A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Even adding in the bouts of phone sex it certainly doesn’t add up to a fulfilling relationship. The sparsity of sexual fulfillment makes a previous White House incumbent, Warren Harding, look like Casanova by comparison. Nor was Bill Clinton’s comportment entirely gross. He was tempted; infatuated. He told Monica he’d had hundreds of affairs in his youth but that now, after forty, he had been trying to commit himself more strongly to his marriage.

  They exchanged gifts. In the words of the report, “He told her he enjoyed talking to her. She recalled him saying that the two of them were emotive and full of fire and she made him feel young.” In the end she turns into the spoiled girl from hell, storms the White House, spurns jobs secured for her by the President and Vernon Jordan. And of course she led him badly astray by swearing that she’d never, ever told a soul.

  Editorial moralists have sprung to their high horses. The New York Times spoke of reading the Starr report with “a heavy heart and churning emotions.” This is like saying one reads Judith Krantz with a heavy heart and churning emotions. The dalliance—“affair” is far too serious a word—between Clinton and Lewinsky simply won’t sustain the burden of moral reproof being placed upon it. It’s like treating Edward Lear as if he was Homer.

  It’s clear enough now that Kenneth Starr did Clinton a huge favor by confining himself so relentlessly to the President’s sex life. Not even a whiff from the stagnant marsh of Whitewater riffles his pages. A report which is designed to evict a president by means of impeachment surely has to have some urgency to it—some sense of great misdeeds of state, the boding darkness of Macbeth. You can’t send round to Congress a report in the style of Midsummer Night’s Dream and expect those folks in Congress to muster the seriousness of statesmen and stateswomen pondering high crimes and misdemeanors. It just won’t wash.

  As things are, the American people once again seem to be displaying themselves as mature adults, endowed with a sense of realism, unlike the opinion-formers who have been howling as though the President molested a child in its pram.

  On February 19, 1996, so Independent Counsel Starr discloses to us, the President was closeted with Monica in the Oval Office, telling her they could still meet but that there could be no more canoodling. In the midst of this tête-à-tête he took a call from one of the Fanjul family, powerful Florida sugar barons who at the time were battling the idea that they should have to pay any money to compensate for the damage to the Everglades attendant upon their sugar-growing activities in Florida. Even as Clinton was talking to Fanjul, Al Gore was agitating for such a levy. By the end of the conversation we know there was one, and can surmise there were two, satisfied parties. The Sugar Baron and the President, each man efficiently serviced.

  But Ken Starr wasn’t writing about this happily consummated relationship, which is why Americans won’t take this report seriously. They understand the difference between petty moral dereliction and political corruption.

  October 7

  Driving through Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and out across the Northern Plains, it’s clear enough, in jokes and derision at the blue noses, that the cavortings of Bill and Monica and the maneuvers of the Republicans and Democrats have been good for America. It’s been marvelously cathartic for people to have had to talk so long and so loudly about blowjobs, orgasms, infidelity and privacy. Nothing has been more ridiculous than the whinings of parents about how to talk to the kids about it all. Kids who’ve watched forty-five deaths a day on American TV their whole lives are experiencing a marked elevation in the quality of their cultural consumption by listening to accounts of Bill and Monica’s sexual encounters, such as they were. (Ironically, it’s always been Hillary-think that kids need special counseling when some big untoward event occurs, like an eleven-year-old blowing away some classmates.)

  One thing is certain, as the network correspondents like to say at the wrap-up point. The car mechanics of America are for Bill. The ’64 Chrysler New Yorker I’m driving developed serious gas feed and overheating problems at 5 p.m. in central Indiana the afternoon I was due to give a talk about my and Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Whiteout, in a bookstore in Chicago, at 7 p.m. Rodney Sheets, owner and manager of One Stop Auto in Columbia City, flung himself into the emergency, but still had time to deride at some length Henry Hyde. This was Quayle country and at intervals Rodney would chat with several of his children who were running in and out of the shop. So here was a devoted parent and advocate of family values, possibly a former Quayle voter, but still thinking the uproar is ridiculous.

  It was the same in Milwaukee, where Peggy and Dennis of Lake Shore Mobil took up the work Rodney had not had time to finish. If Bill’s future was in their hands, Bill would be safe. A word about mechanics. In the late 1940s and early 1950s many Americans got screwed around by car salesmen. The odium carried over to mechanics. Theirs is not the most trusted profession in the charts, albeit not nearly so low as journalists and politicians. But as the owner of ten old cars from the 1950s and 1960s, all of which at various times I’ve driven around or across the country, and in all of which I’ve been beleaguered by various grave setbacks and crises, I’ve only had about four unsatisfactory encounters with mechanics in which I could say I’ve been seriously hard done by. This yields an “I-was-screwed” statistic of a fraction of one percent. Set this against the risk factor associated with encounters with academic people and the entertainment industry and you will agree, mechanics are as honest a bunch as the unpaid staffers of the Catholic Worker, which is saying a great deal.

