Fair Game

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The Thickening Plot Persons with a nose for conspiracy will by now have sniffed out two ominous developments in America's publishing industry 1. It is being devoured by capitalist oligarchs Alfred Knopf is a subsidiary of Random House, which is a subsidiary of rca Holt, Rinehart & Winston belongs not to Winston or Rinehart or Holt but to the Columbia Broadcasting System The Times Mirror Co owns, among plenty of other things, World Publishing, New American Library and Popular Science And as this is written, Simon & Schuster, having narrowly escaped being processed by Hunt Enterprises, the tomato paste people, is being corralled by Kinney, Inc, the parkmg-lot people 2. American publishing is in thrall to revolutionaries The catalogues are alive with Yippies, Panthers and their publicists Of a dozen books put out on the Chicago conspiracy trial, not one extols Judge Hoffman Of a hundred books on education, not one praises the existing schools In tens of thousands of pages on Vietnam, the reader has to search hard for a couple of nice words about Lyndon Johnson Surely, this amounts to a consensus of the disaffected So the evidence is in—conspiracy is afoot, both the right foot and the left foot How has it happened, this sinister accommodation between the Establishment and 'the rebels9 Why don't the masters of the corporations use their presses to promote the glories of capitalism instead of the complaints of people who want to blow them up...

...Why don't the revolutionists give the finger to the system and publish exclusively in Rat and Screw"* Well, to begin with, the executives of our great companies are notoriously beyond ideology An H L Hunt is a rarity, a remnant of another age Company men have no illusions about the power of the written word Why should they, having advanced so high by having read so little'' If put to the rack, they could not state their philosophy or their politics or their view of society Yes, they know what they like—and that's about all As for writers, and nonwriters who have lately been admitted to the calling by virtue of their race, ethnic origin or sex, they write and publish as and where they are able That is the nature of the impulse If it occurs to them that they are helping to sustain institutions they abhor, they can reply that they are using The System to undo The System And, indeed, in these situations, we are often hard put to determine who is exploiting whom The central figure in our conspiracy, however, is neither writer nor owner, but the book-house editor, the marriage broker between commerce and ideology...

...As servant of the corporation, with an affinity to arts and letters, he would be under a considerable strain in making sense of his life were he not fundamentally frivolous Like all those whose professions consist of catching a fashion before it peaks and riding it for all it is worth, but not an instant longer, he cannot afford to be serious That way lies failure and neurosis The race crisis, the ecological crisis, the classroom crisis—all feed his career Give an editor a problem, and he'll give you back a red-hot crisis Cnsis-mongenng is an old editorial art The end achievement of the great publishing conspiracy may be seen in the remarkable case of Charles A Reich, author of The Greening of America This earnest attack on the big-government-big-corporation mentality first appeared in the New Yorker, our national showcase for materialism, and was then published by Random House, a component of rca which is a component of the military-in-dustrial-mass-media complex Now, one must assume from what he writes that Reich hates rca and despises the New Yorker—yet there he is, caught in flagrant contractual alliance with them But the accommodation may not be so peculiar In the Consciousness III phase that Reich celebrates, no decent person will have anything to do with either organization, until that time, though, a piophet is safer entrusting the publication ot his work to Con-II types Free spurts make sloppy proofreaders...