H_ANGM_N Books
104 pages, $14.95

Review by Carley Moore

In the introduction to Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974, Bill Ayers re-examines the complex global social, political, and economic climate that led to the formation of one of the most infamous revolutionary groups in American history. Known for their brash communiqués and the bombing of several government buildings in response to the war in Vietnam, the Weather Underground created their own vocabulary, a series of riffs on the Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Bad Moon”—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ayers remembers:

We talked of Weathermen and Weatherwomen, Weatherkids and Weatherstories, Weather documents and Weathersymps. The leadership was, of course, the Weather Bureau, a leaflet was a Weather Balloon, and the anti-imperialist struggle was the Weather Tide. Recruits went through what amounted to an informal Weatherman Berlitz in order to become functionally bilingual.

Weather, then, became not only a patois, but also a means to communicate on two levels—the politics in the air and the air itself. Continue reading →