A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  December 13

  On the one hand the calls for “closure,” “finality” and national unity. On the other, Justice John Paul Stevens’s bitter summation: “In the interest of finality, however, the majority [of the US Supreme Court] effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent, and are therefore legal votes under [Florida] state law, but were for some reason rejected by the ballot-counting machines … Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law.”

  Part 2

  2001

  January 18

  JoAnn was recently traveling in a limo from Baltimore to a town in West Virginia and fell into conversation with the driver, who related some of his ferryings to and fro of various bigwigs. One of these was Hillary Clinton. “An ornery woman,” the driver commented. “And what a mouth on her!”

  The driver went on to describe an occasion on which he was driving the First Lady and a couple of her female friends through a poor area of Washington, DC. They passed a beggar, and as they did so the First Lady expressed her disgust for the mendicant, adding “He wouldn’t be a bum if he had a piece of ass.” The driver was able to shed no light on how or why she had arrived at this conclusion, stunned as he was by the coarse nature of her observations. Then they passed two young black women with babies. “There go two welfare cases. They make me sick. They’re too lazy to work,” said Senator Clinton, champion of mothers and children everywhere.

  January 28

  Attending the annual Texas Monthly bash, George W. was asked what he and Bill Clinton had talked about in their White House photo op. George W. described how he had asked Clinton why Al Gore was taking his defeat with such poor grace. “It’s been eight years,” Clinton genially replied, “and we still haven’t figured out Al.” Bill added hastily: “But he’s been a great Vice-President.”

  February 5

  Oklahomans are selective in their grief after a mass killing. They took about eighty years even to make official acknowledgement of the scores of dead blacks slaughtered in the Tulsa race riots, while fiercely denying reparations. Nor is the Oklahoma City site a simple memorial. Funded by us taxpayers it offers an Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. But if Oklahomans refuse to confront McVeigh’s motives and rationale, what credentials can their Institute have for any preventive strategies?

  There’s something ghoulish about the way Oklahomans are remembering their 168, from the repellent architecture and commemorative furniture of the site, to the icky blather about “survivors” and “closure,” to the nature of this supposed “closure,” focused on killing more people (whether those on death row for whose denial of habeas corpus rights they fiercely lobbied in the passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act), or McVeigh, whose jury they entertained as though it was a victorious football team, and whose execution they have been drawing lots to attend.

  There are plenty of references in the Memorial literature to Oklahoma City as part of the American heartland. From that heartland have gone forth across the world Oklahoma lads who have, in government service, dropped bombs, gone on terror missions like Bob Kerrey’s, participated in dreadful campaigns of extermination. Now, if they were to visit the Memorial, would not a survivor of one of those missions, a Vietnamese or a Salvadoran say, perhaps feel that some expression of empathy with other acts of terror was in order? Face it, there are plenty of “survivors” around the world, bereft of their parents, brothers, sisters, kids, because some Oklahoman kitted out in one of the national uniforms pressed the button, pulled the trigger, lit the fuse.

  But no, the Memorial specifically offers a definition derived from USC Title II Section 265 F(A) of terrorism as “politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups … Note definition excludes irrational acts, purely criminal and economic activities or acts committed by nation states.”

  McVeigh made some of these points, and to say that he has the better of the argument with the Oklahoma Memorial is not in the least to apologize for what I described as his evil act, it’s to say that the Memorial offered me kitsch rather than dignified and considered sorrow.

  February 15

  Bill Clinton now proposes to establish an office in Harlem, on 125th Street, scarce more than a few stone throws away from where Gore delivers homilies to journalism students in Columbia University. Each has found his appropriate setting: the defeated veep pouring banalities about journalism and politics into the ears of ambitious high fliers already sending their résumés and clips to the New York Times; Clinton the moral reprobate fleeing a blizzard of criticism for auctioning a pardon to a billionaire crook by setting up shop among the poorer folk, rolling out a real-estate boom in the area.

  February 18

  Late last week a senior pollster in Clinton’s inner circle spotted a journalistic acquaintance in a Georgetown supermarket and pinned him against his shopping cart with a vibrant diatribe against Gore.

  How, the pollster hissed, can we explain that Gore was unable to run on the Clinton economy, unable to mention millions of jobs created through the Clinton ’90s? She answered her own question. Because to do so would have meant mentioning Clinton’s name and Gore couldn’t bring himself to do that.

  Why not? The answer, the pollster said, went far back before the Lewinsky affair that so troubled Al and Tipper. It seems that Al has always felt that it was he who actually won the 1992 election, bailing Bill out of all his problems over draft-dodging and Gennifer Flowers. Through Clinton’s two terms Al’s conviction that he rather than Bill should by rights by sitting in the Oval Office throbbed painfully in his psyche. Result: he never spoke to the boss and couldn’t bear to ask him to help in those last desperate campaign days.

