A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  The conspiracy virus is an old strand: The Russians couldn’t possibly build an A bomb without Commie traitors. The Russians are too dumb. Hitler couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across Eastern Europe and half of Germany. Traitors let it happen. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Oswald—it had to be the CIA. There are no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, the Viet Cong, the Japanese, etc., etc. couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians. It’s all pathetic but it does save the trouble of reading and thinking.

  It’s easy enough to proclaim one’s readiness “to speak truth to power,” as the self-regarding tag line goes. As yet, that’s not a very perilous thing to do, here in America, at least on the part of the folks who like to use the phrase. But to speak truth to people overwhelmed with a sense of powerlessness and hence ready to credit Bush and Cheney with supernatural powers of efficient evil—that’s one of our functions at CounterPunch. There’s no point in marching forward under the banner of illusions.

  December 8

  The slithery junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, is ensuring himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. We’re entering the time frame when all such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite money and political base for a run. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided that he can’t, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the weakness of the left these days.

  It’s a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by waving a “maybe” flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.

  It’s depressing to think that we’ll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on. I used to think Senator Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I’d least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama is worse. I’ve never heard a politician so careful not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

  A couple of weeks ago Obama unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike mush about Iraq to an upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming to new realities, he’s now talking about a four-to-six-month time frame for beginning withdrawal from Iraq. Don’t mistake this for any real agenda. It’s a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a rubber mask from a Christmas stocking.

  December 27

  I bid a sad adieu to Gerald Ford. It has always been my view that Gerald Ford was America’s greatest President. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford’s tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. He finally pulled the US out of Vietnam. Now, “not doing harm” for an American President has to be a very forgiving phrase. True, on his watch, with a US green light, Indonesian troops invaded East Timor.

  As a visit to the Ford presidential library discloses, the largest military adventure available for display was the foolish US response to the capture of the US container ship Mayaguez by the Khmer Rouge on May 12, 1975. As imperial adventures go, and next to the vast graveyards across the planet left by Ford’s predecessors and successors, it was small potatoes.

  Ford was surrounded by bellicose advisors such as his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger; his Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller; his Chief of Staff, and later Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld; and his presidential assistant, Dick Cheney. The fact that this rabid crew was only able to persuade Ford to give the green light for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor—an appalling decision to be sure—is tribute to Ford’s pacific instincts and deft personnel management. Unlike George W. Bush, Ford was of humane temper and could mostly hold in check his bloodthirsty counselors.

  Kissinger was part of the furniture when Ford took over, after Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. With latitude to choose, Ford made sensible selections, none more fruitful than his Attorney General, Edward Levy, who in turn prompted Ford to nominate John Stevens to the US Supreme Court, where he has long distinguished himself and dignified Ford’s choice by being the most humane and progressive justice.

  As a percentage of the federal budget, social spending crested in the Ford years. Never should it be forgotten that Jimmy Carter campaigned against Ford as—this is Carter—the prophet of neoliberalism, precursor of the Democratic Leadership Council, touting “zero-based budgeting.”

  If Ford had beaten back Carter’s challenge in 1976, the neocon crusades of the mid to late 1970s would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.

  Instead of a weak southern Democratic conservative in agreement with almost every predation by the military industrial complex, we would have had a Midwestern Republican, thus a politician far less vulnerable to the promoters of the new cold war.

  Would Ford have rushed to fund the Contras and order their training by Argentinian torturers? Would he have sent the CIA on its most costly covert mission, the $3.5 billion intervention in Afghanistan? The nation would have been spared the disastrous counsels of Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

  During Ford’s all-too-brief tenure a mood of geniality was the rule. Even the attempted assassinations of the President by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Moore, in September 1975, had a slapdash, light-hearted timbre.

  2007

  January 11

  A make-or-break speech by a beleaguered US President is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush’s address last night was no exception.

  The AC-130 gunship that massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia’s southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on Sunday to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush’s determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: when the US President schedules a speech, don’t herd, don’t go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave.

  February 25

  The Clintons have always had short fuses. At the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition, and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic nomination are getting somewhat cloudier. This last week has been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al Gore, no favorite of the Clintons.

  On the heels of his $1.3m fundraiser for Hillary’s rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC’s candidacy.

