A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Listen to the French writer, Jean Giono in La France à Table:

  Never with butter, never with almonds; that is not cooking, it is packaging. (It is, of course, understood that my recipes are not for all comers.) With the exception of truite en bleu nobody knows how to cook a trout. It is the most unfortunate fish on earth. If an atomic bomb destroyed the world tomorrow, the human race would vanish without ever having known the taste of a trout. Of course, I am no more talking of tank-bred trout than I would give a recipe for cooking a dog or a cat.

  So, a fine fat, or several fine fat, trout from the river, fresh (that goes without saying), gutted, scaled, etc.… A frying-pan previously rinsed out with flaming wine vinegar. Make this empty pan very hot. Into this very hot pan, a mixture of water and virgin olive oil (a claret glass of olive oil to 3 of water). Let it boil fast. Add a bouquet of thyme and nothing else whatsoever except 2 crushed juniper berries and some pepper.

  Reduce the mixture, and when there is nothing but a centimeter of fast boiling liquid left in the pan, put your fine fat, or several fine fat, trout gently into the liquid. Do not turn the fish over. Cover the pan and boil 1 minute, then 3 minutes very gently, and serve.

  This rapid boiling of oil and water is the way to make bouillabaisse, which is fast food, the way fish should always be. Get the mix boiling, just like Giono says, then throw in your firm fleshed fish like bass or snapper with the smaller stuff five minutes later. Take it all off after another three minutes, put a slice of bread in each soup plate, a dish of aioli (garlic mayonnaise) in the center and go to it.

  When I was a schoolboy in Scotland I used to catch little, pink-fleshed burn trout, roll them in oatmeal, then fry them. Hard to forget. A couple of years ago, on a pack trip in the Golden Trout Wilderness in the California Sierra, I moodily noted the lack of any trout in a stream of high repute and was told that biologists from the state’s Fish and Game Department had decided the resident trout were alien and poisoned them with rotenone. If they’d introduced trout with the correct birth certificates, they hadn’t survived. Fishwise, the stream was dead for the next year and we’re now told by our friends Tim and Odette Larson, who regularly pack mules into the Wilderness, there are trout back seemingly identical to the ones purged by Fish and Game.

  July 20

  I love scrubby old state highways, warm with commercial life. Highway 90 runs from Florida through Alabama and Louisiana, then on across Texas. I got onto it at Mobile and trundled westward into New Orleans, in time to go along and pay my respects to John Sinclair, formerly of the MC5 and now one of the city’s prime musical figures, notably on his radio show. The night I got into town Sinclair was presiding over a benefit at the House of Blues, on Decatur St. for Coco Robicheaux to whom some disaster has befallen. Robicheaux was wearing a bright purple suit. Sinclair is tall and has a goatee beard, which juts out, a bit like Don Quixote’s.

  Sinclair told the crowd that a year earlier he and his wife had been grateful recipients of the proceeds of a similar benefit. Later he told me that the Coco Robicheaux benefit was the third in a recent series of “fire recovery events,” starting with Eddie Bo’s fire in what Sinclair thought to be 1999.

  Jerry Brock, my wife Penny and some other people organized a benefit for Eddie and his sister Veronica which brought a lot of people together and helped raise money so Eddie could get back on his feet. Then our own house burned up in January 2000 while we were out of town and we would have been completely devastated if Jerry Brock and Bill Taylor hadn’t quickly put together a benefit concert at the House of Blues with music by Eddie Bo, Snooks Eaglin, Deacon John, Wild Magnolias, Treme Brass Band, Jon Cleary, Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers, James Andrews, John Mooney, Coco Robicheaux and others. The show raised $12,500 at the door and another $7,500 in donations and sales of donated items that night, which allowed us to replace all our equipment, furniture and household essentials and get back on our feet after the fire.