  March 3

  A few weeks ago I found myself at a small theater in SoHo, attending what had been billed to me as a recreation of Weimar and the world of Sally Bowles. This same Sally Bowles, as first created in a short story by Christopher Isherwood, then in I Am a Camera, a stage version that transmuted into Cabaret, was based on Jean Ross, my father’s second wife, a charming woman. Naturally, I’ve always taken an interest in the fictional versions of her time in Berlin.

  The production in SoHo turned out to have nothing to do with Berlin and everything to do with Giuliani, since the strippers ousted from gainful employment in their usual premises were regrouping under the banner of Art. In fact it was a big relief not to listen to pastiche songs in the manner of Kurt Weill. It was the occasion of the much-heralded snow storm that menaced New York the day of George Bush’s inauguration, so the audience of six was heavily outnumbered by the strippers. The acts were okay, though not particularly rousing. The star of the evening didn’t take off so much as a petticoat, being a magician who, since we’re on the subject of Weill, looked slightly like Lotte Lenya in her cameo appearance as the KGB officer in From Russia With Love. She ogled the sparse audience gloriously as she bumbled her way through her tricks.

  Jean Ross was a gentle, cultivated and very beautiful woman, not a bit like the vulgar vamp displayed by Lisa Minnelli. Jean died before her time at the age of sixty-two. Her daughter Sarah, my half sister, wrote wonderful detective stories under the name Sarah Caudwell: among them The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, Thus Was Adonis Murdered, and, posthumously published, The Sibyl in Her Grave. Before she turned to crime Sarah was a barrister, and a very good one. She used to negotiate my contracts with Verso and I’d pay her by taking her to lunch at the Ritz. As in any other venue she’d light up her pipe, then when waiters rushed up to protest, fling the thing into her handbag, from which smoke would soon begin to wreathe our table.

  Sarah felt strongly about Isherwood’s use of her mother, and wrote a piece about it in the British weekly, the New Statesman, in the mid-1980s.
Her mother Jean, she wrote, “never liked Goodbye to Berlin, nor felt a sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modeled on one of Isherwood’s male friends. (His homosexuality could not at that time be openly admitted.)” Sarah’s point was that Isherwood, supposedly so avant-garde, was actually very conventional:

  The convention does not permit an attractive young woman to have much in the way of intellectual accomplishments, and Isherwood follows it loyally. There is nothing in his portrait of Sally to suggest that she might have had any genuine ability as an actress, still less as a writer. My mother, on the other hand, was at least talented enough as an actress to be cast as Anitra in Max Reinhardt’s production of Peer Gynt and competent enough as a writer to earn her living, not long afterwards, as a scenario-writer and journalist.

  Above all, the convention requires that a woman must be either virtuous (in the sexual sense) or a tart. So Sally, who is plainly not virtuous, must be a tart. To depend for a living on providing sexual pleasure, whether or not in the context of marriage, seemed to [Jean] the ultimate denial of freedom and emancipation. The idea so deeply repelled her that she simply could not, I think, have been attracted to a man who was rich, or allied herself permanently to anyone less incorrigibly impecunious than my father. She did not see the question as one of personal morality, but as a political one.

  The pipe smoking did in Sarah in the end, presumably causing the cancer in her esophagus that killed her at the age of sixty, last year. I knew her best at Oxford in the early ’60s where she intrigued successfully to have women admitted to the Oxford Union. She was always exclaiming about so-and-so’s “wonderful profile,” pursuing dons with this particular asset. One don was known for watching television and Sarah, amid the ashes of her love, sent him this verse:

  I cast aside my modesty, I laid aside my shame

  And on my knees I offered love—Or something much the same.

  You brushed my powder from your sleeve, with elegant precision

  And murmured: “Conversation is killing television.”

  March 8

  In intelligence committee rooms on Capitol Hill and in briefing sessions in the FBI, CIA, and other redoubts of the national security establishment, the air now quivers with gloomy assessments of the secrets “compromised” by the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused of working for the Russians since 1985.

  If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working for the US, some of whom were then executed. Among many other feats he allegedly ratted on “an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States” which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He trundled documents by the cartload to “dead drops” in various suburbs around Washington, DC, often within a few minutes’ walk from his house.

  It’s amusing to listen to the US counter-intelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack of “tradecraft” in using the same drop week after week. These are the same counter-intelligence officials who remained incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of empty drawers in their TOP SECRET filing cabinets, all contents removed on a daily basis by Ames and Hanssen who deemed the use of copying machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later calculated, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be fifteen to twenty feet high. Hanssen was slack about “tradecraft” because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery was. The only risk he couldn’t accurately assess was the one that brought him down, betrayal by a Russian official privy to the material he was sending to Moscow.

  April 5

  Gallup, NM—Drive across the United States, mostly on Interstate 40, and you have plenty of time to listen to the radio. Even more time than usual if, to take my own situation, you’re in a 1976 Ford 350 one-ton, plowing along at 50 mph. By day I listen to FM.

