Weed Atman and Rex Snuvvle: Mentorship Undone by Political Disagreement

Weed Atman and Rex Snuvvle’s relationship moves from an improvised mentorship to an acknowledged political separation. Rex imagines Atman as a guide who might give revolutionary hope a practical voice; Atman instead becomes an organizer almost by accident, reluctant to inhabit the role Rex has prepared for him. Their disagreement is not merely over tactics. It exposes different expectations of what political commitment should demand from a person, and whether a movement can preserve its humanity while confronting escalating state force.

Unequal Beginnings

Rex Snuvvle is a graduate student in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, where he has been taught the government’s version of the Vietnam War. His studies have made him increasingly preoccupied with the fate of the Gruppo Bolscevico Leninista del Vietnam, a Trotskyist section of the Quarta Internazionale that trained and sent roughly five hundred cadres to Indochina by 1953. The cadres, positioned to the left of Ho Chi Minh, had disappeared from view; Rex believes that every party, including the Quarta Internazionale, betrayed them. He has secretly corresponded with the handful of exiles left in Paris, while admitting that fear of reprisals has kept him from speaking openly about what he has learned.

The missing revolutionaries have become more than a subject of research for Rex. He imagines them as a lost tribe of heroes whose cause may yet return as a prophetic voice or a rescue mission entering history from elsewhere. That romantic, almost redemptive vision shapes what he hopes to find in Weed Atman. After Atman leads students to safety during campus unrest, guiding them behind the Greg Noll Laboratory and the Olympic Auditorium to Las Nalgas, some of the students continue to his home. Rex sees an opportunity in the tall, shaken student whom others have already begun to follow.

The Protégé Rex Imagines

Rex pictures himself advising and educating Weed Atman, opening a dialogue in which they might examine American reality through what Rex thinks of as an Eastern lamp. The imagined exchange promises a meeting of political analysis and lived experience: Rex would supply intellectual direction, while Atman would become the person capable of turning that direction into action. In practice, Atman says little. At a meeting of the newly formed ADHOC committee that evening, he evades the work of political discussion, distracted by rock and roll broadcasting at overwhelming volume from XERB.

The contrast between Rex’s expectation and Atman’s inattention does not immediately end the relationship. Rex gets Weed Atman into what appears to be the movement’s emerging leadership. The gathering remains festive late into the night, and the political community around them grows into a small crescent-shaped region. Its cheerfulness is described not as despair or arrogance but as relief after what has happened before. Atman’s ability to lead people toward safety has given him a public role; Rex’s hopes help place him inside a developing political structure. Yet their first mismatch is already visible: Rex wants a thinker and revolutionary exemplar, while Atman has been swept into leadership through circumstance and does not perform the intellectual part Rex expects.

Political Violence and the Failing Mentorship

As the political situation darkens, Weed Atman’s account of resistance changes. He once argued that, because those in power cared chiefly about their own lives, humanitarians should attack what the regime valued most: money and property. Later, he warns that taking up a rifle will only lead the state to answer with a machine gun, and that a machine gun will bring rocket launchers. The change in his position registers exhaustion and dwindling hope. He still preaches a revolution with a human face, but he snaps at people and then apologizes; his strain has become difficult to miss, even as the students keep coming to Rex’s house in groups.

Rex, meanwhile, is preparing to go to Paris and contact what remains of the Vietnamese section of the Quarta Internazionale. Weed Atman tells him the effort will fail, arguing that Rex’s Anglo-Saxon identity will make it impossible for the exiles to trust him. Rex rejects the racial assumption and answers sharply. The reversal matters: Rex, once deferential toward his protégé, now treats him as someone who has disappointed his expectations. He had wanted more reflection and less immersion in daily life from Weed Atman; instead, Rex sees Atman as too absorbed in immediate circumstances to pursue the larger cause he had imagined they might share.

Sacrifice and Diverging Destinies

Rex understands revolution as a progressive discipline of renunciation. In his account, commitment begins with giving up drugs and tobacco, then alcohol and sweets, and eventually sleep, lovers, sex, and even private habits. As the enemy’s attention tightens, the revolutionary must also surrender privacy, freedom of movement, and access to money, with prison and a life stripped of comfort waiting as further costs. This is Rex’s demanding measure of seriousness: political conviction should reorganize ordinary life, not remain an idea alongside it.

Weed Atman finds this vision pessimistic. Rex counters that he cannot see Atman giving anything up, and the disagreement makes their separation legible to both of them. It is not presented as a sudden break so much as recognition that their futures are moving apart. Rex’s own attachment to his red Porsche 911, which he calls Bruno, adds a revealing counterpoint to his doctrine. He treats the car as a beloved possession and confidante, knows the round-the-clock car washes across four counties, and has slept beneath it using a toolbox as a pillow. The narrative gives this attachment an almost intimate intensity even as Rex describes revolutionary life as a sequence of renunciations. The contrast does not erase his commitment, but it makes visible the distance between his austere ideal and the material attachments that also shape him.

The relationship therefore ends not with a single rupture but with incompatible standards of political life. Rex wants Weed Atman to become the disciplined, reflective revolutionary he has been waiting to meet; Weed Atman cannot or will not fulfill that projected role. Atman’s growing weariness and tactical pessimism separate him from Rex’s faith in sacrifice and distant revolutionary possibility. Their former bond remains consequential because Rex helped place Atman among the movement’s leaders, but the hoped-for mentorship cannot hold once each man sees the other as failing the cause in a different way.