Books The Open Conspiracy

Stackpile Books: 256 pages; $6.95

IF YOU'RE willing to pay four bucks to see Woodstock at a Sack theatre, then you will certainly grab the opportunity to give up seven bucks for Ethel Grodzins Romm's extensive collection of spicy excerpts from the underground press.

Few Woodstock participants actually want their mud-soaked experience unfolding in leaden colar in a tightly ushered, red-carpeted, air-conditioned movie house which charges anti-people prices. Similarly, few persons who have been closely involved with the underground press can really appreciate Mrs. Romm's commentary which supplements this collection of cartoons, articles, and photographs. The Open Conspiracy however, is not directed at these intensely partisan initiates so much as it is aimed at the silent, confused legions of Middle America.

In fact, Mrs. Romm seems to view her anthology as a test of the fragile open-mindedness of silent majoritarians who are dangerously close to slipping from misunderstanding into repression. In her preface, she tells her readers that much of her salacious "actual raw material" will offend them and asks them to be tolerant:

In confronting this street corner press, so much of it thumbing its nose at me, I had to remind myself again and again of the distinction between expression and action. I don't imagine it will be much easier for others. Bearing in mind that it is no test of citizenship to abide only the man who agrees with us, the reader can test his own allegiance to the First Amendment by computing how much of the anthologized material to follow he is willing to defend. He will, as well, learn which disturbs him the least- the obscenity, the pornography or the politics.

Its purpose couched in those terms. The Open Conspiracy, despite its honest presentation of a variety of underground literature, cannot appeal to any self-concerned radical. Still, in spite of the fact that it is straightforwardly facile, Mrs. Romm's commentary describes thoroughly- at times, sensationally- the development and growth of the radical movement during the past five years. Her smoothly flowing prose often becomes intensely descriptive, grappling momentarily with acutely perceptive insight. Describing the revolt against the technologized state for example, she notes Edmund Wilson's observation that "in times of social disorder literature becomes gothic." Thus, she writes, life is becoming macabre and grotesque as men sense frighteningly that their spell-binding super-technology, with its awesome unworking complexity, is rendering them helpless. And men, baffled by this technology, turn to cults- or what the Coop's book department has begun to categorize the "occult sciences."

"Put that way." Mrs. Romm writes, "Chicken Little was right. Impotent we all are. When fallible human thinking does not work, the solution is not to think harder. Western Man must finally return full circle to the glimmerings of primeval occult wisdom, to the time when men knew what to do when the sky was falling."

MRS. ROMM is extremely aware of tangential developments and concerns in her examination of the underground press, entertaining very diverse topics and historical issues which she relates to the growth of the underground press as a medium for the ideas of the counter-culture and a reinvigorated, youthful left.

If The Open Conspiracy aims at the great middle class, how well does it convey the feelings and thoughts of a burgeoning American radicalism?

Despite its offensiveness to her. Mrs. Romm defends the movement and street corner press as a legitimate, though rash, expression of deeply felt emotion-"reactions to an America that many of the nation's young feel has not lived up to the promises of their Sunday school sermons or their civies class lessons." To her the underground press is a symptom of a sick society a cancer-like attack on the American body politic. In other words, the underground press- "salacious, hilarious, outrageous, desperate, philosophical, didactic"- is a reactive phenomenon that reflects an ailing culture.

The many selections in the book divided into the categories of "the cultural scene" and "the political movement," reveal an amazing outpouring of angry creativity, blended with an indelicate melange of incisive wit. The phenomenal rise of a strident underground press that is growing despite intensive persecution in Washington, San Diego, and on countless army bases throughout the nation, provides one of the most intriguing stories in the history of the Movement. Coming at a time when many of the once-great micropolitan dailies are consolidating into huge monopolies that fabricate vast chains of syndicated pablum, the underground press is providing a growing and piquantly creative alternative for an increasingly vocal subculture. And the success of papers in such unlikely places as Richmond, Va., testifies that even the straight world is becoming interested in the counter-culture newspapers.

The underground press serves in many capacities. It incorporates the aesthetic and mystic potential of a flowering "hippie" civilization. It saves its readers from a dependence on the often depressively alien news biases of the establishment media, so that radicals can keep their ranks together with the stimulation of rhetoric and exhortation. And ever since the creation of the Liberation News Service in 1967, the Movement press has shown increasing signs of permanency and coordination.

The underground press itself has been a fleeting and sometimes unstable form of communication, as community, high school, black, G.I., hippie, and radical papers are born and die with amazing frequency. New printing methods- notably the "coldtype" use of the offset press- have encouraged the proliferation of what seems to Mrs. Romm to be an unattractively vibrant genre of protest journalism.

Yet, as Mrs. Romm notes, the most powerful push for a new form of journalism has been a growing political alienation to a stagnant, wasteful society. Historians will puzzle for years on the strangely a-typical developments among the children of a well-fed, money-obsessed American bourgeoisie. The Open Conspiracy, despite the obvious limitations of its gentle bias, and occasional over-sensationalization of its material, provides an interesting addition to a limited number of books on an exceedingly fascinating subject.