A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  “In crackpot realism,” Mills wrote, “a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands … The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists … instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe … They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines … they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what …”

  September 5

  Though the numbers are dwindling, some people still go through their whole adult lives thinking that the next Democrat to hunker down in the Oval Office is going to straighten out the mess, fight for the ordinary folk, face down the rich and powerful. I got off the plane in New York in 1972 at the age of thirty-one with one big advantage over these naive souls. I’d already spent twenty years seeing the same hopes invested in whatever Labour Party candidate was on the way to 10 Downing Street.

  By the time I reached my prep school at the age of nine, the first postwar Labour government was already slipping from power. Back in the summer of 1945, if any party was ever given a mandate, it was surely Labour, propelled into office by the millions who had spent the war years awakened by unusual circumstance—a familiar effect of war—to a fresh awareness of the barely inconceivable incompetence and arrogance of the British upper classes and memories of the prewar Depression when the Conservatives ruled the roost. With one voice they said, there must be a better way.

  The Tories thought they were going to win. After all, Churchill was presiding over the defeat of the Axis in the war, and the apparatus of gerrymander was still in place, including an electoral register unchanged from 1935, thus rendering those in their twenties as disenfranchised as American felons today. University graduates and businessmen could vote twice. There were predictably archaic methods to undercount the overseas armed forces vote from troops overwhelmingly for Labour. But Clement Attlee’s Labour Party swept to tremendous victory.

  When the dust settled, Labour had 393 MPs out of a total of 640, the greatest majority in their history, with the Tories limping along with 213 MPs, almost exactly the reverse of what happened thirty-eight years later when Thatcher trounced Foot and got a majority of 143, which she swiftly put to radical use. In 1945, with an invincible majority of 146 and vast popular hunger for radical change, the challenge was great but Labour’s leaders—Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, and the others—rose and mastered it, managing successfully in the next five years to keep the British class system intact in all essentials. Of course the Conservatives savagely attacked the onset of “socialism,” but the “welfare state” had more to do with the wartime command economy than with any attack on the dominion of capital.

  Across the channel the French used their Marshall Plan handouts from the US to reorganize their infrastructure and plan the railway network the British now worship as they surge in a few hours from Paris to Marseilles. The British themselves, Miss Muffets of propriety, paid off old debts and rejected new ideas. French-style planning? “We don’t do things like that in our country,” Bevin scoffed. “We don’t have plans, we work things out practically.”

  My awareness of this first Labour government was limited, though I do remember my father telling me that “we”—this was 1947 when I was six—now owned the railways. I was no early bloomer. A year later the British Special Branch, tapping my father’s phone as part of a continuous program of surveillance of the man, lasting from 1934 to 1954, monitored me urging him to come home to read me Christopher Robin, a conversation finally released into the National Archives in 2004 and perused by my brother Patrick, who swiftly reported the Christopher Robin request to me.

  Christopher Robin! By the time he was seven John Stuart Mill was already re-reading Aeschylus, although he confessed later he did not know what an emotion was until he was twenty, which shows the downside of intellectual precocity. We went off to live in Ireland, followed by the Special Branch onto the boat where, so the archives now show, they made “a discreet search” of my father’s suitcase, prowling through his socks and shirts in search of the Communist Master Plan, while 4,000 drunks heading home for Easter wondered why the ship wasn’t getting under way.

  Irish politics, as ripe in intricate corruption as those of Naples or Bangkok, had scant relevance to the vices of the Labour Party or the Democrats of the United States. I returned to England for the late 1950s and ’60s. Great was the rejoicing when, in 1964, Harold Wilson led the Labour Party to slim victory, ousting the Conservatives after thirteen long years. Years of disappointment immediately followed, with a celerity that had to wait until 1993 to be equaled by the almost instant collapse of the Clinton administration as any kind of reforming force. By 1972 Edward Heath sat in 10 Downing Street.

  Now I was nearly thirty and yearned for escape. I could see English politics stretching drearily ahead. After Wilson’s return there would be James Callaghan. After Callaghan, Michael Foot. After Foot, Neal Kinnock. After Kinnock … One day in the late summer of 1972 I had occasion to be in the portion of south London known as Balham. It was hot, and the streets infinitely dreary. I must get away, I muttered to myself, like Razumov talking to Councillor Mikulin in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes.