  Then Coco’s apartment caught fire just before JazzFest this year and Dell Long put together this benefit at the House of Blues to help him recover. The musicians in New Orleans also play at benefits for people who need help with their medical bills and other catastrophes, and generally everybody helps take care of each other when trouble strikes. There are very few of us in the New Orleans musical community who have any resources outside of what we’re hustling up to get through the week or the present month. Few have insurance of any kind, let alone medical or fire insurance, so there’s what I call the “people’s insurance” when your friends get together and raise money to help you out. It’s a beautiful thing.

  It is indeed. I listened for a while, then went off to the Hotel Richelieu, and listened to a couple of new arrivals speculating on the career of the wily cardinal. I’ve never had time to explore the bayou country southwest of New Orleans and resolved to spend a day doing that. 90 took me west towards the turn off to Abbeville. Encouraged by its sign I stopped at a roadside café, Badeaux’s in Des Allemands, Louisiana. For its soups the menu featured crab stew, shrimp stew, seafood gumbo and chicken and sausage gumbo, all at $5.50 a bowl or $3.50 for a cup. Plus soft-shell crab when in season for $10.95.

  Heartened by seafood gumbo and soft-shell crab and a bill under $20, I continued along 14 and soon saw a pick-up, with a sign saying “live crab at 4 p.m.” A jolly Cajun fisherman showed me two boxes, “big ones in the right go for $7 and the smaller ones $4”. I asked for three large ones, figuring I could boil them up in my motel room on an electric plate stowed in the Plymouth Belvedere for just such purposes. “That’ll be $2,” said the fisherman, looking a bit scornful. It turns out it’s $7 a dozen. So I bought a dozen and cooked them in my room in the Sunrise Motel on 90 on the edge of Lake Charles, letting them cool overnight and keeping them in my Coleman ice chest for dinner the next evening.

  But that last night in Louisiana I had crawfish étouffée in a diner at Creole, which is the intersection of 82 and 27. This was after a beautiful back-road drive through sugarcane, sudden surprising vistas of shipyards, more cane, endless bayous, with the sun tilting down over the vast panorama of wetlands. I only had one really inedible meal between Landrum, SC, and Petrolia, northern California—a horrible plate of supposedly Mexican food in Truth or Consequences, NM. In that place in Creole, everything turned out right. Amidst Cajun oil riggers or fishermen belching and cursing over their Budweisers I had a great plate of crawfish in peppery rice for $10 and got back on the road with an optimistic outlook on the human condition. I stopped in the Sunrise Motel and fell asleep amidst the fragrance of the boiled crabs.

  July 22

  In Columbus, Texas, Jerry Mikeska’s Bar-B-Q sign announces SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT BARBQ MAKES ONE WEAK. In the old days that probably would have read Makes A Man Weak. Not any more; and there were plenty of sisters chowing down. Mikeska’s walls were profuse with the relicts of innumerable hunting excursions: mountain sheep, bear, moose, deer, bobcat. Mr. Mikeska himself, elderly and formally attired, moved from table to table, thanking the truckers, commuters and tourists for coming by. Old world courtesy and we all felt the better for it.

  I headed northwest again, planning to spend the night in Abilene but suddenly saw a sign for Midland, and resolved to pay my respects to the childhood home of George W. Bush, not least memorable as the place where he later lived with his bride, the divine Laura.

  You can see why George Bush doesn’t believe in global warming. Having grown up in West Texas summers he doubtless believes it can never get any hotter. It was 101F at 8.30 p.m. as I stopped to ask directions to motel row from the inhabitants of a Dairy Queen, two girls on an outing from Odessa (the grimier oil town down the Interstate a few miles) and a solitary Goth in traditional black garb.

  Since Laura is the nation’s First Librarian I thought it only right to visit Midland’s library and was searching for it when I passed a building labeled Museum of the South West and stopped for a look. The first room had Audubon’s prints of Texas animals
from his last book, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, published between 1845 and 1848. Audubon died three years later. They are marvelous, and some of them, such as the ocelot and jaguar (now extinct in Texas), so lively looking that you’d swear the artist had sketched them from life. But by that time in his life Audubon rarely moved from his house on the Hudson, to which specimens arrived in various stages of putrefaction, sometimes pickled in rum.

