A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  So we can run fiber-optic cable through the western deserts but not put enough money in the hands of eighty-one-year-olds so they don’t have to pull all-night shifts clerking in motels. At least the lady in Austin was spry and interested in life, refreshed by her intermittent naps on the couch in the sitting room off the reception office, dipping into her book, with the motel cat to keep her company, across the road from the International Café, which serves good breakfasts and decent drinks from a magnificent wooden bar that came round the Horn from Europe back in Austin’s mining heyday in the 1870s.

  People who drive or lecture their way through the American interior usually notice the same thing, which is that you can have rational conversations with people about the Middle East, about George W. Bush, and other topics certain to arouse unreasoning passion among sophisticates on either coast.

  April 24

  The ripe tones of Archbishop Mahony of Los Angeles filled my house last week, courtesy of National Public Radio. Mahoney spoke of his horror, his shame, at the stories of priestly abuse. He apologized to the victims. The mellifluous sanctimony of his penitence filled the room with such unction that I burst out laughing. What a surprise it all is! Priests hitting on altar boys! Priests molesting children. We’re shocked, shocked!

  When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading Jail in 1895 for sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover were soon replete with panicked gays fleeing England to Paris. Hundreds of Catholic priests here, many of them in retirement, must be asking themselves whether it might be prudent to remove themselves from the jurisdiction until the heat dies down.

  It was bound to happen. Five years ago a senior dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy confided that over the previous decade the Church had paid out over a billion dollars in out-of-court settlements as well as court fights on priest abuse cases.

  Anyone with any knowledge of these cases knows perfectly well that this is no matter of a few rotten apples in the barrel. Sometimes, hearing about one priestly molester after another, one has the impression that not only has the Catholic Church been the prime sanctuary for repressed gays for the past several hundred years but that there isn’t a priest alive that hasn’t at some point made advances to an altar boy or boy scout. At least in the Middle Ages they got off with the nuns, or in the nineteenth century when they could afford domestics, the maid.

  And certainly the Church has protected these priests, moved them around the country, away from an area where their activities had become known. The Church has some very dingy closets to clean out.

  May 15

  THE ROOTS OF WAR RHETORIC

  Dear Sir,

  I was amused to learn from Alexander Cockburn that the Vietnam War was caused by Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. It is tempting to classify this as a fine example of the Mendocino School of deductive logic. In fact, Mr. Cockburn joins a respected group of American social critics with his claim.

  In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain suggests that Sir Walter Scott caused the American Civil War. It seems that the romantic tales of chivalry so imbued the antebellum Southern culture that military conflict was widely supported throughout years of unbelievable destruction. There is a modicum of truth in each claim.

  I would suggest a more likely literary trigger to the Vietnam War is Profiles in Courage. The author of that work, John F. Kennedy, was certain to believe in the ideals he portrayed, and in fact lived. Sadly, he was also in a position to act on those beliefs.

  Sincerely,

  Edwin Shelby, Fountain Hills, Arizona

  Alexander Cockburn replies: Of all rhetorical modes, irony and hyperbole are the most perilous. There were people who believed Swift’s Modest Proposal was for real, Shelby among them no doubt.

  May 16

  Over the past twenty years I’ve learned there’s a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There’s a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing “the left” of anti-Semitism. Of course the rhetorical trick is to conflate “Israel” or “the State of Israel” with “Jews” and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo, to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic.

  These days you can’t even say that the New York Times is owned by a Jewish family without risking charges that you stand in Goebbels’s shoes. I even got accused of anti-Semitism the other day for mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood, which they most certainly did, as recounted in a funny and informative book published in 1988, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler.

  The encouraging fact is that despite the efforts of the Southern Poverty Law Center to drum up funds by hollering that the Nazis are about to march down Main Street, there’s remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US, and almost none that I’ve ever been able to detect on the American left, which is of course amply stocked with non-self-hating Jews.

  It’s comical to find the left’s assailants trudging all the way back to Leroi Jones and the ’60s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic jibes. The less encouraging fact is that there’s not nearly enough criticism of Israel’s ghastly conduct towards Palestinians, which in its present phase is testing the waters for reaction here to a major ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, just as Rep. Dick Armey called for.

  It’s not anti-Semitic to denounce ethnic cleansing, a strategy which, according to recent polls, around half of all Israeli Jews now heartily endorse. In this instance the left really has nothing to apologize for, but those who accuse of it of anti-Semitism certainly do. They’re apologists for policies put into practice by racists, ethnic cleansers, and in Sharon’s case, an unquestioned war criminal who should be in the dock for his conduct.

  July 19

  Last week Sight and Sound released its list of “the top 10 films of all time.” My list:

  1. The Girl Can’t Help It, 1956, written and directed by Frank Tashlin. (Also author of the incomparable Bear That Wasn’t, very influential on my childhood.)

  2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956, based on a story by Jack Finney, screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring, maybe with input from Sam Peckinpah; directed by Don Siegel.

  3. Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman; directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Best thing ever done on the press.

  4. Some Like It Hot, 1959, written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond; directed by Billy Wilder. The perfect movie.

