And why wouldn't Patty Hearst hide out in Vegas after robbing a bank with the Symbionese Liberation Army? She allegedly did. It's where you go to drop out of reality. It's a famous hideout for the would-be anonymous. And it's certainly a reprieve from political radicalism.
Here is the frontal lobe of progressive activism in Las Vegas, in this teeny conglomeration of offices on East Desert Inn Road: Progressive Leadership Alliance of Southern Nevada, ACLU, Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network and Citizen Alert. Peggy Maze Johnson, director of Citizen Alert and a chief anti-Yucca activist, has shaggy brown hair, a fuzzy brown sweater and brown leggings, and occasionally puts her feet on her desk while talking. On the wall in her ramshackle office are a faux Time magazine cover of Bush with the headline "We're F--ked", and a certificate giving Johnson a "license to bitch."
Johnson, 65, has only been in Vegas a few years but is already one of the lead voices opposing the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Turn her onto the subject and a burst of facts and figures about nuclear waste and its dangers comes out of her mouth, starting and ending with the same adamant statement addressing some of the community's resignation about the issue: "It's not 'already coming,'" she says of the nation's nuke waste. "That's what people don't get. It's not a done deal. We've got more fighting to do."
Her passion and politics feel contagious; and given her past, you want to believe she's got it in her to help thwart the Bush administration's determination to haul tons of toxic waste to a mountain 90 miles north of Vegas.
In the late 1960s, Johnson went from Catholic housewife to well-known activist for the poor in Seattle, Washington.
Soon after, she got caught up in one of the nation's more memorable socio-political rebellions, the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst. Johnson's perspective on affecting social change runs the gamut, from the radicalism of the SLA to the workaday labor of progressivism in Vegas today. Citizen Alert is a multi-issue activist group founded in 1975 to fight nuclear dumping in Nevada, but also speaks out and organizes rallies on other progressive issues.
"It's a different era, yes," she says. "And a different place. But I feel like the problem is that we've lost our ability to be outraged."
In Seattle, Johnson began her interest in social issues as a church volunteer feeding the poor at food banks. "I call it my 'lady bountiful stage,' going around giving out food, feeling like I was helping a lot of people, then going home comfortably at night. Then one day I was in the food bank intaking people, and this woman came in and I sized her up immediately. I said, 'Hmm, hooker.'
"Then she sat down and told me her story, about how she was being beaten by her pimp and got away, and for some reason, I just realized that I could be that person. I could be her. I could be in her situation. It was a revelation to me, that I was no different than this person."
It caused Johnson to take the job more seriously, to knuckle down and organize a larger network of food providers that served thousands of people in need across Seattle, which she eventually separated from the church and incorporated. She was the executive director of the Neighbors in Need program for five years in the early 1970s.
"Towards the end of my career there, I was contacted by the Hearst family," Johnson says. Patty Hearst—daughter of the publishing giant—had been kindapped by the SLA, who saw the family as representing the evils of corporate and political largesse. The band of leftist radicals—born in the anti-Vietnam Berkeley underground and led by a prison escapee—announced they were avenging the "crimes [Hearst's] mother and father have committed against the American people and the people of the world." Their motto was "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people," and their ultimately misguided mission was meant to change the system they deemed oppressive.
As ransom for Patty, the SLA demanded that the Hearsts distribute $2 million worth of food to the needy in San Francisco. So Patty's parents, Randolph and Catherine Hearst, called Johnson to set up a program.
"The secretary of state and I flew down [to California] and met with the Hearst family," Johnson recalls. "We drove up to the house in Hillsborough, and the whole front of the house was full of the press—big trucks, microphones, reporters looking in the car windows, asking who are you? I really didn't know what I was getting into."
She met with Randolph, Catherine, and Patty's fiancé Steven Weed, talked about the program in Seattle, and agreed to carry out the SLA's demands for the Hearsts.
The group wanted $125 worth of food for every poor person in San Francisco, and so she and the Hearsts set up People in Need in the downtown offices of the Hearst corporation.
Johnson found herself not only in the national spotlight, but also in the middle ideologically. While she thought the SLA's tactics were violent and unfocused, she hoped that ultimately the food program would make a difference.
