A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

But when it came to Grand National day, March 26, 1949, no laborious toil over the form sheets was necessary. Among the scheduled starters that year was a horse called Russian Hero. Although the cold war was limbering up, Russians were still heroes to many. Not just members of the CPGB but a wider swath of punters in the union movement would be likely to plump for a horse carrying that name, if only as a side bet in honor of Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad, the Kursk salient.

  One of the jockeys riding that day was young Dick Francis, later the immensely popular author of a long string of racing thrillers. Francis was on a great but temperamental horse called Roimond. In the last mile he took the lead. With only eleven horses still in the race, he was set for victory. Then, just short of the finishing line, Roimond got passed by a horse going so fast Francis knew he had no chance to catch up. It was Russian Hero, ridden by Leo McMorrow, carrying starting odds of sixty-six to one. Russian Hero beat Roimond by eight lengths.

  As the BBC man calling the race screamed out the finale, my father—who was no longer a party member but who’d staked his well-frayed shirt on Russian Hero—loosed a triumphant roar. So, across Britain, did all readers of the Daily Worker following the advice of the Burmese tipster, who’d picked Russian Hero, no doubt partly through rigorous assessment of the horse’s genetic profile—contrary though this Mendelian posture was to the doctrines of Lysenko, riding high in Stalin’s esteem.

  It was by far the largest collective transfer of wealth ever to Communism’s stalwarts in Britain. Around that time the party probably had around 50,000 members, and even a wagered half-crown looked pretty good when multiplied by sixty-six.

  Dick Francis took second in 1949. Seven years later, a champion jockey in his eighth Grand National, he rode Devon Loch, owned by Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Francis was ten lengths clear, less than fifty yards from winning, when Devon Loch suddenly went down on his belly, tearing muscles in the process. It’s one of horse racing’s great mysteries, though Francis thinks it was a sudden wave of noise from the crowd that spooked his horse. “That’s racing,” the Queen Mother said stoically to Francis.

  The event got Francis a contract to write a memoir. He retired from the track and took up a hugely successful life of crime writing. But “given the choice,” he says, “I’d take winning the National every time. I was a jockey first, writer second. It’s good having a book well received, but it doesn’t compare to winning a race.”

  February 25

  I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at sixty-three, I’m the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-’50s, Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

  Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.

  I tried to re-read Kerouac’s On the Road a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That’s a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he’ll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I’ve been dipping into his diaries, Confessions of a Barbarian, and laughing every couple of pages. “Writing for the National Geographic,” Abbey grumbled, “is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts.”

  Could Thompson have written that? Probably not. When it came to sex and the stimulation of the synapses by agents other than drugs or booze or violent imagery Thompson was silent, unlike Abbey who loved women. Thompson wrote for the guys, at a pitch so frenzied, so over-the-top in its hyperbolic momentum that often enough it reminded me of the squeakier variant of the same style developed by his Herald-Trib stable mate and exponent of the “New Journalism,” Tom Wolfe. In their respective stylistic uniforms they always seemed hysterically frightened of normalcy, particularly in the shape of girls, so keenly appreciated by Abbey.

  Thompson’s best writing was always in the form of flourishes, of pell-mell bluster wrenched from himself for the anxious editors waiting well past deadline at Scanlans or Rolling Stone, and in his later years often put together from his jottings by the writers and editors aware that a new Fear and Loathing on the masthead was a sure-fire multiplier of newstand sales. Overall, Thompson’s political perceptions weren’t that interesting except for occasional bitter flashes, as in this sour and prescient paragraph written in 1972: “How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at least the 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.”

  There’s nothing much to the notion of “Gonzo” beyond the delighted projections of Thompson’s readers. The introduction of the reporter as roistering first-person narrator? Mark Twain surely did that, albeit sedately, and less sedately we had Henry Miller, another man who loved women. Which of the road books will last longest between Miller’s American Nightmare, On the Road and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Kerouac and then Thompson drove faster but they didn’t write better. Norman Mailer took the form to the level of genius in Advertisements for Myself, with political perceptions acuter and writing sharper by far than anything Thompson ever produced.

  “Gonzo” was an act, defined by its beholders, the thought that here was one of Us, fried on drugs, hanging on to the cliff edge of reality only by his fingernails, doing hyperbolic battle with the pomposities and corruptions of Politics as Usual. And no man was ever a more willing captive of the Gonzo myth he created, decked out in its increasingly frayed bunting of “Fear and Loathing …” “The Strange and Terrible …,” decorated with Ralph Steadman’s graphic counterpoints.