  Bunked down at night, there’s some choice on the motels’ cable systems, all the way from C-SPAN to pay-as-you-snooze filth, though there’s much less of that than there used to be, or maybe you have to go to a Marriott or kindred high-end place to get it. By contrast the choice on daytime radio, FM or AM, is indeed a vast wasteland, far more bleak than the high plains of Texas and New Mexico I’ve been looking at for the past couple of days.

  It’s awful. Even the religious stuff has gone to the dogs. I remember twenty years ago making the same drive through the bible belt and you’d hear crazed preachers raving in tongues. These days hell has gone to love. Christian radio is so warm and fuzzy you’d think you were listening to Terry Gross. By any measure, and you don’t need to drive along I-40 to find this out, radio in this country is in ghastly shape.

  Since the 1996 Telecommunications “Reform” Act, conceived in darkness and signed in stealth, the situation has got even worse. Twenty, thirty years ago broadcasters could own only a dozen stations nationwide and no more than two in any single market. Today the company Clear Channel alone owns more than 800 stations pumping out identical muck in all states. Since 1996 there’s been a colossal shake-out. Small broadcasters can no longer hack it. Two or three companies with eight stations each control each market. Bob McChesney cites an industry publication as saying that the amount of advertising is up to eighteen minutes per hour, with these commercials separated by the same endless, golden oldies. On I-40 in Tennessee alone I listened to “Help!” at least sixteen times.

  April 10

  So far as rape is concerned, because of the rape factories more conventionally known as the US prison system, there are estimates that twice as many men as women are raped in the US each year. A Human Rights Watch report in April of this year cited a December 2000 Prison Journal study based on a survey of inmates in seven men’s prison facilities in four states.

  The results showed that 21 percent of the inmates had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced sexual contact since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their facilities. A 1996 study of the Nebraska prison system produced similar findings, with 22 percent of male inmates reporting that they had been pressured or forced to have sexual contact against their will while incarcerated. Of these, more than 50 percent had submitted to forced anal sex at least once. Extrapolating these findings to the national level gives a total of at least 140,000 inmates who have been raped.

  May 8

  Liberals have massed to defend Bob Kerrey, usually by saying that he was just a grunt following orders. In the Los Angeles Times, Bob Scheer announced that Kerrey is “a good man” and that the fellow who should be in the dock is Robert McNamara, who wasn’t even Secretary of Defense when Kerrey lined up those women and babies in Thanh Phong and had his unit of SEALs machine-gun them at a range of ten feet.

  On Fox, Christopher Hitchens, implacable foe of the war criminal Kissinger, had similar kind words for Kerrey:

  COLMES: What’s your view on Bob Kerrey?

  HITCHENS: Of Bob Kerrey? Well, he’s my president, in fact, since I teach at the New School, and I think he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t have made that bad a president. I know him slightly. I like him very much. But look, none of the people he killed were raped. None of them were dismembered. None of them were tortured. None of them were mutilated, had their ears cut off. He never referred to them as gooks or slopes or afterwards. So … for one day’s work in a free-fire zone in the Mekong Delta, it was nothing like as bad as most days.

  Why does Scheer say Kerrey is a “good” man and Hitchens confide to the Fox audience that “I like him very much”? There’s far more evidence to say “Bob Kerrey is an evil man.” His political career offers meager evidence to back any plea that Kerrey improved the human condition and if we are to say that he is a good man solely because he voted against the war on Iraq, then we have to call Sam Nunn “good” too, and we doubt that even Scheer would want to do that.

  Kerrey’s an admitted war criminal.


  Just listen to his disgusting disclosures to Dan Rather in 60 Minutes II, Monday night:

  RATHER: If in fact it did happen. If there was an old man, an old woman and three children being killed. Was it or was it not within the rules of engagement for you and your men as you understood it, if necessary, to kill those people?

  KERREY: Yes, again, I don’t know how you’re gonna cut this tape, but I don’t have any doubt that the people that we killed were at the very least sympathetic to the Viet Cong. And at the very most, were supporting their efforts to kill us.

  RATHER: Old men, women and children.

  KERREY: Yes, I mean, the Viet Cong, in a guerrilla war, the people that get caught in the middle are the civilians. And the Viet Cong were a thousand percent more ruthless than any standard operating procedure that any American GI or Navy SEAL had.

  Last month you didn’t know that Kerrey had left a ditchful of civilians behind him and accepted a medal for an action that read—officially phrased—21 VC KIA (BC). That means twenty-one Viet Cong, killed in action (body count). So—a liar as well as a killer, since he knew the figures were falsified. This month you do know. So perhaps by the watercooler or in the corridor we hear: “Oh hi Bob! Shit happens, right?”

  June 10

  What happened to trout? Of all the farm fed fish they’re the most tasteless. Order one in a restaurant these days and you get something tasting like blotting paper. It was different once.