  5. La Dolce Vita, 1960, written by Fellini and Flaiano; directed by Federico Fellini. (I know, I know. What about all the other Italians? But this one did have Anita Ekberg dancing in the fountain.)

  6. Jason and the Argonauts, 1963, written by Beverley Cross and Jan Read; directed by Don Chaffey. Peplums are my great love.

  7. Pierrot Le Fou, 1965, written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Anna Karina. Wonderful color.

  8. The Fantastic Voyage, 1966, adapted by David Duncan from an Otto Klement–Jay Lewis Bixby story; directed by Richard Fleischer. With Raquel Welch and a terrific scene of Donald Pleasance being eaten by white antibodies. I think it prefigures the AIDS epidemic.

  9. Life of Brian, 1979, written by Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Michael Palin; directed by Terry Jones. World’s greatest political movie. About the sectarian left, made when the awful Trot Gerry Healy was wooing the Redgrave family.

  10. Eating Raoul, 1982, written and directed by Paul Bartel. Perfect Happy Enders film.

  Haven’t seen too many movies since then, though I watched a funny parody of teen girl films the other day in a motel in Los Angeles. I loved Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, watched without headphones on a plane between NYC and LAX and wept when the Golden Retriever came over the hill at the end. The tough A&R chick in the window seat stared at my tear-stained cheeks, revolted. It came as a big shock when they told me there was voice-over.

  As can be seen, movies aren’t a big thing in my life. I’d like to have included Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer’s Night (another from that amazing cultura
l year of 1955), if only because I took Judith Oakley to the Headington Classic in Oxford to watch it in 1962 and held the door open for her. She slammed it on my fingers as a reproof to my male chauvinist profession of “manners,” which was my introduction to the Women’s Movement.

  September 7

  Amid the elegies for the dead and the ceremonies of remembrance, seditious questions intrude: Is there really a war on terror; and if one is indeed being waged, what are its objectives?

  The Taliban are out of power. Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, blooms once more in Afghan pastures. The military budget is up. The bluster war on Iraq blares from every headline. On the home front the war on the Bill of Rights is set at full throttle.

  On this latter point we can turn to Merle Haggard, the bard of blue-collar America, the man who saluted the American flag more than a generation ago in songs such as the “Fighting Side of Me” and “Okie from Muskogee.” Haggard addressed a concert crowd in Kansas City a few days ago in the following terms: “I think we should give John Ashcroft a big hand … (pause) … right in the mouth!” Haggard went on to say, “the way things are going I’ll probably be thrown in jail tomorrow for saying that, so I hope y’all will bail me out.”

  It will take generations to roll back the constitutional damage done in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Emergency laws lie around for decades like rattlesnakes in summer grass. As Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch points out to me, one of the main legal precedents that the government is using to justify detaining “enemy combatants” without trial or access to a lawyer is an old strikebreaking decision. The government’s August 27 legal brief in the Padilla “enemy combatant” case relies heavily on Moyer v. Peabody, a Supreme Court case that dates back to 1909.

  The case involved Charles Moyer, President of the Western Federation of Miners, a Colorado trade union that fought for such radical reforms as safe working conditions, an end to child labor, and payment in money rather than in company scrip. As part of a concerted effort to crush the union, the governor of Colorado had declared a state of insurrection, called out the state militia, and detained Moyer for two and half months without probable cause or due process of law.

  In an opinion that deferred obsequiously to executive power (using the “captain of the ship” metaphor), the US Supreme Court upheld Moyer’s detention. It reasoned that since the militia could even have fired upon the strikers (or, in the Court’s words, the “mob in insurrection”), how could Moyer complain of a mere detention? The government now cites the case in its Padilla brief to argue that whatever a state governor can do, the President can do better. As Mariner remarks, next thing you know they’ll be citing the Japanese internment precedents.

  September 21

  When the young basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose back in 1986 Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan raced each other to show the world who could punish the poor quickest and hardest. The White House urged the DEA to take ABC News along to raids on crack houses in South Central LA. O’Neill drove through the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with its twenty-nine new mandatory minimum sentences, and the 100-to-1 disparity in sentencing for crack/powder cocaine dealers. We were on our way to lockup time for the poor, mostly young blacks and Hispanics. At present rates, the chances of a black man being behind bars sometime in his life are one in four.

  All through the 1980s and ’90s professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio, and Charles Murray grew sleek from bestsellers about the criminal, probably innate propensities of the “underclass,” about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms.

  Now, there was indeed a vast criminal class coming to its full vicious potential in the 1990s: a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.

  Given a green light in the late 1970s by the deregulatory binge urged by corporate-funded think tanks and launched legislatively by Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, by the 1990s America’s corporate leadership had evolved a simple strategy for criminal self-enrichment.

  Step one: lie about your performance, in a manner calculated to deceive investors. This was engineered by the production of a “pro-forma” balance sheet freighted with accounting chicanery of every stripe and hue, willingly supplied by Arthur Andersen and others. Losses were labeled “capital expenditures”; losing assets were “sold” to co-conspirators in the large banks for the relevant accounting period. Later, using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, slightly more realistic balance sheets would be presented to the SEC and the IRS.