  He confided to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times that Mrs. Clinton was not the candidate to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison, Clinton did pardon financier Marc Rich.

  This, and the Oscar triumph for Gore, have left Mrs. Clinton distinctly frayed. But she is defiant. Asked about her vote for the war at a New Hampshire town hall, she said: “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”

  February 28

  Which scion of which well-known newspaper dynasty assembled a squadron of bulldozers in May of 2005, mounted the lead bulldozer and led this rumbling squadron into a ferocious assault on the house his mother left him on her death in 2001? When it wa
s over, a house that had seen visits from President William Jefferson Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan lay in splinters and rubble.

  Mohu? It was the name of Katharine Graham’s large house, which roosted on over 235 acres on Lambert’s Cove Road on the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard. When the chairman of the Washington Post company died in 2001 she willed it to her second son, Billy. A couple of years ago Billy got into an increasingly acrimonious series of battles with the local township of West Tisbury at the property taxes he had to pay each year, challenging his assessments from fiscal years 2003 and 2004, when he paid the town more than half a million dollars in property taxes. The fight matured into the longest tax-appeal case in the history of the Commonwealth.

  Early 2005 the owner of Mohu evidently felt the need to express his feelings of profound loathing for … for whom? Start, obviously, with the tax assessors. End, maybe, with the person who hung the curse of Mohu round his neck. Take in also the people who used to run over from their nearby homes to use Mohu’s tennis court. In fact the very first bit of real property on the estate Billy’s bulldozer scraped into oblivion was indeed that same tennis court. Then it was the house’s turn.

  To me the oddest thing about this piece of demolition is that it happened in early May of 2005. Here we are at the end of February, 2007, and there’s barely been a whisper, beyond a tiny reference to Mohu having been demolished, in the Vineyard Gazette. Did all interest in the Graham publishing clan die with Katharine?

  It certainly seems that way. I checked last year to see how many articles there’d been about the role in the Washington Post’s editorial policy being played by her oldest son, Donnie. He’s the one who got the paper. Month after month, as the Post ran one pro-war story and editorial after another, I kept waiting for one of those insiderish stories to appear in Vanity Fair or some kindred publication about Donnie pushing the Post into a hard pro-war stance. Nothing.

  Suppose that when G.W.H. and Barbara Bush finally depart this world, they leave Kennebunkport to G.W. and Laura, who promptly whistle up the demolition crew and tell them to level the place. Will the local press content itself with paeans to W’s selfless act of homage to the poor of Maine and Natural Beauty Restored?

  Maybe, in the not too distant future, low income structures in Martha’s Vineyard will be enhanced by Mohu’s vertical grain doug fir flooring, thick canyon red quarry tiles, yellow pine bead board, plus lighting fixtures and hardware. John Abrams, the man who supervised the leveling, says that’s the way it’s going to be. It seems unlikely to me, though I can imagine this salvage stock being sold off to rich people restoring their homes and the proceeds donated to a housing charity.

  March 12

  Since there undoubtedly will be a next time, after these latest campus killings at Virginia Tech, what useful counsel on preventative measures can we offer faculties across America? There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby, but it’s all hot air. America is not about to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms.

  A better idea would be for appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons. This is not as outré as it may sound to European ears. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC training regularly carried rifles around campus.

  Five years ago Peter Odighizuwa, a forty-three-year-old Nigerian student, killed three faculty members at Appalachian Law School with a handgun, but before he could wreak further carnage two students fetched weapons from their cars, challenged the murderer with guns leveled, and disarmed him. The stupidity of the campus cops at Virginia Tech will undoubtedly cost the college hefty damages.

  There was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials.

  When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho-Seung Hui finished off the last batch of his thirty-two victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatized students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.

  More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They recommended counseling, then didn’t bother to review the conclusions. And it has emerged that Cho was actually institutionalized as a psychotic and suicide risk in 2005. Yet when he returned to campus the administrators didn’t even tip off his roommate.

  College administrators live in constant fear of declining students enrollment. At the first sign of trouble they cover up. So, there’s a double killing in a Virginia Tech dorm at 7.15 a.m., after which Cho has time to go home, make his final home video, walk to the post office, mail his package to NBC and then head off to the engineering building with his guns.

