Gov't Inspected Meat
Brudnoy, David
Rader's Nadir Gov't Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things Dotson Rader McKay, $5.95 Mr. Dotson Rader is a very personable twenty-seven-year-old who confesses, or boasts, that "the...
...It's all pretty rough stuff, pretty powerfully written, and pretty low from a self-proclaimed friend of "the people...
...He believes that America has a muddled conception of the true nature of masculinity, which he sees indentified in this society with toughness leading unto violence...
...Like Dotson, like Vicki...
...use sex - any kind will do - as a tool both for humiliation and expiation (humiliation of those who do not match up to their expectations of what "true patriots" should be...
...David McKay, 1968), clever and well put, if rather standard new Left balderdash...
...That's Rader's analysis...
...David Brudnoy Mr...
...On Revolutionary Violence" concerns, kind of, the glories of violence as recounted by a guy having a hard time succeeding with a succession of girls who spend their lucky time in bed with Dotson turning on to thoughts of violence instead of Dotson...
...State violence has entered the social fabric," led by "old lady Nixon-the New Left never minds a bit of ad persona m sexual innuendo-and so "true patriots" must join the Resistance against the Silent Majority which runs our "fascistic," "pig-dominated," "murderous" "Amerika...
...Rader's own contribution to #1, "Qn Revolutionary Violence," is probably the best-written article in a generally silly book whose other contributors include Julius Lester, Jack Newfield, Nat Hentoff, Sol Yurick, Gerard Malanga, Tom Seligson, and a few other nouveau (and not so new) gauchistes...
...Collective guilt - you remember that - leads whites to crave sex with Negroes...
...But the corrective he suggests is neither correct nor beautiful...
...as a program for action, it is repugnant...
...Brudnoy is a cosmopolitan residing in Boston...
...The day of "one would think" and "it is certainly obvious" now a thing of the past, at least among younger writers, those, that is, who've stopped trying to sound like G. K. Chesterton...
...He is right, of course, to the degree that some people see it that way and act upon that assumption...
...Among the young ones, the whites that is (there are some significant young Negro critics with whom we have to contend as well), Rader is the best writer, increasingly growing in stature among the Left...
...He writes in the very fashionable egoistic mode (of which, mea enlpa, I'm also guilty), which evaluates everything from a personal stance...
...Rader and I recently had at each other on a Boston television show to which he had come in search of buyers for his new novel, of which more anon...
...The question of "sexism" in America is deserving of attention...
...Inspected Meat is the first-person narrative of "Angel" )Dotson himself...
...Well, after establishing his credentials as a stud of sorts, Dotson gets into it, the Revolution, that is...
...He is an opponent we would ignore at our peril, one from whom we'll hear much in coming years, from the lecture platform, in journals (he writes also in Esquire), on television, in books - that is, we'll hear much from him if he doesn't frag himself some night planting bombs to destroy M-I-C (Military-Industrial-Complex, if there's any doubt...
...in other ways, more than a trifle idiotic...
...But Dotson is anything but gentle on paper...
...Angel" identifies Virtue with Tough Sex with Militance with Savagery...
...but at least it's predictable...
...The older leftists, of course, are another story...
...The excesses of the Women's Liberation harridans, the comical outlandishness of some of the Gay Liberation antics, and the current fad for analyzing "sexism" has obscured for more sober minds the reality of the problem in America...
...Why...
...In some ways, America's sex mores are ugly...
...That was one of the catchier phrases in his first book, I Ain't Marchin' Anymore...
...A former hustler and SDS screamie who's made it big, very very big, as essayist, contributing editor and reviewer (Evergreen Review), and- anthologizer of New Left fulminations, Dotson Rader is worth watching, definitely worth following closely...
...Dotson knows: "To bring the war home...(to) spread violence...over the body of America, paste it across the American consciousness until America...chokes on death and cries Enough...
...We aren't told) whose childhood Negro playmate gets killed and then mutilated by rednecks...
...no, invites rape by Negroes would be more accurate...
...Rader descends to his nadir, however, not in that essay but in his new novel, Gov't...
...Smash the State...
...Rader's name, for all I know, may have been concocted by a computer, programmed to print-out something that would connote all sorts of very solid, heavy things and be remembered easily...
...It's time the democratic left got off its ass and joined the Revolution," he pontificates, meaningit's time they got out and spread a little damage around...
...Rader recently became editor of a New Left journal scheduled to appear quarterly in paperback form...
...That's the "revolutionary cheer" that Dotson Rader is so cheerful about in his essay...
...Rader deserves commendation for ridiculing some of our sex mores, although as a fiction writer he has grossly exaggerated them, parodying them as often as correctly describing them...
...It's been done before...
...by the time spring rolls around, #2 will have hit the stands - it's scheduled for March...
...Rader plumps for the V-S-C (Violence-Sex-Complex...
...He concludes his essay in Defiance #1 by citing Abbie Hoffman's suggestion that Americans be required to eat the bodies of the dead civilians in Vietnam...
...Gov't Inspected Meat is better-grade pornography, awfully good in descriptive passages, awfully clever throughout, and simply awful in the pro-grammatic part of the political message underlying the plot...
...They do have a limited vocabulary, these chaps...
...Dotson Rader is a very personable twenty-seven-year-old who confesses, or boasts, that "the experience of violence, at least for me, creates sexual hunger...
...Death to the Capitalists...
...She kills Dotson's passion because instead of getting down to business, she raps about violence, "which she admitted she dug...
...He does it with an occasional girl, thinks about it with a lot of men, and isn't quite sure (nor is the reader) about his real sexual bent, even at the end when he splits from New York after a night of debauchery, and heads out to San Francisco...
...Rader writes an ugly story...
...Off the Institutions...
...As I write this, only one issue of Defiance: A Radical Review (Paperback Library, 300 pp., $1.25, Fall, 1970) has been put out for the children to lay down their pennies for...
...I found him personally likeable, friendly, gentle in private, well-motivated at heart...
...Gov't Inspected Meat is an excellent novel...
...Like Vicki, who gets her kicks watching the Bank of America at Isla Vista burn...
...He is a regular contributor to Ideas, National Review, New Guard and Counterpoint...
...Rader is personally charming, exceptionally bright, almost frighteningly talented...
...sadomasochistic literature is hardly an invention of the past decade...
...Whereas Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and various others of their playpen buddies are fundamentally Borscht Belt vaudevillians playing games - dangerous games, I grant - they are, in the end, so outrageous that they are more comedians than serious critics...
...It is, instead, a rather clever and not so subtle aspect of a developing New Left strategy, which is this: overturn all our American values in order to overthrow an "evil, racist society...
...Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things on the cover of which-gotta sell them books, right- sprawls a man's chest, in living color, being caressed by two hands, one white, one Negro...
...destroy America by corrupting her virtues...
...In his piece, Mr...
...But Rader does it exceptionally well...
...Angel" wends his way to Fun City and becomes a male prostitute, very unsure of his manhood, very vulnerable...
...But Rader's alternative to "sexism" is grotesque...
...expiation of the guilt that is supposed to reside in all of us - the 'We all killed Martin Luther King" syndrome...
...Angel" is put off by Negroes who aren't militant and revolutionary enough for him, who are old NAACP-type Uncle Toms even if young in years...
...But Dotson Rader's name will be increasingly heard, and his writings should be recognized by conservatives for what they are...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
