Remember Mark Rudd?

Former Child Star Mark Rudd:

"If the guy at the food co-op with the long white beard rattled on like this while weighing out the lentils, you would smile indulgently and glance at your watch. If a Distinguished Professor of Education said it during a speech, you would wearily shake your head. But when a forgettable 1960s relic goes on in the same vein for 300 pages plus, it’s like a four-CD box set of Iron Butterfly’s Greatest Hit.

...Still, as Rudd tours the nation to sell his book, and his Weatherman colleagues Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn pal around with the president of the United States, it’s worth remembering that they leave behind a trail of dead, mangled, and crippled bodies, ruined and interrupted lives, broken marriages, emotionally scarred victims, and destroyed property and dreams — just like another famous pair:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (The Great Gatsby)

And as the rest of the world struggles to come to grips with the 21st century, Rudd and his dwindling band of 1960s comrades “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — an era of obvious choices and easy certainties, complete with noble heroes and wicked villains and a bright, shining collectivist future that always seemed to be just around the corner, but somehow kept getting farther away."