  Like Evel Knievel, Thompson’s stunts demanded that he arc higher and further with each successive sentence’s outrage to propriety, most memorably in his obit for Richard Nixon: “If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”

  Kerouac ended sadly at forty-seven. As Abbey nastily put it, “Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama’s lap from alcohol and infantilism.” Abbey himself passed gloriously at sixty-two, carried from the hospital by his pals to die at his own pace without tubes dripping brief reprieves into his veins, then buried in the desert without the sanction of the state.

  How about Thompson? His Boston lawyer George Tobia Jr. told the Globe the sixty-seven-year-old author sat in his kitchen Sunday afternoon in his home in Woody Creek, Colo., stuck a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth, and killed himself while his wife listened on the phone and his son and daughter-in-law were in another room of his house. His wife had no idea what had happened until she returned home later.

  Seems creepy to me, same way Gary Webb blowing his brains out a while back with a handgun was creepy. Why give the loved ones that as a souvenir? I suppose Thompson’s message was: We were together at the end. Webb was truly
alone. He lifted the curtain on one little sideshow of the American Empire, and could never quite fathom that when you do that The Man doesn’t forget or forgive. Thompson engaged the Empire on his own terms and quit the battlefield on his own terms too, which I guess is what Gonzo is all about.

  March 6

  Relentlessly, the increased hours Americans have to work, just to squeeze by, is sapping their will to live any sort of pleasant life, at least in terms of the way “pleasant” was parsed half a century ago.

  My neighbor Joe Paff says his older brother Bill worked for McDonald Douglas in the 1960s as a blue-collar line inspector, had a $19,000 house in Anaheim, two bedrooms, swimming pool, hardwood floors, new car every year or so, boat and trailer, and time to enjoy them.

  There were millions like Bill and his wife. Back then, when the incomes of ordinary working people reached their apex, the average family lived in an affordable house with a couple of late-model cars at reasonable insurance rates. Their kids could go to college either for free or cheaply. The man worked reasonable hours and could even look forward to a decent pension instead of having it looted by Bernie Ebbers. The woman didn’t have to work prodigious hours at two thirds of the man’s rate of pay so that they could meet the mortgage payments. They might have a little hideaway in the country. They were not so exhausted that they fell asleep over their supper. They stayed up night after night to watch Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” having already enjoyed light-hearted commentary on their happy condition from Jackie Gleeson. The whining racism of Archie Bunker was still ahead, in the 1970s, when the fortunes of the white working class began to dip.

  As the Economic Policy Institute’s State of Working America 2004 Report instructs us, any story of rising income for working families across the past quarter century is, at bottom, a story about rising annual work hours, particularly among women. The extra hours worked by wives in 2000, compared to 1979, translates into additional full-time workweeks as follows: 8 weeks in the bottom 20 percent, 12.9 weeks in the second, 12.5 weeks in the third, 9.2 in the fourth, and 8.3 in the fifth. If women in poor families hadn’t gone to work in the years after 1979, their family income would have fallen by almost 14 percent.

  It’s always eerie how quickly people accept sharply changed circumstances as normalcy, like paying 22 percent interest on a credit card debt and watching payments on all cards get hiked to the fiercest interest rate if you’re late on one payment. Twenty years ago those were credit terms the FBI took to be proof of Mafia membership and got prosecutors to file charges of extortion. Now, both parties in Congress leap to obey when the credit card companies—i.e., the banks—issue their commands. Latest to come under the axe is Chapter 7 bankruptcy, where bankrupts could go down and not have repayments through their next ten incarnations, which is what Chapter 11 bankruptcy mandates.

  March 25

  How many times, amid the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for some anti-depressant at the blood-spattered murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine including himself. Scroll through the last fifteen years and you’ll find plenty such stories.

  That’s the trouble with time. As Paul Krassner joked about Waldheimer’s Disease, you get old and forget you were a Nazi. But it’s never too late to go back to the dim distant origins of the Depression Industry in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the saga of what happened after three researchers working for Lilly concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine hydrochloride, later known to the world, to Wesbecker and to Jeff Weise, as Prozac.

  Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated the selling of depression and of Prozac in the mid-1990s we found that the clinical trials of Prozac excluded suicidal patients, children, and elderly adults—although once FDA approval is granted, the drug can be prescribed for anyone of any age. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known Bethesda-based psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA’s approval of Prozac, it was based, ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the face of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty-three patients were on fluoxetine for a period of more than two years.

  Psychiatrists—a breed whose adepts, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide at twice the national rate—have been central to the entire enterprise. The process linking their alchemy to the corporate bottom line has a robust simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly’s research bench and headed for the mass production line, psychiatrists, some in receipt of Lilly’s money, labored to formulate conditions to be installed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the 1980s was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone-box survivor and adept copywriter skilled at coining the DSM’s arsenal of “disorders” sanctioning treatment, medication, and most crucially of all, reimbursement by insurance companies. When troubling questions were raised about Prozac’s possible linkage to violent acts, psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of doubt.