  There are two other splendid special collections in the Midland library, devoted to genealogy and petroleum. In a break from poring over Roemer’s Texas I chatted with the curator of these collections, to be told that Laura Bush, née Welch, had worked as a librarian in Austin. In Midland she’d been a teacher. I’ve heard vulgar gossip about Laura’s racy twenties before she settled down, and I thought there perhaps a tinge of disapproval in the voices of two ladies in the genealogy section when they discussed local history with me and made mention of “the Welch girl.”

  I rounded out the Midland visit with an excursion to the truly tremendous Permian Basin Petroleum Museum on Interstate 20, which does for hydrocarbons what the Uffizi does for the art of Renaissance Italy. The museum’s entry is framed by two oil pumps, like triumphal gryphons. Here is to be found the famous map by O. C. Harper, done in 1924 and reckoned to be one of the most outstanding feats of reconnaissance geology in history. Harper accurately deduced the whereabouts of the vast oil resources of the Permian basin of West Texas and eastern New Mexico.

  A year later other geologists, scouts and land speculators were rushing to Midland and had soon, as an oilman later recalled in a news story of the 1950s displayed in the museum, “married all but a few of the single girls who had finished high school and a few who had not. Whirlwind courtships of two weeks to a month prior to the wedding were not uncommon. The few remaining eligible single young girls had but to decide with whom and how many dates they would have each evening. The young women were outnumbered about six to one by the single young men.”

  By 1928 just one oil field, the 1,100-foot-deep Yates, was rated as having a daily production potential of 2.2 million barrels a day, just under the daily national consumption at that time of 2.6 million a day.

  George Bush Sr. arrived in 1948, later recalling that “We all just wanted to make a lot of money quick.” The time I interviewed her back in 1980 I thought Barbara Bush one of the meaner women I’d met in a long time, and looking at the photos in the oil museum you could see why she might have been bitter. To ship out from the East Coast first to broiling, oil-sodden Odessa and then in 1950 to broiling, oil-sodden Midland must have been a jarring experience. George Sr. never did make a big pile out of oil and neither did George W., who spent the ’50s in Midland as a boy and returned there between 1975 and 1986 to try to make his pile.

  It was hard to tear myself away, but the placed closed and I drove down the Interstate to seedy and depressed looking Odessa which one year edged Miami to become Murder Capital of the USA. The notorious aggressions of a slice of Odessa’s citizenry probably accounts for the fact that the nearby, more prosperous and classy Midland county is Texas’s rape capital on a per capita basis, according to Ms. Betty Dickerson of the Midland Rape Crisis Center. So much for the timeless values Bush claims to have imbibed in West Texas. Leaving Odessa I passed a sign for the Harvest Time Church: “Jesus Knows That Life Can Be Hard As Nails,” then, to the right, black on gold and red, the more urgent, “ETERNITY, IT’S HELL WITHOUT JESUS.”

  July 25

  Joe Pulitzer famously said, “A newspaper has no friends.” Looking at the massed ranks of America’s elites attending Katharine Graham’s funeral in Washington last Monday, it’s maybe churlish to recall that phrase, but it’s true. At least in political terms Mrs. Graham had way too many friends. Her newspaper had its hour when she had real enemies, when Nixon’s Attorney General was screaming his famous threat, and when Nixon was threatening to pull her company’s Florida TV licenses.

  The twin decisions, concerning the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, that made Mrs. Graham’s name as a courageous publisher, came at precisely the moment when, in biographical terms, she was best equipped to handle pressure. She’d had eight years to overcome the initial timidities that bore down on her after Phil Graham’s suicide left her with a newspaper she resolved to run herself. Yet the amiable but essentially conservative bipartisanship that had the notables of each incoming administration palavering happily in her dining room hadn’t yet numbed the spinal nerve of the Post as any sort of spirited journalistic enterprise.