  October 10

  Fall is always the best time to meander around the country. Across the Midwest the corn is being harvested. The browns and golds of stubble and still-standing stalks warm those vast flat or slightly undulating vistas. In Chicago, we stayed in Danny Postell’s and Tom Petralis’s nice apartment in Rodgers Park—$600 a month, a pleasant mixed ethnic neighborhood, small lakeside park and public beach available for dips in Lake Michigan, which I took. We looked at the map. The decision, as always, is whether to head southwest along old 66, or straight west through Iowa and Nebraska, or take the northerly routes through the Dakotas. This time we aim to go along upper Missouri, right under the Canadian border, maybe go through Glacier National Park. The old Lewis and Clark route, more or less. (One of the local papers had a story about new efforts to find their camp sites. It seems that some of the men on the Lewis and Clark expedition had syphilis, which they treated with mercury. The mercury hangs around in the soil, and so now the researchers run around with sensors and locate the sites.)

  About 100 miles along 94 from Minneapolis we came to Sauk Centre, and espied a sign for the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, which he offered to the world as Gopher Prairie in Main Street, the novel published in 1920 that made his name.

  Fortunately the Info Center has not yet found the money to transform itself into an interactive learning experience in the modern manner, replete with audio-visual aids and the indispensable computers. In fact, the “center” is an old-fashioned small museum with fading photographs and photostats of Lewis’s working manuscripts. Some of these were detailed plans Lewis drew of his fictional towns, plus his real-estate maps of the inhabitants’ precise locations and their family histories. Every time he visited a graveyard, he’d take down names for future use.

  The Center, unsurprisingly, presented Lewis as a Man of Letters, gravely posed in tweeds. The only indication that he might have been somewhat of a rip-snorter was a photograph of Marcella Powers, the young aspiring actress with whom Lewis began a five-year relationship in 1939, when she was eighteen and he was 54 and still married to Dorothy Thompson. From her later letters, Marcella, who died in 1975, seems to have been a lively and intelligent person. My father, who met Lewis in Berlin in the late 1920s, recalled “Red” Lewis as a boozer of formidable proportions.

  I’d forgotten how good a writer Lewis was. “This is America,” he wrote in the epigraph to Main Street. “Main Stre
et is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.”

  To give some longer sense of perspective, the Interpretive Center also has an interesting photograph of a Viking Altar stone into which Norsemen, wandering across the prairie, drilled four holes to support a canopy under which a priest had celebrated mass in 1362. Bishop George Spettz rededicated the stone in 1975.

  We left the Interpretive Center and headed for Sauk Centre’s greatest pride, Main Street, though the citizens were naturally furious when the novel was first published. Now the banner on Main Street says, “A View of the Past, A Vision of the Future.”

  October 15

  ORWELL’S SHITLIST

  Dear Mr. Anderson,

  In Alexander Cockburn’s recent frenzied attack on George Orwell and his now infamous shitlist, he quotes Peter Davison as saying that Cockburn’s father was Orwell’s “political foe.” The following might be of interest to those fans of the deadly ideological wars of the 1930s and 1940s.

  Cockburn’s father, Claud Cockburn, was a Communist who Graham Greene called one of “the two greatest journalists of the twentieth century.” Unfortunately, the one collection of his work that I’ve seen, Cockburn in Spain, doesn’t live up to this accolade. The book is a collection of Cockburn’s Spanish Civil War dispatches to the Communist Daily Worker. Here’s a taste:

  “The POUM, acting in cooperation with well-known criminal elements, and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organizations, planned, organized and led the attack in the rearguard, accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front at Bilbao.

  “In the past, the leaders of the POUM have frequently sought to deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People’s Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted murder against the government of the Soviet Union.”

  Note Claud Cockburn’s party line reference to the Moscow show trials.

  Orwell, of course, fought with the POUM. In his vivid and moving memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell responds to the Communist propaganda attacks, including some produced by Cockburn, directed against the POUM. Ironically, Orwell went to Spain with the intention of enlisting with a Communist unit. He still planned to join one until the POUM, which had been labeled Trotskyist by the Communists, was attacked in Barcelona and its leaders purged. Anyone interested in the details should read Homage to Catalonia in which Orwell refers to Claud Cockburn by his Daily Worker pseudonym, Frank Pitcairn.

  Interestingly, Alexander Cockburn, in The Golden Age Is in Us, quotes a section of a review of a book about Roger Hollis in which his father, Claud, figures prominently. Roger Hollis, if memory serves, was the head of MI5, roughly the British equivalent of the FBI, and is now suspected of being a long time Soviet mole. It appears, according to the review, that Claud Cockburn was under the protection of Hollis. Cockburn and Hollis were at Oxford together, but Hollis concealed their association and kept Cockburn’s file in his personal safe. And Hollis has been accused of refusing to provide evidence to wartime witch-hunters who wanted to prosecute. Hollis is also accused with involvement in furthering Cockburn’s “activities.”

  Was Claud Cockburn a Soviet agent? Did he dutifully name names to his superiors? If so, what happened to their sorry asses? Perhaps, when Claud Cockburn’s Russian, American and British Intelligence files are released, it may be time for another round of righteous indignation.

  As far as I know, Orwell never had a secret agenda. His political views and his political loyalties were out in the open. I suspect that Orwell would have given the same assessments of the same people to anyone who asked.

