A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  By 1960, Joe was on the student council, running a weekly coffee hour with a speaker: “I invited Dizzy Gillespie twice, Ralph Gleeson, Jean Renoir, the movie director who’d been sitting in his office with nothing to do. His son taught at Cal. I invited Linus Pauling and Martin Luther King Jr. I asked Mrs. Sobel when her husband Morton was in prison as a spy. Anti-communists came and made her cry. Young Caspar Weinberger running for state assembly drew no one to the meeting, so we went and had lunch. John X came from the Open Temple, the first time any Black Muslim spoke in the Bay Area.”

  Joe invited Gus Hall, general secretary of the CPUSA, and Eric Hoffer. He got into trouble when he invited Vincent Hallinan to discuss the Gary Powers trial, which Vincent had attended in Moscow. Sheldon Wolin had given a lecture on Richard Hooker “coveting eccentricity.” A student who’d attended Wolin’s lecture accused Joe of “coveting eccentricity” by inviting Hallinan, and the majority agreed with him.

  Malcolm X was supposed to speak on campus in May of 1961, Joe reminisces, “but the University high command rejected him, saying he was a minister who might convert people to Islam. So Stiles Hall offered him a venue at the last minute, with no time for publicity and room for only 160. It was electric, the most extraordinary speaker I have ever heard. He changed everyone’s life forever. You’d ask him a question, he’d look you in eye and repeat your question, then really go into it. Pretty soon people got scared of asking dumb questions. All blacks sat together and not one of them acknowledged you when they left. Within a month, half the blacks were giving Malcolm’s speech.”

  The 1960s rolled into motion. Stiles had long had a concept of incubating groups and activities that could soon stand alone and form independent groups. Berkeley’s residential co-ops were a good example. Student activists soon followed the same policy. Fired by the gatherings in Stiles Hall, campus meetings became more politically conscious, more boisterous. Protests against bans on collecting money became more vigorous. It was not long before the Free Speech Movement was under way.

  Many Stiles members became active in the civil rights movement—going to Mississippi, getting arrested, beaten. Many had been hosed off the steps of the San Francisco City Hall as the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings. Thelton Henderson went south for the Justice Department—he was the first African American in the Civil Rights division—for two years until he was fired for loaning his car to Martin Luther King Jr. to drive to Selma. Henderson has remained all these years on the Stiles Board and was honored at the 125th anniversary.

  At seventy-six, Henderson is senior judge in the federal Northern California division. It was Henderson who, in 2005, found that substandard medical care in the California prison system had violated prisoners’ rights. In 2006, he appointed Robert Sillen as receiver to take over the health-care system of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; he replaced Sillen with J. Clark Kelso in 2008. The Internal Affairs Division of the Oakland Police Department remains under his supervision.

  “One could say that going to lunch at Stiles from 1957 to 1963,” Joe concludes, “and going to the events, if combined with going to Pauline Kael’s little movie theater and reading her extensive program notes, was a complete education. A carefully chosen small set of classes at UC would do the rest.”

  In June of 1965, the California Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities released its Thirteenth Report. Chairman Hugh Burns was also the President pro tempore of the state Senate. In the section on “Communists on the Campus,” it excoriated President Kerr and the regents for removing the Speaker Ban.

  [After] Albert J. Lima … came the deluge. In came Malcolm X, William Buckley Jr., Mark Lane, Dr. Fred Schwartz—an endless procession of political candidates, folk-singers, and an incredible procession of controversial figures ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left, with heavy emphasis, in our view, on the left. The students no longer had to walk across the street to Stiles Hall, the YMCA facility where Communist speakers had been holding forth for years, because the university was now bringing the Communists to the campus …

  It is difficult for us to understand how a disciplined Communist who addresses a crowd of students for thirty minutes can actually teach them anything worthwhile about Communism. Certainly not anything they could not learn much better from the thousands of books on the subject in the university library. The Communist is obviously there to indoctrinate and recruit, so he benefits. But the student, presumably there to learn, gains nothing except a satisfaction of his morbid curiosity and thirty minutes of entertainment.

  If, as a result of several years of exposing students to the propaganda emitted by Communist lecturers, one student is drawn into the Communist conspiracy against his own country, who is really to blame? We conclude it must be the persons who are charged with the high responsibility of caring for and teaching the students entrusted to them. The Communist speaker is clad with the reflected prestige of the university where he is a guest; and we are unable to understand why the people should contribute to their own destruction by making their public institutions available to those who are dedicated to the task of overthrowing our government by any means available … It is our considered view that to throw wide the portals to any controversial speaker, who wishes to utilize the opportunity to harangue a college audience, is to put curiosity and entertainment above the educational process, and to appeal to the morbid and emotional rather than to the scholarly and the intellectual.

