We will always have Nixon to kick around.

[Mark Kohut]

" He [Philip Roth] turned to political satire, he said, because of a single word: Nixon. He was proud to say that his New Deal Democratic family had considered Nixon a crook some twenty years before the rest of the world caught on. When, in a single week in April 1971, the President granted leniency to Lt. William Calley, one day after Calley's conviction for the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and then released an anti-abortion statement proclaiming his ""personal belief in the sanctity of human life," Roth could not resist writing an op-Ed piece, which THE NEW YORK TIMES rejected as "tasteless". Barbara Sproul, living in Woodstock  with him at the time, tells me that she remembers him banging away on the typewriter and saying over and over, " Tasteless, I'll show them tasteless! " IN a mere three months, he had completed the full length anti- Nixon satire, OUR GANG. 

Roth sez he had a very civil conversation with the Pres of Random House, who were a little worried about publishing it, about the place of satire in a culture. He brought up Swift, " who you should always bring up when you want to publish something disgusting" 

From ROTH UNBOUND. 


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l