A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  If the UN had been around at the time, the hunchbacks of Philip IV of Spain would have been forbidden to pose for Velazquez, and Jeffrey Hudson (eighteen inches at the age of nine, gracefully proportioned) would never have been permitted to step out of a pie on the dining room table of his boss, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. Having emerged from the pastry, Hudson saluted Villiers’s guests, King Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, who promptly adopted him.

  Spared a UN sponsored abortion to save him from an existence incompatible with human dignity, Hudson led an adventurous life and survived two duels, one against a turkey cock and the other in combat with a certain Mr. Crofts. The arrogant Crofts turned up for the duel with a water pistol, but Hudson stood on his dignity and insisted that the engagement be for real. They put Hudson up on a horse to get him level with Crofts and he promptly shot the man dead. Captured by Turkish pirates, Hudson said his tribulations made him grow, and having held steady at eighteen inches from nine to thirty, he shot up to 3 foot 9.

  Another dwarf, Charles Stratton (aka General Tom Thumb) killed one of my favorite painters, Benjamin Haydon, who was exhibiting his vast work “The Banishment of Aristides,” in the Egyptian Hall in London. But the crowds preferred to gawp at General Thumb, on display in the same Hall. Thumb drew 600 pounds sterling in his first week, while Haydon got only a measly seven pounds, thirteen shillings. Haydon went off home to his studio and killed himself.

  Dwarf tossing? The job came with the stature. William Beckford, the eccentric millionaire who wrote Vathek and built the famous folly at Fonthill, was one of the last to have a dwarf in private service, though E. J. Woods, author of the useful Giants and Dwarfs (1860), says Beckford’s dwarf was “rather too big to be flung from one guest to another, as was the custom at dinners in earlier days.”

  October 15

  The Earth Charter is the spawn of Steven C. Rockefeller, Canadian eco-mogul Maurice Strong, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who has said of it, “My hope is that this charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a Sermon on the Mount, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century and beyond.”

  The portage of the Charter at the end of last year began at an Earth Ceremony in Vermont, where Rockefeller (chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Earth Charter International Drafting Committee) is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College. Present was Jane Goodall, of chimpanzee fame, one of whose thumb tips was once nipped off by a chimp asserting its dignity when Goodall tried to cosy up to it at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, part of NYU and located in Sterling Forest. (Goodall tried to cover it up by saying she’d caught her thumb in a car door.)

  The Charter, which finally puffed into Johannesburg in time for last month’s Earth Summit, is housed and transported in the cheesy Ark of Hope, furiously described on the New American Patriot website as “a blasphemous mimicry of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, which held the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses.” Accompanying the Charter and the Ark are the “Temenos Books,” containing aboriginal Earth Masks and “visual prayers/affirmations for global healing, peace, and gratitude,” created by 3,000 artists, teachers, students, and mystics.

  “Temenos” is the word for the precincts of a temple, and accurately reflects the ersatz religiosity of UN ritualism.

  According to the Charter, we must: “Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value …” (except of course for human fetuses, which are not included in the UN’s definition of “every form of life,” merely as disposable protoplasm). There’s the predictable affirmation of faith in the “inherent dignity of all human beings,” excluding those who are finished off by euthanasia or haled before the ICC or required to clean the bathrooms of overpaid UN bureaucrats.

  Now comes the jackboot: the earth must “adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations; prevent pollution of any part of the environment; internalize the full environmental and social costs of goods and services in the selling price; ensure universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction.” In other words, population control, as promoted through the century by the Rockefellers, who of course assigned the Manhattan real estate to the UN for its HQ.

  December 16

  We’ve been without power for a week now. As the storm winds rattled the window panes and the lamps guttered low, warming the room to the tints of a La Tour painting, and as Becky Grant’s youngest, Oliver, gamboled with Jasper, I sang of the ancient times of 7 Days, a weekly I was involved with at the end of the ’60s in London. There were about twenty people in the collective, with all decisions, down to the refinements of punctuation and the proper use of the semi-colon, settled by debate and democratic vote, 50 percent men, 50 percent women. Democracy at that level is very tiring.

