TODAY’S COUNTERCULTURE is even more decentralized and participatory than its famous 1960s predecessor. From science fiction fandom it has borrowed the "fanzine" (a small-circulation photocopy magazine) and the "apa" (or Amateur Press Association, an entirely reader-written compilation). Thanks to the ubiquity and cheapness of self-service xerography, even fourteen-year-olds can lead alternative lives by mail, often pseudonymously. For added security, post office boxes start at twenty-two dollars a year. No need for fine arts training when the morning paper is replete with images - startling enough - to be combined in offbeat ways. Add a poem or polemic or maybe just an ad for a garage-band performance as text, and for three or four dollars an uncensored poster goes up in a hundred places around town. Only somewhat more expensively, self-produced music is recorded on cassettes (as are spoken letters) and distributed by the maker or by small independent outlets. Everything is done by mail, including "mail art," in which collage artists and others bypass the galleries by putting their work on postcards. For lack of a better word I call them "marginals." The implication that they are lumpenproletarian vagabonds or declassed intellectuals holds true for quite a few; that is, some are temp workers, welfare bums, petty criminals, career students, or some combination of the above. If they hold down real jobs, these tend to be lowly -- file clerk, fry cook, bookstore cashier - although the ones who’ve gotten into computers may do tolerably well. The youngest of them are high school students still living with their parents (but several are runaways), There are dropouts from academia, law, and, in at least one case, real estate. A few have parlayed their psychological problems into Social Security disability checks. They number more alcoholics than vegetarians, are mostly white and in background middle class, and their common denominator is aversion to lifelong subservience to a boss, a preference for time over money.

Like the counterculture of the sixties, the current version tends to be raunchy, argumentative, impassioned, and embattled. It is in part a youth culture, but not monolithic in its tastes. Marginals, for example, variously prefer punk, "industrial" music, or the high-tech cacophony that some call "anti-musik."

Those involved in punk often act as its loyal opposition, alert to tendencies toward capture by the dominant culture of the kind that, they think, devitalized rock music in the seventies.

THIS, IN FACT, is the usual relation of the marginals to adjacent dissident or avant-garde scenes. Thus most are familiar with anarchism, and quite a few espouse it; but others dismiss it as just another constraining ideology or criticize its obsolescence. If they once read science fiction, as many have, they don't read it now or they criticize its current condition. Some of them are, or were, libertarians, but of a kind to make the respectably bourgeois Libertarian Party cringe-people like Samuel Edward Konkin III, whose revolutionary "agorism," or pure free-market anarchism, is supposed to abolish and liberate the working class; or Erwin S. Strauss, Jr., editor of the political "apa" The Connection, who takes the self-help individualism of Americans to its ultimate in books like Basement Nukes and How to Start Your Own Country.

Older marginals often have histories of political activism, Rev. Crowbar, publisher of the lively bimonthly tabloid Popular Reality, is a peace-movement veteran who once ran for office. John Zerzan, who chronicles the "revolt against work" and other indicia of unarticulated rebellion, is a former union official. Possibly the oldest marginal, who was already boasting he was the world's oldest rock 'n' roll star when he formed The Fugs in the sixties, is Tuli Kupferberg. In the seventies he was born again as a satiric cartoonist, self-published in newsprint booklets; today he frolics with youngsters who might be his grandchildren.

Except for the libertarians, who usually have conservative backgrounds, the marginals, insofar as they are political, are left-oriented or used to be; but few are not highly critical of existing left organizations and ideologies, whether liberal or Leninist. Their criticism, however, is shut out of the established "alternative" media, sometimes because the leftists are too lazy to counter novel assaults from other than right-wing quarters, sometimes because they don't want it known that there is anyone more radical than they are. Crude or combative polemics may also fall afoul of New Age-influenced conventions prescribing a positive approach, but in many cases the message, not the manner, is what disturbs. Antinuclear publications haven't rushed to print Mycall Sunanda's essay, written in their own argot, calling on antinuclear activists to acknowledge and express publicly the violent feelings they bottle up in the interest of nonviolence as an ideology. Nor have antiwar activists welcomed "The Enchantment of Nuclear Destruction," a piece by AntiAuthoritarians Anonymous which begins: "The possibility of total destruction through nuclear,, war corresponds to a condition of ruin everywhere that makes such destruction attractive." The peace movement, narrowly framing its objective as mere survival, has nothing to say to those who are enchanted by annihilation precisely because they are sick of an everyday life already reduced to mere survival.

