The subject of Tom Hayden as a student leader in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] comes up. “I really like Tom,” says Rudd, between bites. “The only thing I don’t understand about Tom is how he could get divorced from Jane Fonda.” He laughs.

The world may be no less in need of remaking than it ever was, but Rudd is apparently a lot quicker to see the humor in things these days. He’s in town from his home in Albuquerque, N.M., to help promote the documentary “The Weather Underground,” a film in which–for lack of a better word–he stars.

At 56, he’s a bit more roly-poly than in his revolutionary prime when he cut a dashing and charismatic, if somewhat implacable, figure as he angrily decried “the system” and called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

Is he at all nostalgic for his days as an American revolutionary back in the late ’60s and early ’70s? “No, not at all,” he answers. “Or, well, only to the extent that it was such a lovely feeling to think that the world was changing … to think that revolutionary violence could put an end to state terror.”

Rudd was drawn, he says, “to the romance of the outlaw revolutionary, but remember, we’re talking about a 20-year-old guy. I’m not a violent person. I think I was posturing. I wanted to be tough.”

In 1989, he ran across “The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terror,” a book by the feminist scholar Robin Morgan. “She’s anti-left and anti-male,” says Rudd, “but she analyzes an archetype that goes back 5,000 years–the male warrior who kills or dies. If he kills and wins, that’s great. If he dies, he’s martyred and that leads to liberation also. That archetype comes down to us through Jesus Christ and Che Guevara. It’s a male, a macho archetype. And in 1989, I got it–I was part of the cult of Che.”

One of the main leaders of the movement against the war in Vietnam wanted to be–of all things–a soldier. “I wanted to be a soldier who fights for equality and justice in the world. It was crazy, but not that crazy.” He repeats this, his voice rising. “It’s not that crazy!”

Perhaps, it is suggested, he could have just played football. “That probably would have been better!” he exclaims. “Angry young males! It’s normal! Al Qaeda, the Marines–that’s young males!” Rudd is now a committed pacifist. He believes, for example, that the Palestinians would be much further along if they had pursued a nonviolent strategy. “They should challenge the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] to a snowball fight in Jerusalem. What country in the world is more susceptible to moral shame than Israel?”

His views on Vietnam are far more qualified than they once were. “I still believe that war was a national struggle against American domination,” he says. “But in retrospect, I wouldn’t have backed the NLF [North Vietnam’s National Liberation Front] so strongly and said ‘Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.’ There are issues of Stalinism there. I’ve been introduced to Vietnamese Buddhists who were the third force. It was immature to have picked that one side when no ideology would have been better.”

The hypocrisy of ending state terror with homegrown terror actually hit him “pretty early on.” As a result, he says, he separated himself from the Weather Underground in 1970, though he stayed in hiding for another seven years, giving himself up in New York in September 1977. While on the lam, he lived the working-class life he had mainly theorized about beforehand, laboring in factories, as a landscaper and on the docks in San Francisco. “I was doing what people did with minimal amounts of ID–and, I might add, a minimal amount of skills.” He now teaches math–or, as he says, “fractions”–at a community college in New Mexico.

In the film, he describes feeling a mixture of shame and guilt as he surveys his past, but does he also feel any pride? After all, the United States did eventually leave Vietnam. “I feel about the same way every other schnook walking down the street feels,” he says. “I’ve done some pretty good things and some pretty terrible things.”

He feels especially badly about the Weather Underground’s campaign of bombing, of course, though he acknowledges that it was largely symbolic. “Everything was an act of theater,” he says. Apparently, it still is. As if on cue, an autograph seeker comes to the table, asking Rudd to sign the program from the documentary. “We recognized you from the movie,” the filmgoer says. “You were great.” Rudd laughs, thanks the man, and signs.