  Late one night as I labored over the photographs with our design team, I heard a crackling on the aged stairs of the old building on Shavers Place, a hundred yards from Piccadilly Circus, where we were perched on the top floor. I pulled open the door, to be confronted by a sheet of flame. It later turned out that some group of Ulster-based Orangemen had taken exception to our measured posture on the Irish question and had decided to torch the building.

  We decided to abandon ship. Carrying boxes of valuable prints from Magnum we walked the narrow catwalk that led to the next building, and kicked in the window. There was a screech of alarm as a couple of Palestinians who were working late on their magazine saw the window burst in and thought the Israeli commandos were about to follow. By dawn we had the pages made up and then it was a rush to the train station, then an hour down to the printers. So different now; so much easier, so much cheaper. Who says there isn’t progress in human affairs, though I do miss the inky excitement of those old hot type days.

  December 18

  It’s one of the staple and indeed few remaining pleasures of American political life. A Republican taken with drink, speaking unguardedly near a live microphone—or in Trent Lott’s case coasting through a ritual farewell speech on automatic pilot—drops a racist gibe or fond salute to America’s dark past. The rituals of outrage, apology, self-abasement, renewed outrage, deeper self-abasement, forgiveness or rejection, duly follow.

  Sometimes the sinner is ceremoniously booted into oblivion, as happened with Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, or Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt. Sometimes, as is now happening in Lott’s case, the Democrats give him a thumping while hoping that in the end Lott will hold on to his post as Senate Majority whip, the better to remind black voters that this is the true face of the Republican Party, featuring the Klansman’s robe, the burning cross and the lynching tree. Better Lott than some oily substitute like Frist of Tennessee solemnly declaring that the Republican Party has finally put the past behind it and that the healing should now begin.

  One of Bill Clinton’s many offenses was that he devalued the public apology. He had to make so many of them that they ceased to be valid as currency, like bank notes in the German inflation of the early 1920s when people had to take a wheelbarrow of cash to buy a sausage for lunch.

  These days, post-Clinton, a manly mumble of contrition is no good. Unless a politician comes out with a truckload of apologies and keeps sending them round the track for a week, people claim he’s refusing to climb down, and keep insisting, Does Lott really and truly mean it? And for that matter, why stop with Lott? What about the four Dixiecrat states that voted for Strom Thurmond back in 1948? Shouldn’t their governors today issue formal apologies, and make available “apology bins” in every neighborhood wherein those who actually voted for Strom, or their descendants, can deposit personal expressions of remorse?

  Another factor in this inflation is the fact that sometimes the apology is rejected, no matter how often repeated. The Democrats and the press did this to Jesse Jackson—columnists like the late
James Reston, who defiled the editorial pages of the New York Times on a weekly basis with racist diatribes about Jackson’s effrontery as a black man in presuming to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, then whacked him again for inadequate demonstrations of remorse for his crack about Hymietown. Senator Joe Lieberman even managed to bracket Jackson and Lott together, saying that neither of them were sincere in covering themselves with sackcloth and ashes.

  December 29

  America has lost one of its senior weapons inspectors, one of its most ardent would-be dismantlers of weapons of mass destruction. Phil Berrigan died in the evening on December 6, at Jonah House, the community in Baltimore he co-founded in 1973, surrounded by family and friends. For forty years he campaigned against war and violence, most of all against nuclear weapons. Challenge America’s weapons of mass destruction, and the state locks you up. Phil Berrigan spent about eleven years in prison in the cause of peace and disarmament.

  Berrigan wrote a final statement in the days before his death. His final comments included this: “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.”

  Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus told the crowd in the Sermon on the Mount, and Lo, Ronald Reagan named the MX nuclear missile the Peacemaker.