  Also, according to Cockburn, “the list displays Orwell as suspicious of Jews, homosexuals, and blacks …” This is an interesting statement coming from a journalist whose Mossad file is probably as thick as Noam Chomsky’s.

  Moreover, when I sent an earlier version of this letter to the AVA in September, 1996, it wasn’t printed because Alexander Cockburn was unable to respond. Cockburn, it seems, was busy fag-baiting in the Dakotas. As I recall, Cockburn outed some Senatorial candidate who Cockburn later took partial credit for defeating. But, of course, Cockburn was only battling hypocrisy.

  Sincerely yours,

  Jock Penn, San Rafael

  Alexander Cockburn replies: Anyone who wants to test Graham Greene’s high estimate of my father’s work should read his memoirs, issued under various titles including A Discord of Trumpets, I Claud, In Time of Trouble, and Cockburn Sums Up. A Discord of Trumpets shows up from time to time in second-hand bookstores here, or on internet sites. Cockburn in Spain was a reissue of Reporter in Spain, my father’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War for the Daily Worker, written under the name Frank Pitcairn. There were good things in that collection, and stuff that reads badly now. It was done at great speed during the Spanish Civil War to rally popular support for the Loyalists, and sold in great numbers and translations around the world. He believed in the “treason trials” then. So did a lot of other people. Later, he ceased to believe in them. In 1946 he stopped working for the party. Unlike Orwell, he didn’t rush to squeal, secretly squeal, on his comrades to the British Secret Service.

  There’s enormous mythmaking about POUM and Spanish anarchism today. I don’t think my father, in hindsight, would particularly modify his views.

  Penn uses a passage from Golden Age very disingenuously. A friend of my father is describing, and deriding, the views of a right-wing nut, to the effect that Roger Hollis was a Soviet agent. Penn alludes to the views of the nut, views which were held by a particularly nasty bunch of ultra-right-wingers in the British intelligence establishment, but doesn’t disclose the context.

  I dimly remember some earlier, even more stupid letter from Penn. Perhaps I said it was too stupid to publish—not that this warning infallibly deters the mighty editor. I do remember with pride my excursion to South Dakota in 1996 to point out to the citizenry that Senator Larry Pressler was a hypocrite. The citizenry evidently agreed, in the only upset of a Republican Senator that year.

  I don’t understand the paragraph about the Mossad. Orwell certainly was suspicious of Jews, blacks and homosexuals. My father was a Communist agitator. No, he didn’t send Orwell-type lists to Moscow.

  October 16

  Hucksterism in the name of “good causes” is now as embedded in the liberal life and mindstyle as hookworm in the foot of an African child. Today, at the level of symbolic action, a person of progressive temperament can live in a bubble-bath of moral self-satisfaction from dawn to dusk.

  Take that morning cup of coffee. Maybe it comes courtesy of the self-congratulatory Thanksgiving Coffee, or Equal Exchange, an outfit in Boston which, as its name suggests, claims it has smoothed out the inequitable wrinkles in the coffee trade between the Third World and the First.

  The coffee is perhaps consumed at a table made of choice hardwood certified as having been harvested under “sustainable” forest practices. The coffee machine is powered by “green electricity” offered by Working Assets. And who knows? The coffee pot was perhaps acquired with a Nation credit card.

  Take Equal Exchange. Here is a nonprofit in Massachusetts that makes the very big claim that it is rectifying the iniquities of First/Third World trade in coffee beans. “Feed your soul as well as your body,” the outfit’s ad proclaims in the New Yorker, raising the battle-standard of fairness. They buy “direct” from small farmers, they say, thus eliminating the middle man.

  No they haven’t. They’ve taken over the function of “conscience” middle man from the o
rdinary First World coffee brokers and there’s really very little evidence that the Third World growers, as opposed to the soul-fed coffee drinkers at First World tables, do better because Equal Exchange is doing the brokering. They buy from grower co-ops, Equal Exchange boasts. But so do ordinary First World coffee brokers, paying the same prices.

  But if Equal Exchange is having little or no impact on conditions of production in the Third World, it certainly is having an effect, a baneful one, on small local businesses across America. Equal Exchange flies a buyer from a First World co-op grocery store on a two-week jaunt to Costa Rica, courtesy of the American taxpayer. The group tours the coffee fincas and a good time is had by all. On return, the buyer might expand the coffee rack of Equal Exchange, with bins provided by Equal Exchange.

  This means less business for the small local roaster, local sales people, local distributors. Lo and behold, what do we have but the Conscience Industry’s equivalent of General Foods or Proctor and Gamble, with the nonprofit’s executives scarcely paying themselves starvation salaries.

  Start with the word “sustainable.” These days fund-raisers and grant-writers string it round each sentence like an adjectival fannypack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it’s a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.

  Working Assets’ offer of “green” power has been an astounding piece of effrontery, since the consumer has not the slightest way of knowing whether the electricity thus provided comes from solar or nuclear, or hydro or coal-burning generating stations. The Nation’s credit card offers a low interest charge, to be sure, but you’d better not be late with your payments.