WEATHER UNDERGROUND, THE

Right after a terrorist bombing on US soil, no yellow alerts. No praise and prayers for the FDNY. Instead, a festive block party, and a young woman in hippie face paint chirping out, “A smile and a wink to all the kids who hate the American government!” to TV news cameras. This is the damning of the Age of Aquarius, the Weather Underground. An extreme faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, these young protestors against the Vietnam War, many from upscale families and universities, took ideology to fanatical levels in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They stepped up demonstrations to “bring the war back home” with antics at least equal in insanity to Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. Taking their name from a Bob Dylan lyric and media-ready exploits from the pop-culture of “happenings,” Weathermen liberated a jailed Timothy Leary and bombed ROTC offices and other symbols of authority across a nation they hoped to spur to all-out revolution. When mass social upheavals failed to foment, and with the FBI cracking down, infamous radicals like Bernadine Dorn and Mark Rudd went “underground,” hiding from the law and their own parents. Today, from prison, community centers and faculty offices, ex-Weathermen reflect back, in a post-Oklahoma City, post-9/11 world they never made, some with bravado, others with bewilderment and zonked-out regret. What a long, strange trip it's been. Could it happen again?