  May 22

  How long does it take a mild-mannered, anti-war, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, “decapitation” strategies, and remote-control bombing of mud houses on the far end of the globe?

  Obama campaigned on a pledge to “decapitate” al-Qaida, meaning the assassination of its leaders. It was his short-hand way of advertising that he had the right stuff. And, like Kennedy, he’s summoning the exponents of unconventional, short-cut paths to success in that mission. Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal now replaces General David McKiernan as Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan.

  McChrystal’s expertise is precisely in assassination and “decapitation.” As commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly five years starting in 2003, McChrystal was in charge of death squad ops, with its best advertised success being the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Iraq. McChrystal, not coincidentally, was involved in the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad’s Camp Nama. (He also played a sordid role in the cover-up of the friendly fire death of ex-NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman.)

  Whatever the technique, a second certainty is the killing of large numbers of civilians in the final “targeted assassination.” At one point in the first war on Saddam in the early 1990s, a huge component of US air sorties was devoted each day to bombing places where US intelligence had concluded Saddam might be hiding. Time after time, after the mangled bodies of men, women, and children had been scrutinized, came the crestfallen tidings that Saddam was not among them.

  The logic of targeted assassinations was on display in Gaza even as Obama worked on the uplifting phrases of his Inaugural Address. The Israelis claimed they were targeting only Hamas even as the body counts of women and children methodically refuted these claims and finally extorted from Obama a terse phrase of regret.

  It didn’t take long. But it’s what we’ve got—for the rest of Obama-time.

  May 24

  Go to any Tea Party rally and three quite different political components are in evidence. There are the libertarian populists, chaotic in philosophy, strong on the right to bear arms, hostile to all forms of taxation, bankers, and big business. There are the social conservatives massed behind Sarah Palin. And, lurking nervously behind the speaker’s rostrum, there are the Republican politicos like former Texas Representative Dick Armey, hoping to harness the Tea Party to the c
hariots of the Republican Party establishment.

  The politicos have now learned with acute dismay that many Tea Party members, particularly the libertarian populists, regard the Republican leadership as a significant part of the problem. Following Rand Paul’s shattering upset in Kentucky, one member wrote on his blog, in an idiom which accurately catches the echt, slightly nutty Tea Party flavor: “There are now two forces in America—not Democrats and Republicans, but a patriotic pro-American anti-Wall Street faction which cuts across both parties, and a traitor faction that supports the financial parasites, a pro-British column in the US, which also cuts across the two parties.”

  Scroll through the political positions Paul took in the primary and one can see at once that the Tea Party is firmly lodged in a political lineage in Republicanism that has been muted for decade after decade since Barry Goldwater was crushed in his presidential bid against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Its ancestry goes back to the Isolationists who fought vainly to keep America out of both World Wars and who saw the American Empire as a betrayal of the Republic’s historical destiny.

  This brings us to another powerful strain in the genetic coding of the Tea Party as a right-wing populist movement—a strong racist antipathy to blacks and browns, symbolized most vividly for them by Barack Obama, whom many Tea Partiers believe was born in either Kenya or Indonesia and therefore has no right to be lodged in the White House, however many votes he won in 2008.

  Kentuckians displayed no particular interest in Paul’s deprecation of those bits of the Civil Rights Act forbidding private businesses to put “whites only” notices on their premises. But at the national level it was a different story. Twenty-four hours after his victory, Paul was on national television, carefully explaining to the very liberal Rachel Maddow of MSNBC that while he abhors racism, he does indeed think private businesses have every right to pick and chose the customers they want.

  America is a discontented place. Unemployment remains high. Liberals are disappointed in Obama but lack any of the fire that the Tea Partiers have in their bellies. The established parties are widely despised, as is “big government.” Rand Paul’s victory is the augury of a turbulent time. The demands for “change” are far greater than Obama and the Democratic and Republican leadership ever bargained for.

  June 5

  As they drafted his speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo on Thursday, President Obama’s speech writers strove to suggest that cordiality towards Islam is soundly embedded in America’s cultural history. The first Muslim congressman, Obama confided to his vast audience across the Muslim world, was sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran.

  Obama reminded the world that Morocco had been the first nation to recognize the infant United States, signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, which declared in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. The second US President, John Adams, said that America had no quarrel with Islam. As my father Claud said, Never believe anything till it is officially denied. Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states.

  America needed free access to the Mediterranean and the Barbary “pirates” controlled the sea lanes, and, furthermore, supposedly had some Christian slaves, all no doubt using the opportunity of captivity to imbibe the first principles of algebra, whose invention Obama took the opportunity in Cairo correctly to lay at the feet of the mathematicians of Islam, though ancient India deserves some credit too. He also credited Islam with the invention of printing and navigation, which should surely require the Chinese People’s Republic to withdraw its ambassador in Washington, DC, in formal diplomatic protest.

