Trashing the Public

Trial By Tom Hayden Holt, 168 pp., $4.95 How many more orthodox versions of the Chicago conspiracy trial are we to be trashed with? How can any intelligent person read Tom Hayden’s with other than a yawn? For anything approaching thought in the pages of this brave revolutionary (he boasts of spitting on an arresting officer—wow!) is so perfectly puerile, and indeed degenerate, that it can surely only engage sophomore City dropouts, as well, of course, as the excitable New York rubbishing scene. Having just returned from a 15,000-mile trip into the West and Southwest I guarantee that the average American in those parts, and others, is not going to have the foggiest clue as to who half the names, importantly paraded across these pages, are. (Renault Robinson? Stew Albert?) On finishing the book, or cry-baby diatribe, I really received the impression that Tom Hayden seriously imagines he exists.

He does so, of course, in some country “where murderous bullets were unleashed against tender white skin” and “even middle-class while children would no longer be safe from the paranoid wrath of the older, entrenched generation” (dig that even). Everything is “repressive,” especially any decent behavior and consideration for others, and everyone except those conspiring to cross state lines to riot is “paranoid.” The unpara-noid author contends that in this country of his mind “special task forces have been established in the Justice Department to go after the Panthers and other groups,” and that “the Panthers held in jails across America today are no different from prisoners held in Santo Domingo, Saigon, or any other center of the American empire.”

GW

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Geoffrey Wagner

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Trial By Tom Hayden Holt, 168 pp., $4.95 How many more orthodox versions of the Chicago conspiracy trial are we to be trashed with? How can any intelligent person read Tom Hayden’s with other than a yawn? For anything approaching thought in the pages of this brave revolutionary (he boasts of spitting on an arresting officer—wow!) is so perfectly puerile, and indeed degenerate, that it can surely only engage sophomore City dropouts, as well, of course, as the excitable New York rubbishing scene. Having just returned from a 15,000-mile trip into the West and Southwest I guarantee that the average American in those parts, and others, is not going to have the foggiest clue as to who half the names, importantly paraded across these pages, are. (Renault Robinson? Stew Albert?) On finishing the book, or cry-baby diatribe, I really received the impression that Tom Hayden seriously imagines he exists.

He does so, of course, in some country “where murderous bullets were unleashed against tender white skin” and “even middle-class while children would no longer be safe from the paranoid wrath of the older, entrenched generation” (dig that even). Everything is “repressive,” especially any decent behavior and consideration for others, and everyone except those conspiring to cross state lines to riot is “paranoid.” The unpara-noid author contends that in this country of his mind “special task forces have been established in the Justice Department to go after the Panthers and other groups,” and that “the Panthers held in jails across America today are no different from prisoners held in Santo Domingo, Saigon, or any other center of the American empire.”