WITHIN THE MARGINALS' OWN MEDIA, disputation is vigorous, and the range of permissible opinion is wide. Arcane or even abhorrent topics, from space colonization to Holocaust Revisionism, are taken in stride. Some of it is puerile: the apa FreFenZine has lately hosted a raging controversy among verbose nitwits as to whether or not it's sexist to hate Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. But if much of a fanzine like Inside Joke is written by teenagers, including several in their late twenties, it has also published fictions which would have raised the red blood cell count of many an anemic literary journal. In this hothouse atmosphere, it is possible to grow rapidly in creative power. In a recent circular, a talented Knoxville marginal known as Revo reviews his accomplishments: "Have been making collages since 1979, 'zines since 1980, mail art since 1982, and tapes since 1984." Revo just turned twenty.

Though their graffiti is everywhere, the marginals have so far escaped popular notice except when on rare occasions the media treat them as pranksters or hooligans. But this may be about to change; sub-underground artifacts are starting to surface almost in spite of themselves. Detroit's Black & Red, whose animating spirit Fredy Perlman recently passed away, has published a series of well-made books and pamphlets culminating in Perlman's own poetic condemnation of the course of civilization, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, probing the nature of class society. Neither/Nor Press has slowly but relentlessly published a magazine, Beatniks From Space, and several books. Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous recently self-published, with supplies in part stolen from employers, the best of four years of its posters in Adventures in Subversion. Flipside, a major punk magazine, is publishing a book by John Crawford, whose distinctively drawn satiric cartoons (mostly about "Baboon Dooley, Rock Critic"), appearing in hundreds of fanzines, have made him the R. Crumb of the eighties. Book-

length translations in Yugoslavia. Loompanics Unlimited, a two-fisted marginals' story in itself, has published the (by marginals' standards) famous religious satire Principia Discordia. One of its co-authors, who twenty-five years ago befriended a fellow Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, may be the only man in America with a book in print who sleeps under a bridge. Other Loompanics books by marginals, including L.A. Rollins' Biercean Lucifer's Lexicon and a collection of my own polemics and satires, are in the works.

Marginals are not, in general, joiners. Their antipathy to organization (a major bone of contention with the established left) arises partly from their crusty individualism, partly from their interpretation of the modern history of radical movements (with the USSR as Exhibit A), but importantly also from the raw fact of geographical dispersion. The sixties counterculture was based in college towns and in the poor neighborhoods adjoining college campuses in big cities. The eighties anti's may also be found in those places (notably Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Eugene, Madison, Austin) but, with no draft, they aren't concentrated there, or anywhere. That they often turn up in the boondocks may be just as well for their cause, which appeals least to jaded cosmopolitans. This also minimizes the dangers of co-optation. Marginals are only too familiar with prior oppositional movements which, at this end of the line, took like losers. They'd rather provoke a "failure" like the Paris Commune than a "success" like the Bolshevik coup d'etat.

The reclusiveness of marginals does not necessarily establish their impotence. "Posterists" (as they are called in Mike Gunderloy's indispensable quarterly directory Factsheet Five) have made a splash in a number of places. For example, when a marginal who calls himself the Multi-notionalist was caught putting posters under windshields in Junction City, Missouri, and the police threatened to prosecute him for "sedition," the marginals' international went into overdrive, deluging the local paper with letters (some were printed) extolling anarchy and maligning the police. The case was dropped.

"The Falwell Game," which has been noticed by the mass media, is a marginals' jape. Innumerable marginals' ’zines published instructions on how to waste the Moral Majority's money by calling its toll-free number and hanging up or, better yet, signing up as Faith Partners to get free Falwell Bibles. Later some gay papers picked up on the Game and Jerry Falwell's threatening response was directed toward them. Even if the gays drop it, the sub-underground, which is as fat beneath Falwell's notice as the earliest mammals were to the lordly dinosaurs, will keep it going.