"Our program was definitely a political strategy. We wanted to start documenting everyone who was coming in for food. Randy Hearst was empathetic to that—I mean, obviously, his priority was getting his daughter back. But he really got it that we could start something. ... It was to help people, but it was also political. To let people know, 'We're changing the system.'"
The scene unfolded as a surreal chapter in both national history and Johnson's life: "It was a very bizarre time. I had a million dollars in our [food distribution] account, and my secretary was Sara Moore [who later attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford].
"We had to have bodyguards. We had Pinkerton guards. We had guns pulled on us and our trucks hijacked, and the SLA bitched about everything we did. I think I—I think a lot of us—didn't really understand the danger we were in. One of my volunteers was being held hostage—the whole thing was very surreal. But it was like my adrenaline was pumping, and I was just working ...
"It was almost like I was in this movie," she says.
Nixon was in the White House and Ronald Reagan was governor of California, and Johnson recalls Reagan saying that he hoped everybody who took the food "got botulism."
"In 28 days we distributed $1.5 million worth of food."
The SLA wasn't done; Patty Hearst wasn't back to reality. Who can forget the surveillance tapes showing Patty and company robbing a bank? She allegedly hid out in Vegas for a few days after that. No tremendous surprise there—criminals and runaways of all pedigrees seem to believe it's the perfect getaway. Haven for the Lost or Would-be Lost is one of the storybook elements of Vegas' character, parallel now with the opposite notions that it's a place to be seen for the young and famous, and for the less flamboyant in occupation, a community undeveloped enough that it allows anyone to make his or her mark. Vegas is also a textbook example of large-scale corporatization and its effects both good and bad—concentrated wealth and power and on its own scale, homogenization. The city's lore is rounded out by the notion that every national story has a Vegas connection and then, less ostentatiously, is tapered by the idea that it isn't tremendously hospitable to the poor, or homeless, or progressive causes. Just this month Vegas again ranked as one of the nation's "meanest cities" to homeless people by National Coalition for the Homeless; it's also noted to be high in violence against women, low in education and prolific in its expenditures of natural resources. Is Vegas due for its share of social radicalism? Is the nation? In the middle of an unpopular war, with a divided nation, where's the uprising some thought would happen if Bush was re-elected?
"I think there is still a little radicalism out there at a national level," says David Damore, political science professor at UNLV, citing eco-groups that opt for vandalism of construction sites and the pro-life movement's targeting of abortion doctors. "But not that much." The colossal triumph of corporations and institutions is perceived by some as being insurmountable. "Since that era, the institutions have gotten so much stronger," Damore says. "The military industrial complex is stronger, corporations, it's all much stronger."
Ted Jelen, chairman of UNLV's political science department, says radicalism leans more right than left today. "Now it's the loony Right. It's the Aryan Nation instead of the SLA. You haven't seen the equivalent of the SLA popping up on the Left. You see them in Idaho. Instead of Abbie Hoffman you have Tim McVeigh.
"And there is a sense that the party system can accommodate this. People who are disgruntled now are more likely to have a legitimate outlet—you don't have to kidnap an heiress, you can write a check to MoveOn.org. Is that being co-opted? Yes, to a certain degree. ... Normal political channels look more promising to people"—especially after a presidential election that showed a decisive and less challengeable win, Jelen says.
"As for the SLA, did it accomplish anything? Absolutely not. Well, wait. They broke up [Patty's] engagement and provided the basis for a couple of episodes of Law & Order."
In fact, the SLA's political rhetoric was notoriously hodgepodge—combining concern for the poor and ex-convicts with anti-Vietnam sentiments and an affiliation with white, middle-class, college-educated protestors. They killed the Oakland school superintendent, set off numerous bombs, robbed a string of California banks and killed a housewife in one bank robbery. She was the mother of four who was depositing church donations. Six members of the SLA were killed in a shootout with the Los Angeles police.
"Some radical groups from that era did put issues on the agenda—for example the women's lib movement advanced the economic and social roles of women immensely over the last 30 years," Jelen says.
"But today, the Republicans have a firmer grasp on this process than Democrats." Jelen says smart political operatives are using the fringe groups to their advantage. "The Republicans are increasingly concerned with the evangelical and moral [platforms], sweeping them in. And that's an area where Bush hasn't given an inch."
