REVIEW OF BOOKS

Al Capp on pigs, insects and white liberals

By the time this reaches print, Patricia Hearst may have given herself up, been captured, or shot, and the theory I am submitting tc, you may be as much rubbish, as David Boulton's*. But, let me say this first; Boulton is a first rate reporter, his story of Field Marshal de Freeze, a vastly more inspiring one than mine, his picture of Patricia Hearst indistinguishable from Joan of Arc.

Patricia Heast grew up to be exactly the sort of girl every solvent Californian hopes for. She was willowy, slim; today's compulsory poetic hairdo gave her face softness and loveliness. Her mother, a Catholic, sent her first to Catholic schools, and then Patricia, a girl of the 'seventies, insisted on going to Berkeley, then, arid now, the last stronghold of our student Crazies. She defied the most sacred strictures of her mother's religion. At fourteen she took an older lover. Catholic girls are supposed to remain virgins until they marry and it would stun you if you knew how many do. At nineteen she was living with a boy named Stephen Weed, who looks very much like the mating of a goat and a worm. Her family, of course, was appalled, but secretly — did they take some pride in Patricia? She had shown the world in living openly with young Weed that she had inherited the arrogance of her grandfather, who, in a fit of temper, sent the USA to war with Spain. Then having, I presume, all the answers she announced that she was going to marry young Weed. She had spent the day buying silverware for her home, with her mother, the night she was kidnapped by a ragtag array of young blacks and whites who rejoiced in the name of the Symbionese Liberation Front. They demanded two million in ransom for her.

Well, so far, it is the ordinary story of the rich American girl next door. The family usually pays the ransom, and after that the authorities usually capture the Crazies, or they don't, and very little harm is done. But this one was different Field Marshal de Freeze, a black kid in his twenties, the sole commander of the Liberation Army of eight, I think, wanted no money for himself. He ordered two million dollars of food packaged and distributed to the starving of California or the SLA would kill Patricia. Now, packaging two million dollars worth of food was comparatively easy; finding two million starving Californians was not. Despite the widely-known inhumanity of Governor Reagan, anyone with the price of a cab ride, could get to the local welfare office, and return with a sizeable living check, a rent check, and food coupons. Nonetheless, mobs of nicely-dressed, slightly overweight Californians gathered around the trucks, and clawed each other to ribbons for the packages. The next message from the Field Marshal (delivered on tape to various underground radio stations, and papers in the area) denounced the quality of the food packages.

*The Making of Tania Hearst David Boulton (New English Library £3.25) . But de Freeze was a humanitarian. He would not kill Patricia even now, if six million more was deljvered to the poor; but this time, the real stuff — the real Hearst table stuff, and no more of that slop. Hearst had run out of money, but there was some sixty million in the Hearst Fund (a complicated way of keeping the money in the hands of the family, and out of the hands of our Tax Service) that could, and did, vote the additional six million. Again the food trucks, again the mobs, again no Patricia. Mr Hearst threw up his hands, and turned the whole mess over to the authorities. The next tape from Patricia was a stern one. The Field Marshal had given her permission to leave the SLA and return to her family. However, now that she had learned the full story of the horrors visited on the poor by such as her family, she chose to stay with the SLA, fight with them, give up her life, if necessary. Photographs of Tania (which she now called herself) looking quite menacing, with a ferocious weapon slung over her shoulder were taken at places, robbed by the SLA, and thrilled the country. They were finally tracked down to a house in the suburbs by five hundred cops (liberals claim that five hundred cops against less than a dozen armed and maniacal criminals was unsporting) and when the smoke cleared away, the Field Marshal and most of the SLA were dead, but Tania (Patricia) Hearst had escaped.

And that's the way it's been, and there's no reason to think that it may not go on that way for years. The question is (Boulton has one answer, I have another), why did silver-buying Patricia Hearst become gun-slinging Tania?