  In late 1974, after Nixon had been tumbled, Mrs. Graham addressed the Magazine Publishers’ Association and issued a warning: “The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” She called for a return to basics. Journalists should “stop trying to be sleuths.” In other words: The party’s over, boys and girls! It’s not our business to rock the boat. Did Mrs. Graham privately strong-arm her staff to follow her line? But editors and reporters are not slow to pick up clues as to the disposition of the person who pays the wages, and Mrs. Graham sent out plenty of those.

  Mrs. Graham had plenty of reasons, material and spiritual, to find excessive boat-rocking distasteful. The family fortune, and the capital that bought and nourished the Post, was founded in part on Allied Chemical, the company run by her father Eugene Meyer. Perhaps because rabble-rousers had derisively taunted her as “Kepone Kate” after a bad Allied Chemical spill in the James River, we remember a hard edge in her voice when she deplored “those fucking environmentalists.” Privately her language was salty.

  In the early 1980s she associated increasingly with Warren Buffett, the Nebraska investor who bought 13 percent of the Post’s B stock and who was then riding high as America’s most venerated stock player. Graham became a big-picture mogul, pickling herself in the sonorous platitudes of the Brandt Commission, on which she served. I do remember a very strange evening in a Washington nightclub with Lally Weymouth in the late 1970s in which Mrs. Buffett formally displayed her arts as a torch singer, followed with almost over-conspicuous attention by Mrs. Graham and Mr. B.

  Former mayor Marion Barry had some pro-forma kindly words for Katharine Graham after her death, but I’ve always thought that one decisive verdict on the Post’s performance in a city with a major black population came with that jury verdict acquitting Barry on a cocaine bust. Those jurors knew that the Post, along with the other Powers That Be, was on the other side from Barry, and we’ve no doubt that firmed up their assessment of the evidence. In that quarter, for sure, neither the Post nor Mrs. Graham had an excessive amount of friends.

  September 12

  Did Osama bin Laden outwit US intelligence agencies in a deadly game of decoy or double bluff? Three weeks before the attack of September 11, security at the World Trade Center was abruptly heightened; six weeks before the attack a US Army base in New Jersey was placed on top security alert.

  As regards the heightened security at the Trade Center, we are told that according to a businessman working in World Trade Building number 7 (the forty-one-story structure that collapsed after having been evacuated) “security was heightened three weeks ago, including the introduction for the first time of sniffer dogs and the physical search of all trucks prior to their being waved into the entrance from the street.”

  The US Army base in New Jersey is the Arsenal at Picatinny. At the start of July the Arsenal was placed at a very high state of alert, with some staff locked in their offices for a period.

  Set this information against the fact that Osama bin Laden, now prime suspect, said in an interview three weeks ago with Abdel-Bari Atwan, the editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper, that he planned “very, very big attacks against American interests.”

  So, was there an attempted attack some time in August,
or was it merely a feint by the bin Laden units, to prompt an alert, then a relaxation of US security procedures?

  The Pearl Harbor base containing America’s naval might was thought to be invulnerable, yet in half an hour 2,000 were dead, and the cream of the fleet destroyed. This week, within an hour on the morning of September 11, security at three different airports was successfully breached, the crews of four large passenger jets efficiently overpowered, their cockpits commandeered, and navigation coordinates reset.

  In three of the four missions the assailants succeeded probably far beyond the expectations of the planners. As a feat of suicidal aviation the Pentagon kamikaze assault was particularly audacious, with eyewitness accounts describing the Boeing 767 skimming the Potomac before driving right through the low-lying Pentagon perimeter, in a sector housing Planning and Logistics.

  The two Trade Center buildings were struck at what structural engineers say were the points of maximum vulnerability.

  The phrases “faceless coward” and “faceless enemy” have been bandied about. The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects: rogue states (most of which, like the Taliban or Saddam Hussein, started off as creatures of US intelligence). The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.

  The explosions were not an hour old before terror pundits like Anthony Cordesman, Wesley Clark, Robert Gates, and Lawrence Eagleburger were saying that these attacks had been possible “because America is a democracy,” adding that now some democratic perquisites might have to be abandoned. What might this mean? Increased domestic snooping by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies; ethnic profiling; another drive for a national ID card system.