  I turned in the direction of the subway station. A dingy sign caught my eye, in a sub-basement window. I knocked, and the sibyl, in Indian saree, greeted me. She had Tarot cards and a parrot, a method of divination with an ancient lineage in India. She dealt the cards. The parrot looked at them, then at me, then at the fortune teller. Some current of energy passed between them. The sybil paused, then in a low yet vibrant voice, bodied forth the future to me, disclosing what lay ahead in British public life. Her lips curved around the as yet unfamiliar words “New Labour.” Falteringly, raising her hands before her eyes in trembling dismay at the secret message of the cards, she described a man I know now to have been Tony Blair. I paid her double, then triple as, amid the advisory shrieks of the parrot, she poured out the shape of things to come.

  Within a week, obeying the promptings of the parrot, I had booked a flight to New York and a new life. Ahead of me lay a vast political landscape, seemingly of infinite richness and possibility. Never for a moment have I regretted my journey westward. That parrot in Balham had read the cards correctly. It is probably still alive, and I’m sure that if I were to return for another consultation, it would cry out, “I could have told you so,” and cackle heartily as it described the blasted expectations raised by Democrats stretching from Carter to Clinton.

  We approach the midterm elections; soon thereafter the great masquerade of Election 2008 will commence. There will, I can guarantee it, be once again hopes for change, courtesy of a Democrat. I will remain without illusions. Like the Labour Party, the Democrats offer no uplifting alternative and not even the pretense that they differ in essentials from the Republicans in the way they propose to deal with the rest of the world.

  I might even offer a maxim here: the greater the hunger for change, the more thunderous the popular cries for decisive, radical action, the more rapid will be the puncturing of all hopes, as though the whole point of the electoral exercise, of 1964 and 1966 in the case of Wilson, and of 1992 in Clinton’s, had been to demonstrate to those foolish enough to have thought otherwise the lesson that all hopes and fierce expectations notwithstanding, business will continue as usual.

  It’s the same lesson European governments now regularly give European voters. The French vote against neoliberalism, despite the stentorian advice of the entire political establishment. The voters prevail, with a thunderous “Non!” The political establishment, as represented in the major parties, pays no attention. Same in Germany, same in Italy, same in Britain. Same in the United States.

  As is now widely recognized, most of all by the v
oters, there is no effective opposition here, any more than there is in the UK. But if the parties are identical in their essential programs, give or take miniswerves from the norm such as tactical environmentalism by the Democrats to keep Green and Hollywood money flowing in, then why is there such vitriol between them? Much of it is plain stupidity. Many people in middle age keep the prejudices of their youth intact. What we need from the political scientists is a fresh consideration of political constituencies and their material interests. The current maps are useless. The parrot did a much better job.

  October 8

  I drove into Eureka to speak at an anti-war rally. I asked one of the organizers—one I knew to be keen on the 9/11 conspiracy scenarios—whether this was planned as basically a conspiracists’ convocation. The inviter said No. “Maybe one speaker on 9/11.” I went along, to the parking lot north of the jail in the middle of town. There were about 200 people. It was a glorious day.

  Speaker #1 was the chairperson, many days into a fast. He told the crowd that he was a 9/11 conspiracy convert. The war in Iraq didn’t get much of a mention in his address. Speaker #2 was a 9/11 conspiracy advocate. He gave a long, detailed and incomprehensible speech, whose main effect was to cut the crowd by about a third. The only audible bit of his allocution was a savage denunciation of Alexander Cockburn. He also barely mentioned the war in Iraq. Speaker #3, an academic, read a lengthy speech loaded with refined ironies about Bush. I don’t know whether he mentioned the war because two young people, one with a button saying “9/11 was an inside job,” were beginning to harangue me. Speaker #4 was my neighbor, David Simpson, who announced he was a global warming cultist and spoke briefly on that theme.

  I was the final speaker. It had been over two hours, and the crowd was much depleted. I said, “we are united by one common desire: LUNCH.” Big applause. I talked about the war, about 9/11/73, the coup against Allende in Chile, as the starting gun for the Empire’s counterattack amid defeat in Vietnam. I talked about the current political situation, and even the prime story of the hour—unmentioned hitherto—the Foley scandal, which may well turn the House of Representatives over to the Democrats. Let’s hope so. We need gridlock. My speech went down well with the seventy or so survivors in the parking lot (and the prisoners in the jail maybe).

  October 22

  Tony Judt, the liberal writer for the New York Review of Books, has just discovered the realities of criticizing Israel. Here’s a message he released in early October:

  I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGOs, academics, etc., from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.

  I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel. Whatever your views on the Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.

  Judt’s disclosure elicited a few stories, including one in the Washington Post by Michael Powell, who wrote:

  The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling. “This is serious and frightening, and only in America—not in Israel—is this a problem,” he said. “These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.”