  The college’s first email to students goes out more than two hours after the first killings were discovered. The ineffable Warren Steger, college president, says later: “You can only make decisions based on the information you have at the time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.” Two dead bodies, a killer somewhere on campus, and Steger makes his big decision to do nothing.

  May 3

  By far the best performance at the recent Democratic candidates’ debate organized by MSNBC was by a very distant outsider, Mike Gravel, a seventy-seven-year-old former US Senator from Alaska, well known nearly forty years ago for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In some electrifying tirades, he flayed Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the others as two-faced on the absolute imperative of getting out of the war in Iraq and not getting into one in Iran. “They frighten me,” Gravel shouted, gesturing at his rivals. “You know what’s worse than one US soldier dying in vain in Iraq. It’s two soldiers dying in vain. In Vietnam they all died in vain.”

  June 12

  These are troubling times for evangelical Christians. The born-again President they helped elect is in the autumn of his tenure, the bold promises of Christian revival now tarnished or cast aside. Their great champion, Jerry Falwell, has gone to the Judgment, leaving only the Reverend Pat Robertson as their national champion. Mitt Romney, the front-running Republican contender to be Bush’s successor, is a Mormon, and although leading evangelical Christians have given him the nod, many foot soldiers in the service of Christ entertain doubts. “The world needs Jesus, the REAL JESUS, not Jesus the half-brother of Lucifer,” cries Kevin Stilley on his Christian site.

  Then, there’s the never-ending struggle with the Evil One in the arena of sexual temptation where, as a one evangelical put it, “Satan and his demons more aggressively attack and tempt those in Christian leadership because they know that a scandal involving a leader can have devastating results, on both Christians and non-Christians.” Still fresh in the ears of the righteous are the chortles of unbelievers over the tribulations of Pastor Ted Haggard, leader of the New Life Church and one of the nation’s most prominent and politically connected evangelicals. He was outed last year in Colorado by a former male prostitute declaring that Pastor Ted had enjoyed sex with him, their monthly interactions enhanced by crystal meth. In February of this year Pastor Ted had crash counseling across three weeks, overseen by four ministers, to give, as one put it, “Ted the tools to help embrace his heterosexual side,” but there have been doubts, even among evangelicals, as to whether Satan and his demons have in this instance been decisively routed after so brief an engagement.

  And now evangelicals face fresh evidence that the Darker Forces miss no opportunity to make further ravages among the righteous. Earlier this week ChristiaNet.com, “the world’s most visited Christian website,” disclosed the results of a survey it has just concluded, asking site visitors questions about their personal sexual conduct. A thousand Christians answered, and ChristiaNet has now evaluated these responses with the analytic assistance of Second Glance Ministries (“a second glance a
t God’s plan for sex”), led by Clay Jones, founder and President of SGM.

  “The poll results indicate that 50 percent of all Christian men and 20 percent of all Christian women are addicted to pornography,” Jones reports bleakly. It seems that 60 percent of the women who answered the survey admitted to having “significant struggles with lust,” 40 percent admitted to “being involved in sexual sin in the past year,” and 20 percent of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

  “There have been dynamic paradigm shifts in the behavior of Christians over the last four years,” Jones declares. “Technology [i.e., the internet] has allowed pornography to flood the market place beyond a controllable level.” The phones at Second Glance Ministries are ringing off the hook with calls for counseling from porn addicts. ChristiaNet.com’s President Bill Cooper reports that “we directed over 100,000 inquiries to Second Glance Ministries in one year,” and that “we are seeing an escalation of the problem in both men and women who regularly attend church.”

  Sex surveys regularly conducted by the University of Chicago suggest why Satan and his legions are finding it easy to beguile these evangelical Christians. Their sex lives are more vital than those paddling in the tepid mainstream, and hence they are more easily led into temptation. One such Chicago survey I have claims that Americans are almost entirely straight (maybe 2 or 3 percent gay at most), and the vast majority revel in the loyal married state and have sparse sex. Evangelicals do better. Among women, conservative Christian evangelicals have the highest rates of orgasm.

  June 20

  In 1938, three years before the first death camps of the Final Solution, Nazi chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters published a full account, in the German science journal Anzeiger fur Sahahlinskund, of the El Paso “disinfection” plant. He included two photos and diagrams of the machinery that sprayed Zyklon B on railroad cars. (Peters went on to acquire Zyklon B’s German patent.)