A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  December 2

  Sir James Goldsmith made millions by getting out of the stock market in 1987 because he thought it was going to be announced that mosquitoes could carry AIDS. He thought this would cause worldwide panic and the stock market would collapse. Many a tycoon’s reputation for omniscience rest on faulty data.

  Back in the fall of 1987, there were indeed fears on this score. I wrote on August 22 of that year, a time when I was living in Key West: “People are worried about getting AIDS from mosquitoes. I’ve not heard of any authoritative conclusion either way. Watching the possibly lethal bugs buzz about makes one realize how people felt about mosquito noises in the heyday of yellow fever. I read somewhere recently that between 1819 and 1839 the British army had a death rate of 483 per thousand men on station in Sierra Leone.” Those lucky enough to possess a copy of The Golden Age Is in Us will find this entry on page five. I phoned my old friend Edward Jay Epstein that same day in August 1987 and told him the fears of Key West. Since Ed was a boon companion of Goldsmith’s he passed the word along and the tycoon acted with all due dispatch.

  1997

  January 3

  I see the word “underclass” a lot. On the issue of poverty here’s a bracing quote from Thomas Carlyle:

  One of the ominous characteristics of this reforming age, the Custom of addressing “The Poor,” as a permanent Class, assumed to consist ordinarily of the same individuals. Just as in Jamaica I might address myself to “the Negroes.” Now if this have a sound foundation in the fact, it assuredly marks a most deplorable State of Society. The Ideal of a Government is that which under the existing circumstances most effectually affords Security of the Possessors, Facility to the Acquirers, and Hope to all. Poverty, whatever can justify the designation of “the Poor” ought to be a transitional state—a state to which no man ought to admit himself to belong, tho’ he may find himself in it because he is passing thro’ it, in the effort to leave it. Poor men we must always have, till the Redemption is fulfilled, but The Poor, as consisting of the same individuals! O this is a sore accusation against any society! And to address an Individual as having his interest merged in his character as one of the Poor, his abiding interest! … The Poor can have, ought to have, one interest only—viz, to cease to be poor. But to call the man who by labor maintains himself under human conditions and comforts, who by labor procures himself what is needful for him and his essential affections a Pauper—to designate the sum total of such Laborers the Poor! O if this be not a foul misuse of words, if there be a ground in fact for it, it is in the same proportion a dire impeachment of both Church and State, such as would warrant a Revolution. For that Country must have a Canker at the Core.

  January 15

  Day of Repentance: The Salem witch trials took place in the spring of 1692. Ten girls, aged nine to seventeen, had met that winter in the house of Samuel Parris, pastor of the Salem Village Church. After learning palmistry and other crafts from Tituba, Parris’s West Indian slave, they accused Tituba and two old women of bewitching them.

  Hysteria spread rapidly. The trials began and when they were done, nineteen had been hanged and one pressed to death for refusing to plead.

  Four years passed, then the colonial legislative body of Massachusetts adopted a resolution calling for a Day of Repentance and fasting in memory of the victims. The bill was drafted by Judge Samuel Sewall, who had presided in the Salem trials, and who invoked “the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments.”

  This week there’s an echo ceremony in Salem, exactly 300 years after the first Day of Repentance. It’s been organized by Carol Hopkins of San Diego, who sat on a grand jury in that city a few years ago and realized the dreadful injustices being inflicted on innocent people in the “Satanic abuse hysteria” sweeping the country in the 1980s and the 1990s. Present in Salem this week are many of the people thrown into prison on the say-so of tots whose testimony was coerced and perverted by “therapists,” social workers and mountebanks.

  Bobby Fijnje will be there. He was held without bail in Florida for over a year when he was in his early teens, on the say-so of Janet Reno, at that time the state attorney of Dade County. Fijnje was ultimately acquitted as were others railroaded by Reno in her “crusade” against child abusers which gave her a national reputation. Kelly Michaels will be there. So will Peggy and Ray Buckey, victims of the infamous McMartin proceeding, the longest and most expensive trial in US history.