The marginals, xerox zealots that they are, do not always welcome their nascent notoriety. They fear that, by encoding a fixed text onto a physical object, publishing separates writer and reader when what both want is to find each other in community. And even if the marginals' messages aren't inherently falsified by written publication, they may be trivialized by the media. Ali example is Zack Replica's Dial-aRumor, a daily telephone tabloid of' absurdist news from an alternative Carrollian-Kafkaesque universe containing the Iacocca Khomeini, the Chez Guevara restaurant in Berkeley (reinvented or borrowed years later by the Farley comic strip), the Trilateral Foundation for Secular Humanism, and much more. Several newspaper stories (even a mention in USA Today) took the edge off this serious satiric project by doing cutesy human-interest stories about Replica because he is quadriplegic.

GERRY REITH (1959-1984), a Connecticut farm boy, might have been the quintessential marginal. In his teens he was placed in a mental hospital, I don't know why; it was an experience from which he never fully recovered. Soon afterwards he became a Bakuninist/ Kropotkinist anarchist and got busted for antinuclear activism at Seabrook in New Hampshire. But the anti-nuclear left of the late seventies wasn't enough to satisfy his hunger for liberty, and he became a (laissez-faire) libertarian, influenced by popularizations of the Austrian-school economics of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Over the years in which he absorbed and engaged other, avant-garde influences-dada, surrealism, situationism-he never completely sundered his ties to the libertarians. He was, at his death, Vice-Chairman and newsletter editor of the minuscule Wyoming Libertarian Party, although he had announced his withdrawal from its (clectorally oriented) activities.

Reith went west for college (unfinished, I believe) and passed the last six years of his life in Sheridan, Wyoming - the second largest city in the state but, with 18,000 people, no cosmopolis. Working the night shift as a motel desk clerk, he saw a different world than his neighbors did. They liked him anyway, in spite of those unusual ideas. Around 1981 he started sending out feelers by mail, and he found his own kind. His small disposable income went for postage, books, magazine subscriptions, and photocopying (well, also for liquor and methedrine, if the truth be known). In those days he resided in a flophouse with Veterans Hospital outpatients and other down-and-outs whom he befriended (reading aloud to them from Don Quixote, for instance). He halfheartedly practiced with Sheridan's only, stillborn rock band, but he spent more time with the few leftists and libertarians the town contained. With one of the latter, who as "Sun Tzu" later contributed to Reith's book Neutron Gun (Neither/Nor Press, 1985), he commenced his first original political project: the Word of Truth Ministry.

Sharing a Menckenesque hatted of small-town piety, the two produced a series of short pamphlets which, taking the Bible deadpan, proved that the answer to questions like "Did God Ordain the Holocaust?" and "Was Satan Behind the American Revolution? " was "yes." Sun Tzu, a preacher's kid, did the actual writing, but Reith as corresponding secretary had to answer for it when the faithful wrote in to complain. They may have done their work too well, since a group of neo-Nazis in Georgia reportedly reprinted the Holocaust pamphlet. The person to complain about this, a punk teen named Carly Sommerstein, ended up as a Neutron Gun contributor, so the joke was perhaps on the Nazis. But the point is, from Day One, Reith was playing with fire.

Soon he was writing every sort of thing, to everyone: posters, hundreds of letters, political tracts, fictions, parables, murky Burroughsian narratives, book reviews, a few poems. First letters, then articles and tales went to apa's, fanzines, and the unorthodox, abuser-friendly fringes of the anarchist and libertarian movements that he did much to connect in a larger antiauthoritarian dialogue. And he had surprising success smuggling his ideas (by way of letters to the editor) into the local dailies, which seem to have tolerated him as a Wild West individualist eccentric, which of course he was. The police were less receptive, though, to his glue-and-poster rampages down Main Street, and they even arrested him once for throwing snowballs at the Dairy Queen. Plainclothes surveillance of an April 15 anti-tax picket thrown up by the Libertarian Party roused his paranoid fears, although not to the pitch they reached when he once complained that his boss was using "Masonic mind-control techniques" on him.