  The Berrigans and their brave comrades shed their blood on a nuclear warhead being manufactured at the GE plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, recalling the blood that Jesus shed for sinful humanity, and Lo, they named a ballistic missile submarine USS City of Corpus Christi, the city of the body of Christ, and they probably knew not what they did, aside from honoring the home port of some Texan pork dispenser on Capitol Hill.

  The word from Jonah House is that those who mourn for Berrigan and wish to honor his memory may make donations in Berrigan’s name to Citizens for Peace in Space, Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons, Nukewatch, Voices in the Wilderness, the Nuclear Resister, or any Catholic Worker house.

  Philip Berrigan was born in 1923 in the Minnesota Iron Range, in the town of Two Harbors, about thirty miles east of the birthplace of the man who wrote Masters of War. He was the first priest to ride in a civil rights movement Freedom Ride.

  In 1967 he poured blood on draft files in Baltimore with three others, known as the “Baltimore Four.” A year later he burned draft files in Catonsville, MD, with eight others, including his brother, Fr. Daniel Berrigan. That action was known as the “Catonsville Nine.” He was convicted of destruction of US property, destruction of Selective Service records, and interference with the Selective Service Act of 1967.

  In 1971, while in prison, he was named co-conspirator by J. Edgar Hoover and a Harrisburg grand jury, charged with plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up the utility tunnels of US Capitol buildings. In the event he was convicted only of violating prison rules for smuggling out letters. On September 9, 1980, he poured blood and hammered with seven others on Mark 12A warheads at a GE nuclear missile plant, King of Prussia, PA. He was charged with conspiracy, burglary, and criminal mischief; convicted and imprisoned. The action became known as the “Plowshares Eight,” and began the international Plowshares movement. He participated in five more Plowshares actions, resulting in seven years of imprisonment.

  December 30

  Many years ago my father visited the secretary of a British society that used certain measurements in the Grand Pyramid in Egypt to predict the future. After running through the basic mathematical drill the secretary murmured that in his estimation the predictive power of the Grand Pyramid was over-estimated. Scenting a possible recantation my father pressed him. What sort of “over-estimation,” he asked. Well, said the secretary, many people believe that the calculations to make current predictions based on the pyramid can be done “in five minutes.” Not so. “Serious predictions involve math that requires at least three weeks to complete.”

  Nuts are never more impressive than when admitting just a measure of uncertainty into the precision of their mad interpretations. And yes, the same can be said of economic forecasters.

  2003

  January 10

  CITATION SWIPING

  Editor,

  I was amazed at the effrontery of the Cockburn, and, presumably, Norman Finkelstein charge of plagiarism against Alan Dershowitz. The fact that the Ottoman-ruled Palestinian town of Safed was a center of rabbinical activities and mystical Judaism in the sixteenth century is a commonplace of Jewish studies as well as tourist guidebooks, in addition to Ottoman history.

  To claim that remarking upon it in a sentence that reworks an earlier statement of this fact is plagiarism is as ridiculous as arguing that one could plagiarize the statement “Washington, DC is the capital of the United States.” Further, the argument that in recycling citations, even with identical ellipses, Dershowitz committed plagiarism is intellectual dishonesty on the part of Cockburn, at its most extreme. Reusing citations is not plagiarism even when the wording is identical. Every serious working journalist and author knows this.

  Stephen Schwartz,

  Washington, DC

  Cockburn replies: How piquant that the portly messenger of the Prophet should rise in defense of theft. The last time I saw him, it was on C-SPAN whining to a small crowd in a bookstore that Hitchens had plagiarized his patented keyword “Islamofascism.” God forbid that I should ever be compelled to read his books, but I’ve no doubt that if I swiped his citations without acknowledgement he would hasten to alert the world to my crimes. The only outstanding question: why does Schwartz want to kiss Dershowitz’s ass?

