Defiance: A Radical Review #1, selected and edited by Dotson Rader (Paper Library, 300 pp., $1.25).
Did you know that we live in a society that can bribe Supreme Court Justices? Jack Newfield knows it and ever so much more. About the poor students, for instance, whose “movement is now faced with serious repression by the Nixon Administration.” What on earth can one do with a country whose opinion polls show that Nixon is “more popular than ever. Ditto Agnew and Billy Graham.” For shame. But Nixon will get his comeuppance, Newfield allows, because the President is busy “mind-f-king those steelworkers and farmers and Korean veterans.” Athletic Dick Nixon; we remember him well. Newfield sets the scholarly tone, after which Tom Seligson gives us the hot poop on high school revolutionaries. Then come Frank Michel’s gems of New Left poetry, e.g., “Word Transformation”: “Agnew/ ague/ googoo.” Almost beats “Lighght.” Julius Lester’s chiaroscuro differentiation of Cleaver and Carmichael follows, just behind Marge Percy on chick-lib, editor Rader’s latest sacrifice on the altar of
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