  Flaunting the “pro-forma” numbers, corporations would issue more stock, borrow more money from some co-conspiratorial bank, buy back the stock for the chief executives, who would further inflate its value by dint of bogus accountancy, sell the stock to the chumps and bail out with their millions before the roof fell in, leaving pension funds like CalPERS holding the bag.

  The scale of looting? Prodigious. This orgy of thievery, without parallel in the history of capitalism, was condoned and abetted year after year by the archbishop of our economy, Alan Greenspan, a man with a finely honed sense of distinction between the scale of reproof merited by the very rich and those less powerful. When Ron Carey led the Teamsters to victory in 1997, Greenspan rushed to denounce the “inflationary” potential of modestly improved wage packets. Even though declared innocent by a jury of his peers, Carey, who had actually led a union to victory, was forbidden ever to run in a union election again.

  Where are the sermons from Greenspan about the inflationary potential of stock-option fortunes lofted on the hot air of crooked accountancy and kindred conspiracies?

  Let someone die in gangbanger crossfire on a slum corner, and William Bennett indicts an entire generation, an entire race. Where are the sermons from Bennett, Murray and the “Sunday Show” moralists about the CEOs scuttling off with their swag, leaving their employees to founder amid wrecked pensions and destroyed prospects? A street kid in South Central is in the computer by the time he’s ten. No “criminal propensity” profiles for grads of the Wharton or Harvard business schools.

  You have to go back to Marx and Balzac to get a truly vivid sense of the rich as a criminal elite. These giants did bequeath a tradition of joyful dissection of the morals and ethics of the rich, carried on by Veblen, Moody, Wright Mills, Domhoff, Lundberg, and others. But by the mid-1960s disruptive political science was not a paying proposition if you were aiming for tenure. A student studying Mills would be working nights at the soda fountain while the kid flourishing Robert Dahl and writing rubbish about pluralism would get the grad fellowship.

  Back in the 1950s we were reading stuff about the moral vacuum in affluent suburbia by people like Vance Packard and David Riesman. I guess inner loneliness soon became inner joy. There was nothing wrong about putting one’s boot on a colleague’s neck and cashing in. Where are the books now about these forcing grounds for the great corporate criminal cohort of the 1990s, coming of age in the Reagan years?

  In fact, it’s nearly impossible to locate books that examine the class of corporate executives through the lens of cool, scientific contempt. As Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, explains, much of the current writing on CEO culture is published in magazines like Fortune or BusinessWeek. And though there are a few authors—like Robert Monks—who focus their attention on executive culture, nowhere will you find empirical studies on the sociobiological roots of the criminal tendencies of the executive class.

  Why? The rich bought out the opposition. Back in the mists of antiquity, you had Communists and Socialists and populists who’d read Marx and who had a pretty fair notion of what the rich were up to. Even Democrats had a grasp of the true situation. Then came the witch-hunts and the buyouts, hand in hand. Result, an Enron exec could come to maturity without ever once hearing an admonitory word ab
out it being wrong to lie, cheat, and steal, sell out your co-workers, defraud your customers.

  The finest schools in America produced a criminal elite that stole the store in less than a decade. Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter and Kennedy, of the Chicago School, of Hollywood, of God’s demise? You’d think there’s at least a Time cover in it.

  October 13

  Here’s why I’m against the UN as promoter of federalism and world guv’mint. This just in from Geneva, Switzerland, via Reuter’s wire: “UN upholds French ban on ‘dwarf throwing.’ ” It turns out that a diminutive stuntman who had protested against a French ban on the practice of “dwarf throwing” has lost his case before some sort of UN human rights judicial body. The tribunal issued some typically pious UN claptrap about the need to protect human dignity being paramount.

  The dwarf, a fellow called Manuel Wackenheim, argued that a 1995 ban by France’s highest administrative court was discriminatory and deprived him of a job being tossed around in discos and similar venues.

  The UN Human Rights Committee said it was satisfied “the ban on dwarf-tossing was not abusive but necessary in order to protect public order, including considerations of human dignity.” It also said the ban “did not amount to prohibited discrimination.”

  Dwarfs and their throwers will have to search out venues, like prize fighters in eighteenth-century England. Soon some place like Slovakia will be the only venue. No doubt a UN embargo will then ensue, with draconian sanctions, appointment of inspectors/spies, followed by the inevitable intervention, NATO bombing and occupation.

  So here’s a bunch of UN administrators, each of them probably hauling down an annual salary hefty enough to keep a troupe of dwarfs in caviar for life, dooming poor little Wackenheim to the unemployment lines, before going home to scream at their underpaid Romanian maidservants or to get a blowjob from a thirteen-year-old girl from Kiev in the local whorehouse. In the old days dwarfs could stand proud, strutting down the boulevards, around circus rings, or forming part of some amusing display, or matching themselves against pitbulls (a popular nineteenth-century English pastime). I can remember dwarfs from my childhood in Ireland, along with other bodies remote from conventional anatomy. Walking down the main street of any Irish town reminded one of Breughel. Not any more. I guess even in Catholic Ireland the doc takes a look and chokes nature’s sports before they’ve got out of the starting gate.