  January 14

  For sale: Rare 1985 Ford Escort diesel station wagon, which of course you won’t have to smog. Acquired by Alex Cockburn in South Carolina two years ago. Driven reliably hither and yon, until fuel feed problems developed from broken off sending unit in the tank. Tank was cleaned out, new sending unit installed, but there’s still a feed glitch. This is the car’s only problem so far as Cockburn knows, but now he’s got other fish (’62 Belvedere SW, ’60 Valiant, ’67 300 convertible, etc.) to fry. New clutch assembly; new rotors and pads on front brakes; new battery; nice upscale paint job. Newish tires. Does about forty miles to the gallon. Odo probably accurate at about 68,500 miles. $1,800. Car’s in Boonville.

  April 7

  One house I stayed in for a few days was in Thornhill Square, three quarters of a mile or so north of King’s Cross. The neighborhood is on the way up in the world, but still agreeably humble along Caledonian Road itself. Each morning I would walk along, enjoying the simple dramas of the shop fronts, the hopes and despairs of small retail entrepreneurs. The tasteful element always hate them and dream of bulldozers, but I love streets like this, such as the old Main in Montreal twenty years ago, or Lincoln Boulevard today south of I-10 in Los Angeles.

  Running north on the east side of the street, from the corner of Caledonian Road and Richmond Street we have: a smart pub called the Tarmon, with a fine display of hanging floral baskets; Caly Gents Hairdresser (wash and cut £8, dry cut £6, child’s cut £5, OAP £4), a smart-looking place; Skaters take-away, with pictures of a chicken and a fish; Uncle Eric Kebab House; Pleasure Garden (grimy, shuttered, broken signage advertising SAU, SPA and UB); Kings Pizza; double frontage of “Kaim Todner, solicitor, crime, prisoners’ rights, mental health, family”; print and copy shop; Caledonian supermarket (a small store with good vegetables on display); Austin Daniel Property; Guzel Café and Restaurant; smart double front of Istanbul Social Club; Dental Surgeon (shuttered and barred, with note, “Dr Kylahs would be pleased to attend Dr Mean’s patients, or any other patients, at his surgery at 2 Biddland Road)”; four more shuttered stores and bags of rubble, including Logman Ltd, “specializing in watermelons”; William Hill, betting shop (Ladbroke’s across the road); E&A Drycleaner; Leonard Villa, picture framer; Somal Hair and Beauty Center (“stand-up
sunbeds, hair extension, nail extension”); post office (also newsagent); KIG café and restaurant, with sign in window, “Full breakfast, bacon, bubble, eggs, beans, sausage, mushroom, tomato, black pudding, 2 slices of bread, tea or coffee, £4.50”; chemist; two shuttered stores; smart double façade of Rigpa Tibetan Buddhist Center; drear frontage of London Taxi Club; Wear-2-Rave, selling trendy gear; Parker Sales and Lettings; Islington Bar, under repair; then Bridgeman Road.

  Round the corner was Islington Council’s West Branch library, with comfortable reading room, nicely stocked shelves, and a big children’s library across the hall. The rack by the entrance featured helpful pamphlets for owners of missing cats and dogs (contact the Lost Dogs Line, run by the Metropolitan Police and Battersea Dogs Home); for male victims of sexual assault (“research shows that the majority of sexual assaults against men are committed by heterosexual males”); for frustrated litigators (“Have You Been Injured? Was Someone Else to Blame?”), issued by the Law Society; for the worried, a detailed pamphlet titled “NHS Abortion (termination of pregnancy services in Camden and Islington).” Denizens of hysterical America, note the tranquil, confident tone: “Having An Abortion: This section describes how the NHS abortion service is organized, and how to access it. If you have decided that abortion is the right option for you, your GP or local family planning clinic can refer you. If your GP has a conscientious objection to abortion, he/she should say so and refer you to another doctor who does not hold these views.”