  The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing “wild conspiracy theories” about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.

  “I think they made the right decision,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s taken the position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.”

  It’s good that Judt is making a fuss about the ghastly Foxman, but I do have to smile wryly at his sudden discovery that criticizing Israel can be an edgy business. Actually, it was far, far riskier twenty or even ten years ago. It’s much easier now, as Chomsky indicated in his note to me and as I and Jeffrey St. Clair have found with talks promoting our book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

  Not so long ago, when Chomsky went to a town to talk, the ADL would trail him and file minute by minute reports on his movements and statements. Someone once sent him anonymously one such dossier. On the front page of the Xerox was written “for Alan Dershowitz.” Chomsky told me long ago that he and Dershowitz were scheduled to have a debate in a week or so, and evidently the file was being sent to Dershowitz, for him to cull the usual slanders and lies.

  The ADL had spies everywhere, sending back feverish reports, mostly hysterical fabrications, about what they claimed to have heard in meetings. That was a joke. Not a joke was what happened at UCLA and Cambridge where there were undercover cops at Chomsky’s meetings because they’d picked up serious threats. And that was nothing compared what Edward Said had to live with.

  Or Norman Finkelstein. What Judt faces isn’t a minuscule fraction of what Norman faces regularly—e.g., being condemned by the Progressive (sic) as a Holocaust denier or by its editor as a “Holocaust minimizer” on the grounds that he accurately quoted Raul Hilberg.

  The difference now is that some of these efforts to crush debate get reported. That wouldn’t have happened ten or twenty years ago, at least in the Washington Post or Reuters.

  November 7

  Let me direct you to a recent series of polite coughs, reminiscent of a sheep quietly clearing its throat somewhere on a fog-bound hillside in the north of England. The aforementioned coughs emanated at the start of this week from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), a body set up under the purview of the British Treasury a few years ago to monitor financial markets and protect the public interest by raising the alarm about shady practices and any dangerous slide towards instability. In a briefing paper under the chaste title, “Private Equity: A Discussion of Risk and Regulatory Engagement,” the FSA raises the alarm:

  Excessive leverage: The amount of credit that lenders are willing to extend on private equity transactions has risen substantially. This lending may not, in some circumstances, be entirely prudent. Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable. This has negative implications for lenders, purchasers of the debt, orderly markets and conceivably, in extreme circumstances, financial stability and elements of the UK economy.

  Translation: “It’s about to blow!”

  The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis. These operational issues arise out of the extensive use of opaque, complex and time consuming risk transfer practices such as assignment and sub-participation, together with the increased use of credit derivatives. These credit derivatives may not be confirmed in a timely manner and the amount traded may substantially exceed the amount of the underlying assets.

  Translation: “The world’s credit system is a vast recycling bin of untraceable transactions of wildly inflated value.”

  November 10

  Lame duck—“A White House controlled by an unpopular, highly partisan lame duck …” Wherever you look, there’s lame-duck Bush limping across the White House lawn, or hobbling out to give a press conference.

  According to Brewer’s ever-useful 1910 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable “a lame
duck in Stock Exchange parlance means a member of the Stock Exchange who waddles off on settlement day without settling his account. All such defaulters are black boarded and struck off the list. Sometimes it is used for one who cannot pay his debts, one who trades without money.”

  November 28

  There are plenty of real conspiracies in America. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property czars and city officials in New York conspire to withhold fire company responses, so that enough of a neighborhood burns down for the poor to quit and for profitable gentrification to ensue. That’s a conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing, also murder.

  It’s happening today in Brooklyn, even as similar ethnic cleansing and gentrification is scheduled in San Francisco. Bayview Hunters Point is the last large black community in the Bay Area, sitting on beautiful bay front property. So now it’s time to move the black folks out. As Willie Ratcliff, publisher of SF Bay View writes, “If the big developers and their puppets, the mayor [Democrat Gavin Newsom] and his minions win this war, they’ll have made what may be the largest urban renewal land grab in the nation’s history: some 2,200 acres of San Francisco, the city with the highest priced land on earth.”

  That’s a real conspiracy, even as many in the Bay Area left meander through the blind alleys of 9/11 conspiracism.

  Machiavelli points out that every conspirator you add to the plot has less chance of preserving secrecy than the previous one. The 9/11 group in fact did tell people about their plans in various ways but the prevailing belief that Arabs couldn’t do it prevented any of the revelations from being taken seriously. The view that a bunch of Arabs with box cutters weren’t up to it was precisely the cover they needed.