KOOKS ARE AN ACQUIRED TASTE not shared by many, but Reith was more than just a crackpot. His honesty and his rapidly developing literary prowess earned him a central place in a transcontinental postal salon which brought together wayward poets, bare-knuckle artists, and meta-leftist radicals in the early eighties. A voracious reader, he became a teacher, brokering Mishima and Pynchon to the politicos, workers' councils to the libertarian right, and irreligion to the general public. Not all his syntheses came off, but the conventional wisdom was such obvious folly that Reith looked elsewhere, anywhere, for pieces to the puzzle it came down to this. How could the cause of freedom (which in any of the many formulations

familiar to him had few adherents) triumph except as the imposition of an enlightened elite and thus, in victory, defeat itself? One of his unpublished stories describes a Political Science class project which engineers a successful social revolution by turning gift-giving to such competitive advantage that the Fortune 500 and their ally the state are bought out. Reith's Neutron Gun stories are possibly more realistic in regarding a few fortunately situated terrorists and assassins as the catalysts of a cleansing cataclysm, but his nonfiction opinion was that such efforts - by the anarchist Direct Action bombers in Canada, for instance - were counter-productive. What did that leave?

It left education -just what he'd been doing for three years, with no pay-off in sight. His students, unlike those of his fictitious Poli. Sci. professor, had their own pre-emptive problems, and were scattered far and wide. Reith never met most of his closest associates but he figured, reasonably enough, that if there were a viable strategy for social change, he would have gotten wind of it. A late text, "Notes on the Impossibility of Writing Your Way Into Anarchy," says that he used to enthuse over a mailboxfull of anarchism but now it bored and bothered him. For Reith, this was like announcing suicide, although the suicide note he finally did write was more succinct. His enlarged ability to interpret the world in no way increased his power to change it.

A failed love affair deepened his depression. His book Neutron Gun seemed endlessly delayed by the publisher's financial and other problems. (it didn't appear till a year after his death.) Finally, the postal service which had been his life-line to another world, albeit only a world of ideas, became the instrument of his destruction. A correspondent's letter was "accidentally" misdelivered to the local police, then turned over to the FBI. Apparently the casual use of words like "anarchism" was enough to activate the G-Men of the High Plains, and they set about questioning Reith's neighbors. When he called up the agency, they refused to hand over the mail and added that "we know all about you." It was a bunch of bull and Reith, in his last letters, said so, but he'd been driven over the brink. His note said: "I have to leave, or die." In the event, he died, he shot himself. Reportedly he'd toted up the pro's and con's of life and death and, finding them evenly balanced, flipped a coin.

From Goethe's fictional Werther to the not much more realistic punk bad boy Sid Vicious, the suicide of alienated youths has become a cliche. Reith is representative of the marginals not in the way he went out (I know of only one other suicide in the marginals' milieu) but rather in the range and intensity of his interests. His writing, though at times tendentious, at its best is crisp and vigorous, depicting a disorderly universe through vignettes of stylized confrontation. The strain of humor which infuses much marginals' work is, in his case, mordant rather than manic; and on topics away from the gut issues of freedom and truth he could relax and be charming. A good example is his --book review? operator's manual?--"Quixote: How to Use," which appears in John Bennett's anthology A Good Day to Die (Vagabond Press, 1985). But for Neutron Gun -half of it by him, half by his pen-pal partisans-Reith deliberately chose stories which directly forced political questions into the open. He wanted to settle accounts with modernism, liberalism, religion, consumer society, Marxism, et. al. because they stood in the way of what he wanted from life. He hoped his book would be the Uncle 7bm's Cabin of the eighties. He'd tried everything else, or so he thought.

Jack Saunders says that, while no great book goes unpublished, many great books go unwritten. Reith may be the author of some of those books. The book he did assemble is a promise as well as an unsettling ensemble of portents. As an anthology it introduces the American equivalent of the samizdat press. It discloses a level of discontent which is deeper than that of the issue-oriented sixties (with all due respect); there is more water under the bridge. But how to go from alienation to action? That was the question that stumped Gerry Reith.