While such co-opting has worked to fuel the party for conservatives to some degree, Damore says that since the Vietnam era, liberals have not worked hard enough to gain from their more radical partners. "You had this idea after the '60s and '70s among liberals that their ideas were proven right, and so they just sat back. But the Christian Right kept going. And the Left is just waking up to that. You're seeing some soul-searching among the Left now, trying to repackage their ideas."
The problem, Damore says, is that extremism like that of the Weather Underground or the SLA or even in elements of the Civil Rights movement seemed plausible as a political strategy in the old days. "That sort of thing now ... particularly in this climate ... makes you a 'terrorist.'"
Johnson says she's had to work hard to get people actively protesting or advocating much of anything in Vegas.
"Today people are really afraid of the system," she said. "When George W. Bush came to the Venetian [during his campaign], he gave us a gift—he announced it six weeks ahead of time, so we had time to have meetings to build support for what I called 'Our Welcome Party [protest]'."
Citizen Alert organized an anti-Bush rally some 1,400-people large outside of the Venetian before his arrival. "Before we went, I called the police to tell them that we'd be doing it, and a little later I got a call from the Homeland Security office. They wanted to know who was involved in putting it together. It was chilling.
"It is our right to protest. Now people are afraid. It's a combination of fear and people that are apathetic. I think people are afraid that people will disagree with them today. Afraid 'I'm not going to be liked.' And afraid of who's keeping track of them."
Johnson's cell phone rings "Fur Elise" and she takes it quickly. Moments later a staffer from PLAN comes in to tell her another group, a UNLV student group, wants to join the progressive alliance.
"Great, wonderful!," Johnson says. Citizen Alert just wrapped up a tour of 25 Nevada towns, showing a mock nuclear transport cask in an effort to reinvigorate the fight against the Yucca repository—not exactly radical, but more forceful than a press release.
"Of course, the SLA took it to a different level. But no, with the SLA, I didn't feel [at the time] any kind of 'They shouldn't have done this,' no," she says. "At least they were doing something.
"It was almost genius that they chose the daughter of a publisher—instant media, it got the story out. But did it accomplish what they wanted to accomplish? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I don't think people were looking at the issue. People were only looking at the poor Hearst family. I saw the issue of protesting the corporate giant, I was hoping that it would draw attention to the issue of hunger. But no, it didn't work, but it was something.
"I feel like the problem is people have lost their sense of power. I believe people need to have power."
Still, Johnson is not pessimistic about political and social activism in Vegas. Quite the opposite. The amount of support that went to Sen. John Kerry in Clark County—more than to Bush—gave her hope. "There is an untapped thing going on here."
So in 1974, an allegedly brainwashed Patty Hearst adopted the protest name Tania, robbed a bank, fled to Vegas, eventually went to prison, got out and wrote a book. The Hearst corporation went from wealthy to wealthier; it's a multi-billion international company that today employs 20,000 people in media positions from magazines to the Web.
Johnson went from San Francisco back to Seattle, to Washington, D.C., as a legislative aide, and on to a heap of other political entanglements, until she and her husband moved to Vegas in 2000. Regardless of the nation's level of activism, though, time hasn't nipped her passion for trying to affect social change. It's just modified it.
Today she sits in a cramped, dilapidated eastside Vegas office, neck-deep in a fight against the the Bush administration and the Department of Energy as they push to ship nuke waste to Nevada.
Right now, the proposed Yucca Mountain project is mired in a web of political and legal challenges. Most recently, lobbyists for the nuclear-power industry said they won't ask the the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the Appeals Court decision that said the DOE safety standards didn't adequately protect public health. The next steps in the battle will likely include either a congressional attempt to rewrite the safety standards law, or the Environmental Protection Agency may come up with different standards for Yucca Mountain.
The complicated nature of the proceedings makes this social issue appear wholly owned by those inside the system, Johnson says.
Still, she says it's as important as ever for everyday people to remain vigilant, as changes in this battle, or a need to publicize the nuke industry or administration's actions, can occur at any time.
But as a citizen, how do you fight the oppressiveness of the big and powerful?
"You do it like you would eat an elephant," she says. "One bite at a time." Quotidian, but possible.
"Or maybe," Damore quips, "they should kidnap Paris Hilton."