Karleton Lewis Armstrong, jailed for a 1970 University of Wisconsin bombing that injured four and killed one, now runs a fruit-juice business in Madison, Wisconsin. And Katherine Power, expert chef and cooking instructor, was renowned in her adopted Oregon for her recipes. Power's therapist, reports the New York Times, found it impossible "to believe that this bespectacled cook with the terrific polenta recipe...had spent 14 years as one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 10 Most Wanted fugitives." It starts with people power. It ends in polenta. A fitting finish to the radical '60s. But it is not quite right to close the book with this touch of cute domesticity. Let's remember who Katherine Power was and what she did. This was not a flower child caught up some wild afternoon in a robbery. She was found to have in her apartment three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun and a huge store of ammunition. She is accused of having fire bombed a National Guard armory. She took part in a bank robbery in which a hero cop, father of nine, was shot dead. This is someone very hard who has now softened--out of feelings of loss, principally for herself. "After all these years," concludes Newsweek, "it's hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for: the [Schroeder] children who lost a father...[or] the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the '60s." That's a hard one? Reflecting on the man who learned to like himself in prison, Bloom notes that in the mind of this ex-con, "the problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending." Except for the orphans. </body> </article> </text>