  In the US the government is in the pay of the drug companies, and prescriptions for anti-depressants have risen as the call for any collective social action to cure “depression” has long since been taken from any political manifestos. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when Congress wiped out Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy statutes, creating family violence, heightened crime, and a vast new potential market for Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.

  March 26

  Mumbai—Sainath and Priyanka advise me against going out this morning since it’s Holi, a day when rowdy fellows pelt you with dye and balloons filled with stones in honor of spring. I wander out at dawn and soon meet people whose faces and clothes are blotched with red and green stains. I retreat for the rest of the morning to the Club, whose guest board showed roughly a 50/50 split between Anglo and Indian names.

  I prowl around the Yacht Club’s library, mostly full of light fiction, but finally come across The Indian Field Shikar Book, compiled by W. S. Burke, sixth edition, published by Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta and Simla, 1928. Embossed on the flyleaf is “J. N. Tata,” presumably once the owner. The Tatas are probably India’s best-known business family, now running a vast business empire, having flourished down the years from their origins as opium concessionaires, just as Jardine and Matthiessen were further east.

  I turn to a chapter called “The Game Destroyers.” Burke advised that with the “marked decrease” in game in several parts of India, “it has become urgently necessary for sportsmen to turn their attention to the game destroyers of India.” Conservation is the order of the day. And who are these “natural foes”? Burke entertains no uncertainty on the matter. “The leopard is one of the greatest foes to the preservation of deer which, largely owing to his depredations, have been almost, if not quite, exterminated in many parts of India … and of all the leopards the Ounce or Snow Leopard (Felis unca) is the most inveterate and successful destroyer of the game to be found in the higher elevations of the Himalayas.”

  Below the leopard, Burke ranges the other game destroyers: wolves, wild dogs (“should be remorselessly destroyed”), civets and mongooses, martins and weasels, crows (“arrant egg thieves and chick destroyers”), owls (“ditto”), eagles, buzzards, falcons (“usually deserving of a cartridge, though we must not forget that their partiality for rats, snakes and other small and noxious animals is a recommendation to mercy which should carry some weight”).

  Night—Sainath, full of bitter denunciations of Indian food in America, takes me off to a Mughalai restaurant. He has butter chicken. I choose mutton curry. Despite Sainath’s acrid dismissal of all Indian restaurants in the US, the food tastes not too different to a decent Indian meal in New York or Los Angeles, though Sainath’s butter chicken was over-salted. Indeed, with some diligence you can find passable North Indian food in a few major American cities.


  Southern Indian food is another matter. How I will miss southern Indian cafés and restaurants. How I will yearn for the dosais (crepes or pancakes), the idlis (steamed cakes), both made from a mix of rice grits and urad dhal fermented overnight. I will pine too for fish and shrimp curries, for oothappam (onion pancakes) and rasam (thin soups), of which a popular one is the Tamil milagu-thannit (literally, pepper water), rendered as “mulligatawny” by the British and thickened into the brackish brown sludge served in clubs and British Railway hotels in the 1950s. By the time my trip is done I’ll have enjoyed Malabar, Chettinad, Mughalai, Gujarati, city Tamilian, Mangalorian and Goan cooking.

  Sainath says he puts on two kilos every time he visits Kerala, and I can see why. I miss the thali too, a stainless steel tray about the size of a pizza platter on which the smaller bowls of vegetable curries, curds, deserts and other elements of the thali palette are set and refilled until you’re done. Why is there no southern Indian cuisine in America? After all, the motel industry may be 70 percent run by clans from Gujarat, but there are a lot of Indians from other regions here too, including Andhra Pradesh which, says Sainath with the pride of a native son, has the fieriest food of all.

  I ask Sainath how he started working in the countryside.

  At the start of the ’90s Sainath was in his early thirties, born into a distinguished Brahmin family, educated by the Jesuits in Madras (a city renamed Chennai five years ago), then seasoned in the radical flames of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. By 1980, he was at United News of India, and three years later working for R. K. Karanjia, a famous journalistic figure of that era and proprietor of the muckraking weekly Blitz, which in the early ’80s commanded a national circulation of 600,000 and a readership ten times larger.

  Karanjia lost no time in making the teetotal and hard-working Sainath deputy chief editor. Soon Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, author of Blitz’s “Last Page” column, which he had written for over forty years, willed the column to Sainath, thus trumping from the grave Karanjia’s designated inheritor. Abbas, incidentally, was the author of the great novel Inquilab (Revolution), plus seventy-two other books, plus the scripts of many of India’s greatest movies.