A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Comrade Ayers, that’s not your lifelong partner the New York Times on the other side of the fence; that’s the graveyard. So much for the so-called left. Without the New York Times, the Federal Reserve, the public school system, the fundamentalists, and the IRS to yap at, they’d be lost.

  In the David v. Goliath struggle of the left pamphleteers battling the vast print combines of the news barons the tide has turned. On a laptop’s twelve-inch screen we stand as high as Punch Sulzberger, or Rupert Murdoch. Twenty years ago the Los Angeles Times was a mighty power. The owners of the Knight Ridder chain complacently counted on a 20 percent-plus rate of return on their properties.

  Today the LA Times totters from one cost-cut and forced employee retirement to the next. Knight Ridder’s papers of high reputation went on the auction block. Will the broadsheets and tabloids vanish entirely? Not in the foreseeable future, any more than trains disappeared at the end of the railway age. A mature industry will yield income and attract investors interested in money or power long after its glory days are over. But it’s a world in decline, and a propaganda system in decline.

  The left is so used to being underdogged that it is often incapable of looking a gift horse, meaning a dead horse, in the mouth and greeting good fortune when it knocks on the door. Thirty years ago, to find out what was happening in Gaza, you would have to have had a decent short-wave radio, a fax machine, or access to those great newsstands in Times Square and North Hollywood that carried the world’s press. Not anymore. We can get a news story from a CounterPuncher in Gaza or Ramallah or Oaxaca or Vidharba and have it out to a world audience in a matter of hours.

  June 19

  I have taken the first necessary step in my own quest for the White House by becoming a citizen of the United States at approximately 10 a.m., Pacific time, last Wednesday, June 17, in the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California.

  To my immediate left in the vast and splendid deco theater was a Moroccan, to my right a Salvadoran, and around us 956 other candidates for citizenship from ninety-eight countries, each holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn early that day that since our final, successful interview with immigration officials we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party. Inductees to US nationhood were downstairs; relatives and friends were up in the balcony, including CounterPuncher and friend Scott Handleman, attorney at law. I was determined to start out on the right path. What is more American than to have a lawyer nearby?

  Master of ceremonies was US Citizenship and Immigration Service agent Randy Ricks. The amiable Ricks actually conducted my final interview in USCIS’s San Francisco HQ. At the Paramount he pulled off the rather showy feat of making short welcoming speeches to the cheerful throng in French, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Russian, and I think Hindi. After various preliminaries, including uplifting videos about Ellis Island that tactfully omitted the darker moments in the island’s past, Ricks issued instructions. Each time, starting with Afghanistan, he announced a country, the cohort from that nation stood up and it was easy to see that China, India, the Philippines, and Salvador were very strongly represented.

  A handful of Zambians brought us to the end of the roster and we were all on our feet. We raised our right hands and collectively swore that we “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty” and that that we would “bear arms on behalf of the United States,” or perform “work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law.” The phrase rang a bell. During World War II in Britain, so my mother Patricia would recall from time to time, cats patrolling warehouses where food was stored would get extra rations for performing work of national importance.

  Minutes later I was outside on the sidewalk, registering to vote, albeit declining to state which party I would favor.

  My own path to citizenship began with a green card in 1973, allowing me to work for the Village Voice in New York and to be a legal resident. The man who helped me get that card was Ed Koch, at that time a supposedly liberal US congressman living, then as now, in Greenwich Village. A few years later, in 1977, he ran for mayor of New York City and I wrote about him harshly.

  Koch was heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, running on a law and order platform. Ed was always a petty man, and this trait was well displayed the night he won. A PBS interviewer asked him what his “worst moment” in the race had been and he promptly said in his trademark squeaky whine, “the attack by ALEXANDER COCKBURN in the Voice … To think I got him his green card!” In that race there had been slurs a lot nastier than any I made. If you walked around Queens in that campaign you’d see “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo,” scrawled on plenty of walls.

  There were others with thin skins. In my Voice column I made fun of a New Yorker writer, a woman dispensing lethal does of tedium on an almost weekly basis. I didn’t know that her lover was a New Jersey congressman powerful on the Immigration and Naturalization subcommittee. Within days I was the object of a probe by the INS. That New Jersey congressman could have pressured the INS to put me on the watch list, meaning the next time I returned to the US I could have found the door slammed in my face.

  In the mid-1980s a nutball colonel called Oliver North, working in the White House for Ronald Reagan, began to re-activate a national system of prison camps for lefties from a blueprint that had sat in government filing cabinets ever since the Palmer raids in the Red Scare following World War I. Dick Cheney most certainly dusted it off after 2001. On North’s plan, as with Cheney’s, it was safe to assume that potentially troublesome legal residents would have been locked up, then kicked out.

