Rat (newspaper)

Rat Subterranean News, New York's second major underground newspaper, was created in March 1968, primarily by editor Jeff Shero,[1] Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who moved up from Austin, Texas, where they had been involved in The Rag.

Its notoriety grew further when two staff members (one of which was star reporter Jane Alpert) were arrested in connection with a series of non-lethal bombings of corporate offices and military targets in late 1969.

While the East Village Other, published a few blocks away, represented the countercultural "establishment" with its relatively relaxed culture-oriented content, Rat embodied the raging far-left politics of the late Sixties.

Among the memorable contents were original contributions from William S. Burroughs,[3] an interview with Kurt Vonnegut, and insightful front-line reports on the Weather Underground's seizure of SDS written by Shero and others.

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.

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.

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

obviously though that isn't a naked chick peering at you, gun belt around her neck, rifle in her arms, and garbage can by our side; that's our art director doing his thing on the model — which is really what this newspaper is all about anyway.

"[6] This comment is made in reference to the cover of the April 5–18, 1968 issue, credited to Elliot Landy, featuring the head and torso of a naked woman with a drawing of an armed rat across her body.

[2] It is 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.

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."

[13][14] This book will allow the reader to relive that turbulent period and will have special sections on Woodstock, the takeover of Columbia University and the Trial of the Chicago Eight that resulted from the demonstrations during the Democratic Convention there in 1968.