  An early version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, written in 1805 amid the routing of the Barbary states, offered a view of Islam markedly different from Obama’s uplifting sentiments in Cairo:

  In conflict resistless each toil they endur’d,

  Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation:

  And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d

  By the light of the star-bangled flag of our nation.

  Where each flaming star gleamed a meteor of war,

  And the turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare.

  Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave

  And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

  In 1814 Key rehabbed this doggerel into the “Star-Spangled Banner.” So America’s national anthem began as a gleeful tirade against the Mohammedans. And of course every member of the US Marine Corps regularly bellows out the USMC anthem, beginning “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

  In short, America’s march to Empire was minted in the crucible of anti-Islamic sentiment.

  June 12

  I came to America in 1972 to the Village Voice, which Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer founded in 1955 to bring light to those whole sectors of civic life kept in darkness by the major newspapers of the day, starting with the New York Times. As a tot I’d been given bracing tutorials about the paradigms of journalism and class power by my father, Claud, who’d founded his newsletter the Week in the 1930s as a counterbalance to the awful mainstream coverage in those years. From Europe, I’d already been writing for Kopkind and Ridgeway’s Hard Times and also for Ramparts, respectively a newsletter and a monthly founded—like much of the old underground press—to compensate for the ghastly mainstream coverage of the upheavals of the ’60s and the Vietnam War.

  In other words, any exacting assessment of the actual performance of newspapers rated against the twaddle about the role of the Fourth Estate spouted by publishers and editors at their annual conventions would issue a negative verdict in every era. Of course there have been moments when a newspaper or a reporter could make fair claims to have done a decent job, inevitably eradicated by a panicky proprietor, a change in ownership, advertiser pressure, eviction of some protective editor, or summary firing of the enterprising reporter. By and large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have—often rabidly—obstructed and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and political condition.

  In an earlier time writers like Mencken and Hecht and Liebling loved their newspapers, but the portentous claims for their indispensable role would have made them hoot with derision, as they did the columnist Bernard Levin, decrying in the London Times at the start of the 1980s the notion of a “responsible press”: “we are, and must remain, vagabonds and outlaws, for only by so remaining shall we be able to keep the faith by which we live, which is the pursuit of knowledge that others would like unpursued and the making of comment that others would prefer unmade.”

  But of course most publishers and journalists are not vagabonds and outlaws, any more than are the professors at journalism schools or the jurors and “boards” servicing the racket known as the Pulitzer industry. What the publishers were after was a 20 percent rate of return, a desire that prompts great respect for “the rule of law,” if such laws assist in the achievement of that goal. In 1970 this meant coercing Congress to pass the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, exempting newspapers from antitrust sanctions against price-fixing in a given market. Nixon signed the law and was duly rewarded with profuse editorial endorsements in 1972.

  South of me in Mendocino County, California, is the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a weekly edited by my friend Bruce Anderson. I’ve written a column for it for over twenty years. The AVA does everything a newspaper should do. It covers the county board of supervisors, the court system, the cops, water issues, the marijuana industry. It’s fun to read and reminds people of what a real newspaper should be, which is why half its circulation is outside the county, often the other end of the United States. The AVA lives resolutely up to the injunction by Joseph Pulitzer it carries on its masthead, “A newspaper should have no friends.”


  I asked Bruce about proposed bailouts of the mainstream press: “Do you like these bailout ideas?” “No I don’t. I don’t even want them to rest in peace. I want them to twist and turn in their graves eternally. Why? They don’t do any local reporting and haven’t for about twenty-five years. I’m talking here about the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, owned by the New York Times Company, and the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  Does this remind you of a paper near you? Weep not for yesterday’s papers, for the old Fourth Estate. At every critical hour, in every decade, it failed us. And yet they do weep. It’s like the dogs in Konrad Lorenz’s book running up and down either side of the fence, barking at each other. One day they take the fence down and after a moment’s bewilderment the dogs continue as before. The other night I watched Bill Ayers at some bookstore being filmed by C-SPAN. He was asked what he thought about the press. Ha! I said to myself, here’s a fine opportunity for the Terrorist Ayers to throw some bombs, hail the rise of the internet. Come on, Bill, greet the new day. But no, Ayers said that he liked to settle down at the breakfast table with the New York Times and the Nation and have his daily little bicker with them. Bark, bark, bark. It adds up to what Mark Ames just referred in an email to me as that “inexplicable cowardice that everyone here in print is infected with. Jesus, they don’t even shoot or club people here like they do in Russia [where Ames founded the splendid Exile] and still they exercise more freedom, take more risks there in print than they do here.”