  On the night of January 13 a candlelit walk proceeds to Salem’s memorial to the witch trial victims. The 14th is the 300th anniversary of the Day of Repentance. These days, Hopkins says, the Salem-style persecutors don’t talk much about Satanic abuse in day-care centers, in fact, they’re keen not to raise it. They’ve moved on, to the “recovered memory” nonsense, and to “facilitated communication” (persuading autistic children they’ve been abused).

  January 22

  I’ve long since learned to expect little or nothing from an inaugural speech. It’s like looking for good prose on an insurance form. But Clinton’s bathos oozing from my radio last Monday was so oleose that I began to sit up and pay attention. It was useless. When I tried to take notes, my pen slithered off the page, as if it had grease on it. All I could inscribe was a formula phrase about hope and civility not being in government but in ourselves.

  We don’t need civility. We need civilization, which is something far different. The ancient Greeks were civilized. They had fiery debates, which were far from civil. The Melian dialogue, put by the historian Thucydides in the mouths of the Melians and the Athenians about to overwhelm them is one of the glories of the world. It is also an uncivil, harsh evocation of the political realities of imperial power.

  Bipartisanship is another fraud word, which reminds me of the anthropologist Laura Nader’s brilliant phrase which skewers both civility and bipartisanship: “coercive harmony,” meaning the notion that if you don’t button your lip, don’t fall in behind the limp standard of “bipartisanship” you are a nutty exceptionalist, best ignored or put onto a daily dose of Thorazine or Haldol.

  And how cozening a word is this “community,” with its agreeable intimations of the village, the meeting hall and the amiable ethic of all-for-one and one-for-all. But America is not a community. It is a nation encompassing faction, partisan interest, the powerful, the weak, the rich, the poor—with a future to be brokered out of the crucible of fierce antagonisms.

  Clinton’s sloppy, tired phrases limp through the reality of America like an obese Sunday jogger waddling down the road. He talks of challenges and of bridges, but the challenge of what, a bridge to where?

  A couple of days before the inaugural I was one of the speakers at a fund-raiser for Bear Lincoln, an Indian from the Round Valley reservation in Mendocino County, northern California, who is now facing death penalty charges brought by the Mendocino district attorney, arising out of a lethal exchange of gun fire on April 14, 1995, which left two Indians and one sheriff’s deputy dead. The circumstances are hazy in the extreme and the capital charges against Bear Lincoln outrageous.

  At the fund-raiser Tony Serra, Lincoln’s defense attorney, talked uncivilly, rudely, about the constitutional realities in America in 1997, which make it harder and harder for ordinary folk to be confident they will find any justice in the courtroom.

  Serra began with the separation of powers. Gone. No longer do judges have discretion in sentencing. The mandatory guidelines tie their hands, and force them to put someone away for ten years who they know deserves a year at most. With prosecutors framing charges to fit the guidelines, denying bail and then recruiting an army of snitches rewarded with cash or reduced charges or reduced prison time, what chance have accused persons got if they have the rashness to plead innocent?

  The last best hope of the accused, Serra went on, is the jury, and here too constitutional rights are on their way to the scrap heap. In California Governor Pete Wilson, malign in this as in all his political instincts, pushes
for majority verdicts. The cornerstone of the jury system is firstly the right to nullify—i.e., set the law aside if the jurors’ consciences require it—and second, the right of one juror to stand alone and prevail. Bring in majority verdicts: 10–2, 9–3, and it’s all over.

  The Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures? Virtually a dead letter, Serra said. I know this well enough, since every fall the California Highway Patrol men in Humboldt and Mendocino counties regard it as their right to stop and search every car or truck driven by persons they conceive, after a couple of glances, to be possibly involved in the marijuana business.

  Step by step we head into the police state, the most recent milestone being the incredible US Supreme Court decision that when imposing sentences judges can take into consideration charges on which the jury has found the accused innocent.

  These are the uncivil realities of our time.