Did she hear the poor, and especially blacks, reviled at her dinner table? The Hearsts are not liberals, as defined by Americans. Liberals are those who appear on TV shows, hear themselves denounced as "racists" and "Honkies" by the black guests, and reply "I'm sorry I'm not black." The Hearsts were perfectly decent people. One can be a millionaire and a publisher and not be a monster, as for example, Katherine Graham, of the Washington Post. Never, I daresay, were • the Hearsts rude to blacks, or, for that matter, knew any well enough to be rude to. They had, according to the inexplicably dim lights of their years, never deprived a black of anything.

Those lights (accepted in my country by pigment, in England by accent) were whatever your grandfather earns is yours. There may, indeed, be better systems, but until the Anglo-Saxon world is convinced there is one, that's the one we're stuck with.

No, Patricia Hearst heard no racism at her dinner table. It was from the Field-Marshal she heard it and his crew of crazies. She'd never heard talk as passionate, plans as bloody, she'd never seen a submachine gun, she'd never been forced to flee from one raL infested garret to another roach-ridden cellar.

This was life. Real life. The life of the world-changer, the Revolutionary. At no point in her taped messages was there the slightest sane hint that the world she was committed to overturn, existed, except in the mind of the Field Marshal. In what other world could a twentyish criminal, as inefficient as Laurel or Hardy, since he was caught at most of the crimes he committed, and got away only by ratting on his friends, become a Field Marshal, without first becoming a corporal? In what other world could he swagger, in stolen cars, with pockets full of stolen money, armed with stolen weapons, robbing, kidnapping, until it took five hundred police to bring him down to a fiery death?

There are those who say that the blackness of his heart darkened his soul. That, in today's America, is utter nonsense. There are twenty-five million blacks in America. More than in many new nations. They are organised and demanding. There are blacks in every area of American life. From the Senate, down to police captains. No American would resent a black candidate for President. We expect one soon.

What does a young man, like Donald de Freeze do? Same thing as if he were any colour. Get a job days. Go to school nights. Most, in fact, do, same as whites. But the Donald de Freezes want to be Field Marshals. They want to wreck a system they know nothing about, have never learned anything about, have not yet contributed anything to. It is I submit, a far better system than the Ethiopian army's or General Amin's. The tragedy is that they will not learn that the whole system fails if they are not included on equal terms. And that, after so many years of mindless neglect, America is working furiously, often foolishly, to make them equal in life, as they are on official paper.

The Donald de Freezes don't know that, or want to, and the Patricia Hearsts, no giant intellects to begin with, are hypnotised by their blazing slogans, their grandiose plans. The mob that surrounded Donald de Freeze was, essentially, no different from the Charles Manson gang.

De Freeze and Hearst are not the last of our romantics. There will be others, and other authors like David Boulton, will slobber over them, and agree that their parents are "fascist insects." Is it impossible to write a book, from another point of view? That the "fascist insects" the Hearsts represent, are their own children only some thirty years older? They bleed, too. They feel. And in those thirty years is it not possible that they may not have hardened, or grown into monsters, but become more human beings? And that they go along with the system (which, by the way, is increasingly unkind to them) because there isn't any other system that, for all its

• unfairnesses, for all its cynicism, works quite as well? Just because Mrs Hearst's. hair is coiffed

and Mr Hearst wears a vest, does that make them any more to be scorned than Donald de Freeze's black skin?

Boulton's book is splendidly written. It is to be regretted that, as he swings along, he too, is hypnotised by the Field Marshal. He almost caught me in the end. But not quite. He wrote: "There will be more myths, more fantasies, more Tanias. But the new world of which they dream of and for which they rage, will be built by the slow painful, unrewarded [unrewarded? Hell, the American middle class, including millions of blacks, is the largest in the world, and our poor would be considered middle class anywhere else] not the "people" of the SLA's abstraction, but the people who will never be Field Marshals, nor will their exploits win anyone an Emmy. But it is their flexibility, their staying power, their collective invincibility, which will crush the fascist insects."

It's a damn shame that anyone who can write as well as Boulton, had to go and spoil it all with "fascist insects." Those are the words of a half demented police spy.

I want to read a book in which a couple of decent, yes, even prosperous parents, are treated civilly, and their dim-witted kids as the mindless pests they are.

At Capp is the creator of the Lil'Abner cartoon strip