Keen On

You couldn’t make up the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974. The granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, America’s most divisive media baron, was kidnapped in Berkeley (of all places) by domestic terrorists who demand that Hearst feed the poor in exchange for the 19 year-old woman. That, in itself, was quite a story in an America still embroiled in both Vietnam and all the other aftershocks of the Sixties. But then Patty Hearst went rogue and appeared to join the SLA, participating in the heist of a San Francisco bank and changing her name to Tania, in honor of Che Guevara’s girlfriend. Such was the paranoid America of early 1974. And, according, Roger Rapoport, author of the new novel SEARCHING FOR PATTY HEARST, such is the paranoid America of early 2024. History doesn’t quite repeat itself, Rapoport explained to me. But it certainly rhymes, particularly when one compares the violent left wing cults of the early 1970’s with the violent right wing cults of the earl