  March 12

  Katharine Graham, empress of the Washington Post company, has had the pleasure of seeing her Personal History reviewed in grossly flattering terms by normally clear-eyed types such as Julia Reed and Nora Ephron. And even if Nora Ephron felt ties of friendship precluded anything but warm praise she could at least have hinted in her New York Times review that KG has moved rightward across the political spectrum over the years. Someone who was on good terms with Harry Bridges—the famous red dockworker union leader in San Francisco—in her youth and with Warren Buffett and Nancy Reagan in her mature years has most surely headed somewhere.

  The thing about the book that irked me was her cavalier treatment of Larry Stern, who gets a couple of brief mentions as a Post reporter. In fact Larry, who died at the age of fifty while jogging on Martha’s Vineyard, was a marvelous reporter and editor at the Post and contributed immensely to its strength in the 1980s when the Post made its reputation. These days, under the deadly editorship of Len Downey, it’s hidebound and dreary, which is exactly what I remember Larry predicting would happen, not long before he took that fatal jog in the late summer of 1979.

  The last noise linking Larry to the Washington Post building was that of breaking glass. After his death there was a big and emotional memorial up on the roof of the Post building. At its climax Ben Bradlee, still the editor, took his glass and threw it violently against the wall in a grand gesture of farewell. Hundreds of other people promptly did the same, and I remember KG looking on sourly as the mound of glass shards grew higher.

  At that same memorial I learned some new facts. Larry had once been on a boat with another Post reporter, George Lardner, and two girls, and had successfully proved that the ferry crossing between Edgartown and Chappaquiddick could be swum in darkness by journalists as well as Senators. And he invented the term “credibility gap.”

  I made some post-mortem trouble for him by writing an obit in which I said he “was not one of those pallidly objective souls who need a route map to get from a gas shortage to Exxon headquarters” and that he had been a Trotskyist in his hot youth. The reds-under-the-bed crowd seized on this as fresh evidence for their nutty theory that the Washington Post really was a radical conspiracy.

  March 19

  Hall’s wife patted the bed and instructed me to display the mutilation. Hillary exclaimed, “God!” and immediately began performing oral sex on me. Apparently aroused by the carving in my vagina, Hillary stood up and quickly peeled out her matronly nylon panties and pantyhose. Uninhibited despite a long day in the hot sun, she gasped, “Eat me, oh, god, eat me now.” I had no choice but to comply with her orders, and Bill Hall’s wife made no move to join me in my distasteful task. Hillary had resumed examining my hideous mutilation and performing oral sex on me when Bill Clinton walked in. Hillary lifted her head to ask, “How’d it go?”

  Clinton appeared totally unaffected by what he walked into, tossed his jacket on a chair and said, “It’s official. I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

  This excerpt is from what was billed late last year by its disseminators as “the hot book of the season,” Trance Formation of America through Mind Control, which lacks the simple punch of the old Olympia Press titles eager sixteen-year-olds like myself used to buy in Paris back in the late 1950s. Some were written by Akbar del Piombo, who was in fact a jolly New York Jew whose last name was Rubin, a good artist who needed to make ends meet.

  Trance Formation is—according to the bibliographic details on the fax—by Cathy O’Brien “with” Mark Phillips. As can be seen from the excerpt above, the authors have diligently conflated conspiracy and porn in a manner that is highly entertaining. You’ll also note that the aim is not to arouse the reader, but to make a political point about the Clintons, and this takes us back to the glory years of political pornography, which were during the French Revolution. There’s a good account by Lynn Hunt in the concluding chapter of the 1993 book she edited for Zone, called The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800.

  Between 1774 and 1788—the eve of the Revolution—the number of titles in the genre of political pornography rose steadily and, according to Hunt, took off after the Revolution burst in 1789. Les aristos were portrayed as impotent, diseased and of course debauched. The central figure was Marie Antoinette. Hunt describes one “very pornographic” pamphlet called L’Autrichienne en goguettes, i.e., the Austrian’s frolics. Marie is portrayed in embraces with her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois, and with her favorite, the Duchesse de Polignac.

