In a room of 120 strangers in San Diego at New Year’s, it was an awkward moment: everyone had to tell the story of their first Celebrity Crush.
I told mine. Mine was the story of sitting with my father who was reading the New York Times. I asked him for the scissors, to cut out Ulrike Meinhof’s picture. I carried this picture with me until it fell apart. I was five.
It’s impossible that I knew who Meinhof was, or her role in Munich 72, or even that Munich had happened. At five years old, It’s improbable that I thought anything had happened at all. But she was a neat looking lady, and her face was distinct in the crowd of halftone newsprint. This is how all crushes start, right? A distinction from the crowd.
Since 1975, my feelings about Meinhof have become logarithmically complex. They that say, they say it was brain surgery that changed her to a terrorist. They say she didn’t choose the terrorist’s life. What makes a man start fires?
But never minding that. In San Diego for the New Year, I recalled her in that first role in my life, as that First Celebrity Crush.
At the New Year, I realized that of all the lessons of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the most personal one is this: no one really chooses. No one chooses who or what captivates them. Would that we could, and frightened that we can’t.
—
Photo reblogged from plsj:
“Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.”
