Rat (newspaper) - Notable Contributions

Notable Contributions

Among the memorable contents were original contributions from William S. Burroughs, an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, and insightful front-line reports on the Weather Underground's seizure of SDS written by Shero and others. There were regular in-depth stories on the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican youth movement, and the Black Panthers - with a focus on New York's own Panther 21 terrorism trial, and well as news of the on-going sagas of Huey Newton, Afeni Shakur, and Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. Jane Alpert wrote on her own experiences in the notorious Women's House of Detention after she was arrested for involvement in the bombings. Like most underground papers, Rat shared articles through the Underground Press Syndicate, allowing regular coverage of distant events like the Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island — and of course, looming over everything, the Vietnam War.

While most pages of Rat serve as two-dimensional museums of its own era, its ecological writings are astonishingly far-sighted even now. The Apollo 11 moon landings were seen through a mirror, in a grand color centerfold, sponsored by the Sierra Club, headlined "Towards A More Moon-Like Earth" - elegantly written and designed, probably by Jerry Mander and/or David Brower and/or Paul Simon aka Paul Zmeiwski. . Coming hard on the heels of UPS reports from the bloody struggles over People's Park, this manifesto provided a radical planetary overview for the nascent ecology movement. As this came to Rat in the form of a paid advertisement from a national organization, it presumably appeared in several other papers at the same time. Further thoughts on this subject came from the famously ex-Marxist Murray Bookchin, a regular Rat contributor whose left-anarchist take on eco-politics anticipated (and influenced) the socially engaged anti-globalization movement that emerged in 1999. Some of his articles appeared under pseudonyms.

There may be only one item first published in Rat that has survived on the fringes of mainstream culture. This would be Robin Morgan's incandescent essay "Good-Bye to All That" (a title borrowed from Robert Graves), which appeared in the first women's issue, and is still available in anthologies of the finest feminist writings.

It's noteworthy that the percentage of the paper devoted to reporting would-be revolutionaries' warfare with the state actually increased following the women's takeover, as did a tendency toward hard-left politics and Maoist graphics. The fiery "Women's LibeRATion" was a far cry from the safely upward-mobile feminism associated with the National Organization for Women and Ms. magazine a few years later. Issues of workplace discrimination and sexual harassment were already a major concern, however. A poem about office work by Marge Piercy, Metamorphosis into Bureaucrat, appeared in the women's Rat of March 7, 1970, containing the lines "Swollen, heavy, rectangular/ I am about to be delivered / of a baby /zerox machine."

A list of notable contents is misleading, in its implication that Rat took itself seriously, and expected to be taken seriously. In fact, it didn't and wasn't. Rat's sense of humor lightened up, and subtly undermined, its often heavy political messages. Most of its better writings contained humor of their own - and any that didn't were likely reach the reader accompanied by inappropriate illustrations and irreverent headlines (in press-on letters that were always a bit askew). Despite the life-and-death urgency of its political stories, Rat's modest newsstand sales came largely from "straight" people looking for offbeat entertainment — and looking for sex.

Rat was published during a period of layout innovation and had a dramatic look of jumbled letters and strong imagery. Stat camera reproduction of paste-ups composed of often "swiped" graphic elements, and letraset type, were fast and affordable. Contributing designers included Van Howell and Joe Schenkman. This largely forgotten period of innovation in communication is remembered for its association with period (mainly punk) music graphics and concert flyers, and for many campus publications and activist flyers. It is somewhat similar to the later desktop publishing revolution.