  Hunt says that in these pornographic pamphlets the Queen was often depicted as a lesbian and that in them “sexual degeneration went hand in hand with political corruption. Counterpoised, most often only implicitly, to the degenerate aristocrat and the sodomitic priest of the ancient regime was the healthy love of the new patriots.”

  In my cousin’s house in Ireland there’s a portrait of Marie Antoinette done by an elderly Frenchman from memory, for my great grandmother. He’d been a pageboy at Versailles. Maybe he was Cherubin, though the portrait is dignified.

  I wonder if there was a spasm of political porn in England in the Thatcher years. Certainly many cherished sexual fantasies about her, mostly of an S/M variety. The late Pablo Escobar, of the Medellin cartel, once told his friend Mario Arango, who passed it on to my brother Andrew, that he thought Thatcher the most desirable woman in the world.

  March 26

  One of the more radical minds in America left us last week. Colonel John Boyd died in Florida at the age of seventy, and though the US Air Force honored him Thursday, March 20, with a funeral in Arlington, complete with guard and fly-past, there are doubtless many souls in the Pentagon relieved that so troublesome an intellect is no longer on active service.

  When people want to make a gesture toward military strategic thinking they usually come up with a couple of quotes from Sun Tzu or Von Clausewitz. Boyd’s was not a widely known name among the general public, but among theorists of conflict he was unrivalled. It is no exaggeration to set him on the plinth next to Sun Tzu.

  No one challenges received ideas without being an incendiary soul, and Boyd’s first sign of mutiny against the militarist tradition came in late 1945 in Japan. As an enlisted man in the occupying US forces Boyd became irked at the fact that his fellow conscripts had to sleep without blankets on the freezing floors of abandoned Japanese hangers, while their officers luxuriated in pleasant circumstances, indifferent to the condition of their men.

  With the tactical daring that was to characterize his career, Boyd led his fellows in burning down the hangars. Threatened with disciplinary retribution, he held up a copy of the Uniform Military Code, which he had taken the time to study, and pointed out that though he might be guilty of arson, the officers had breached one of the fundamental tenets of the Code, that they had to take care of their men. An embarrassed silence was followed by the dropping of all charges against Boyd and the subsequent provision of warm blankets.

  Boyd flew missions over Korea and here is where his ideas first
began to take form. As he pondered the reason for the better kill ratio of the American F-86 fighter plane over the theoretically superior Soviet MIG-15, it occurred to Boyd that the US plane’s advantage lay in the fact that the pilot had a far better field of vision from his cockpit, and that though the MIG-15 could perform discrete maneuvers more efficiently, the F-86 was superior in transitioning from one maneuver to the next.

  Thus germinated Boyd’s concept of the underlying patterns of conflict, and how the upper hand in any conflict could be obtained. Boyd summarized this in a mnemonic: OODA—or as he called it, the OODA loop, with the letters standing for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. Key here is the ability to run through the OODA loop, or a series of these, quicker than your foe.

  Boyd had noticed that as an opponent is continually outlooped he becomes progressively disoriented and eventually loses all ability to respond rationally. This loss was most vividly demonstrated by the fact that outlooped fighter pilots sometimes simply flew into the ground. When he was a fighter pilot instructor at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in the 1950s, Boyd, applying his own principles, became known as “40-Second Boyd,” by reason of the standing bet he had with any pilot that he could beat them in a mock dog fight in forty seconds or pay $40. He never lost.

  Put in these schematic terms, Boyd’s OODA loop might seem to be simply a commonsense precept, like many a military mnemonic. But the radical implications became apparent when Boyd applied the concept to the design of aircraft, which is where he began to tread on some sensitive toes. The military and its prime partners, the defense contractors, were mighty happy with the orthodoxy that a plane that was a faster, more heavily armed and more freighted with complex gadgetry was the proper weapon to procure. The more complex the plane, of course, the more contented were the arms builders, as they pocketed the taxpayers’ dollars.