  These are negative reasons, of the sort that guided me in earlier years to elect to be Irish when I got my first passport. I had the choice between the UK and Eire, as it was then called. I was pondering this when our school radios announced in 1956 that the RAF had bombed Ismailia as a first blow in the Suez invasion. The lads in our Patchell’s house room in Glenalmond rose to their feet cheering. My sympathies were with the Egyptians. I remained seated and listened to a heated debate as to whether I should be tried and hanged as a traitor.

  Plenty of my schoolfellows in this Scotch school had fathers serving in the British armed forces and the mood in Patchell’s was very ugly. Looking at the choleric supporters of the Union Jack it seemed better to be Irish. My brothers Andrew and Patrick made the same decision about Irish citizenship a few years later. Patrick was vindicated in 2005 when Shia fighters at a road block in southern Iraq asked to look at his papers and when they saw his passport was Irish let him pass. Patrick reckons that if he had been carrying a UK passport they would have shot him on the spot.

  So much for the negative reasons. But I have plenty of positive thoughts about America and am very happy to be stepping aboard a sinking ship. After three and a half decades, why be a nonvoting (albeit tax-paying) visitor, particularly if you’ve been dispensing measured counsel for many years on how the country should be run? I’ve lived in every quadrant of the United States and driven across it maybe forty times—not hard when you live in the west and buy old cars from a friend in the southeast. I know the place as well if not better than many.

  August 19

  LIFE’S TOO SHORT …

  Dear Editor,

  I have been enjoying the AVA for the past year and deeply appreciate the good writing of yourself and your staffers. I probably disagree as least as much as I agree but it’s intellectually stimulating in any case.

  On Alex’s latest on the way overpublicized Gates saga I just have to laugh. He gives white America another pompous lecture on our racism but the nearest group of blacks to him is at the supermax prison at Pelican Bay. Since Gates’s verbal abuse of the officer is on tape it really doesn’t matter what Alex believes. He didn’t believe that the Soviets killed tens of millions and Mao even more but these facts are well documented by R. J. Rumnel
and other historians. Alex didn’t believe the stories of Castro’s torturers but of course all the Pinochet atrocity tales are solid gold. Whew!

  Then Alex drags out local “talent” Ismael [sic] Reed as the objective authority on Uncle Toms. I guess the black officer present at the Gates arrest is a Tom too because he supported the arrest.

  I love it when Alex refers to an Oakland cop shooting a black man as if blacks don’t shoot other blacks and sometimes whites far more often than the very occasional police shooting. But Alex has a schizoid side to him because he endorses libertarian books like Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan which explicitly attacks all legislation of the New Deal–Great Society era including government laws outlawing non-governmental discrimination. Maybe he can’t make up his mind whether he wants to be a libertarian or Stalinist when he grows up. Sort of like poor Lyndon LaRouche, who couldn’t decide whether he was a Communist or National Socialist. He now labels himself a FDR New Deal Democrat which combines both above concepts.

  I think the real reason for Cockburn’s transparent blackophilism is to make up for being widely hated in US Jewish circles, a venomous hatred that matches what Ismael Reed and white feminists feel for each other. As a frontier Tennessee housewife said while watching a brawl, “Go husband, go bear!”

  On the recent school teacher case I agree that the guy reads like a real pervert but I don’t agree with any prison sentence unless it was actually rape. In more rational places like Ontario the legal age of consent is fourteen. There’s something deeply sick about America as it has always related to sex. Goes back to our fundamentalist communist Puritan heritage and the fact that we have the largest group of Christ-Cult nuts in the Western world. We are split between the good Athenian part of our intellectual heritage and the bad Jerusalem part. As Nietzsche said, Christianity is the Jews’ revenge on the Gentiles.

  Well I’ve been living here since 1973 and the only good public policy I’ve seen here in that time is Prop 13. We still pay way too much taxes but if we were in some rathole like New Jersey it would be triple.

  Best Regards,

  Mike Hardesty, Oakland

  Alexander Cockburn replies: Among the Rules for Life to which I cling is a commitment not to read anything to which the name Hardesty is appended. I concluded long ago that reading his unique brand of ignorant venom was a worthless and degrading activity.

  October 14

  Of the four US Presidents who have been given a Nobel Prize—Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama—the one who’s shown the cleanest pair of heels when it comes to escaping the world’s guffaws for the absurdity of the award is Jimmy Carter.

  It’s easy to throw mud at TR. The excuse for his prize, awarded in 1906, was his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War. But what the committee of those worthy Norwegians was actually saying was that when it comes to giving a US President the peace prize, the bar has to be set awfully low. After all, TR was fresh from sponsorship of the Spanish-American War and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines.

  He accepted the prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly began planning the dispatch of the Great White Fleet (sixteen Navy battleships of the Atlantic Fleet) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials.

  Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919. The rationale was his effort to establish the League of Nations. His substantive achievement was to have brought America into the carnage of World War I and to have refined the language and ideology of liberal interventionism. Between TR and Wilson, it’s hard to say who was the more fervent racist. Probably Wilson. As governor of New Jersey he was a fanatical proponent of the confinement and sterilization of “imbeciles,” a eugenic crusade that culminated in the US Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Jews and other suspect genetic material from entering the United States. Much against their will, many of these excluded Jews made their way to Palestine. Others involuntarily stayed in place in Russia and Eastern Europe and were murdered by the Nazis. Above all, Wilson at Versailles was the sponsor of ethnic nationalism, the motive force for the Final Solution. And they say Obama’s award has brought the Peace Prize into disrepute!

  Carter got his prize in 2002 as reward for conspicuous good works. But there again, the message of the Nobel committee was—Take the rough with the smooth. It was Carter, after all, who amped up the new cold war, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras, and above all dragged the United States into Afghanistan. It was in 1978 that a progressive secular government seized power in Afghanistan, decreeing universal education for women and banning child marriage. By early 1979 Carter was hatching plans with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China to arm mujahedeen and warlords in Afghanistan to overthrow the government and attempt to lure the Soviet Union into combat. In December 1979, after repeated requests from the government in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sent forces to fight against the rebellion by the fundamentalists. The CIA launched the most expensive operation in its history to train and equip these fundamentalists and allied warlords.

  The Nobel Peace Prize committee loves paradox, which is why I tend to believe that it toyed with the idea of giving Hitler the award in 1939, before the Führer’s sponsor withdrew the name. But it remained adamant about denying the prize to another nominee in 1939—Mahatma Gandhi—as it had done in 1937 and 1938, and would again in 1947 and 1948. When it came to the man Churchill described as a “half-naked fakir,” the committee lost the forgiving appreciation of realpolitik it had evinced in the cases of men like Roosevelt and Wilson and became inflexibly high-minded. Jacob Worm-Müller, a Norwegian history professor who wrote a briefing memo for the committee, remarked censoriously that Gandhi “is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.” Year after year the committee found reasons to reject him.

  The chairman of this year’s committee, a ductile social democrat called Thorbjørn Jagland, was refreshingly frank about the selection of Obama. They could not, year after year, simply honor peace workers without marquee appeal. He didn’t mention it, but last year’s recipient, Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish President, drew a collective world yawn except among those fuming at his disgusting record as a broker in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia. So they decided to shop for the headlines.

  People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese, or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

  So one shouldn’t take these prizes too seriously but simply cheer when a prize committee somewhere does the right thing. What do Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Neruda all have in common? They won the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples, which was in business from 1950 to 1955. Then it became the International Lenin Prize, honoring many estimable toilers for human betterment, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Salvador Allende, Sean MacBride, and Angela Davis. Read that list and you rapidly get a fix on the outer limits of the Nobel committee’s range of political sympathy. Obama’s award was a gift dispensed from the battlements of capital, recognizing that empire is in a safe pair of hands.

  October 17

  The transition from the Tennessee chunk of Interstate 40 to the Arkansas section always makes me laugh. On I-40 you start in Wilmington, NC, and ahead of you lie 2,555.4 miles of road, running through eight states, all the way to Bar
stow, California. Through Tennessee you roll for a day and half on smooth tarmac, often three lanes each way—tribute to the state’s wealth and the patronage powers of Senator Albert Gore Sr., father of the portly Warmist.

  It was Gore Sr., along with a crafty Irish Rep. from Maryland called George Fallon, who was responsible for the bill enabling the financing of the Interstate system, appropriating $25 billion in 1956, sucking in a generous whack of the money for his own state, already engorged with federal pork for the Oakridge nuclear complex and the TVA. In honor of these achievements all Interstates entering Tennessee are labeled the “Albert Gore, Sr. Memorial Highway.” It’s no doubt why, out of forlorn hopes for emulation, Al Jr. preposterously claimed he’d invented the internet. The unimpressed citizens of Tennessee duly doomed Al Jr.’s presidential bid by voting for George Bush in 2000.

  I rolled through Memphis, battleground for a very significant victory for We the People. The blueprint for I-40 had the Interstate slicing through Overton Park on the east side of town. There’s an old-growth arboretum here, also the famous band shell, one of twenty-seven built by the WPA in the 1930s. Elvis Presley gave his first paid concert there, opening for Slim Whitman on July 30, 1954. Since the shell was a graceful piece of architecture the forces of darkness yearned to bulldoze it flat and put in something useful like a parking lot. Lovers of the shell beat back two such onslaughts, and the shell survives, gussied up. The I-40 builders neared Memphis at a bad moment, in 1969. For a decade after World War II the freeway lobby crushed all before them. The downtowns of city after city were destroyed or menaced by rapidly advancing glaciers of concrete. Si monumentum requiris, go to downtown Buffalo and weep.

  October 27

  Across the country last weekend there were anti-war demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.