A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Globalism has its alluring sides. It was good that turkeys, potatoes, and peppers got to Europe (though I have my doubts about the squashes, which evoke the bland horrors of pumpkin pie). That was early globalism. It was much more rapid in those days. The speed with which New World foods spread across Europe and Asia is astounding. The first Indian housewife got the basics for what we regard as part of the eternal Indian diet—curry—in about 1550, and within five years it was on every household menu in India.

  The Spanish brought turkeys back to Europe from Mexico, and by the 1530s they were well-known in Germany and England, hailed at the festive board as part of tradition immemorial. The Puritans had domestic turkeys with them in New England, gazing out at their wild relatives, offered by the Indians who regarded them as somewhat second-rate as food. Of course, wild turkeys have many enemies aside from the Beast called Man. There are swaths of Humboldt and Mendocino counties where coyotes and mountain lions now hold near-exclusive sway.

  Ranchers running sheep used to hold off the coyotes with M-80 poison-gas canisters that exploded at muzzle touch, but these are now illegal, and the alternatives are either trapping, which is a difficult and time-consuming job, or getting Great Pyrenees dogs to guard the flock. But the coyotes are crafty and wait till the sheep have scattered, then prey on the unguarded half.

  And not all Great Pyrenees have that essential sense of “vocation.” My neighbors down the river, the Smiths, who raise sheep, had a fine Great Pyrenees, Esme, partnered with the idle Tofu. Esme would rush about protecting sheep while Tofu lounged under the trees near the homestead, reading the paper and barking importantly whenever cars drove up.

  Before she died in childbirth, Esme produced Baxter, taken by my neighbors up the river, the Weaver-Wrens. Baxter grew bored at the Weaver-Wrens. I would see him trotting down the road, then up every driveway to gossip with the locals. Jasper would run him off, and Baxter would never make a fight of it but collapse instantly like a vast white eiderdown, paws in the air and throat exposed.

  It’s ended well for Baxter. He rapidly ingratiated himself with a new couple on the road, implanting in their minds the notion that he would be a good match for another vast white dog, Grendel, already in their possession. He correctly perceived they were from Berkeley, where he knew that at last he would be able to get a decent shampoo. They commute to the Bay Area and I hear that Baxter is now a familiar flâneur on Shattuck, pausing to review the menu outside Chez Panisse before crossing the road to greet the pizza crowd next to the Cheese Board.

  I’ll have to check with Baxter, but doubtless turkey is on the menu at Chez Panisse for Thanksgiving. Most Americans, even the stylish crowd at that fabled restaurant, won’t eat anything else on the big day.

  December 8

  When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s in every Democratic President’s playbook. TR was President from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon and nearly expiring on the River of Doubt. He was an imperialist con amore, charging up San Juan Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world, proclaiming America’s destiny as an enforcer on the world stage. He loved wilderness, mostly through the sights of a big-game hunter’s rifle—a wilderness suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in The Winning of the West, “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

  When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the trusts, railing against “the malefactors of great wealth.” But on TR’s watch the modern, centralized corporate American state came of age. LBJ loved TR for his “toughness.” Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked TR as his ideal. At least Johnson and Clinton had elements in them of TR’s most admirable trait—gusto, something of which Obama is dismally devoid.

  December 10

  Editor,

  According to petroleum expert Alexander Cockburn we have an oil surplus. This surplus is caused by excessive production from fields in North Dakota. If we’re suffering such a surplus, how come (according to the CIA website) more than half the oil we use is imported? Seems like this glut problem is easy to fix.

  Best regards,

  Bart Boyer, San Diego

  Alexander Cockburn replies: Yes, these days the US consumes about nineteen million barrels of oil every twenty-four hours, about half of them imported. At 25 percent, Canada is the lead supplier. Second comes Saudi Arabia with 12 percent. Third comes Mexico. But supply of crude oil to the US is only half the story. Saudi Arabia controls OPEC’s oil price and adjusts it carefully with US priorities in the front of their minds. If Alaska oil was not exported to the Far East, contrary to the US Congress’s original mandate for the North Slope oil only to be used in the Lower 48, and if US oil companies weren’t exporting diesel to Europe and Latin America because they can make more money that way, the US would be floating in even more of a glut than it is now.

  The amazing feature of the subdivision of moronic humanity known as the Peak Oilers is that they dwell in a moral stratosphere so pure that they forget entirely that oil companies, now and always, want to make money, as much as possible, and to this end rig supply, markets, and prices to that end. It’s sad that some of the best journalism on this theme ever produced in America, right down to James Blair and Robert Sherrill, is too coarse for the POs’ delicate sensibilities.

  December 18

  The great historian Gabriel Kolko makes a persuasive case that in the end the euro zone, indeed the EU, will go into meltdown. This is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas, and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better in the long run. It used to be as much a part of going to France as choking on Gauloise smoke to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu, instead of the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

  The EU “project” is in potential outline a totalitarian nightmare. Down with federalism! Remember Simone Weil’s hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to Europe’s cultural richness and diversity: “If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the barbarian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Mediterranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State.”

  As Weil’s biographer, Simone Pétrement, comments, “The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspiration that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn.”

  December 21

  I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?”—the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the beginning—always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.

  As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a US citizen by Bush’s Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early ’90s about how indigenous peoples—Indians in the Americas—were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress
and should not be mourned.

  On the plane of weekly columns in the late 1980s and ’90s it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the ’80s he wrote scores of columns for the Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980 election by the “October surprise,” denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the ’90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill—a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire—bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew.

  Actually I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

  Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger.

  He used to go on, back in the ’80s, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at the New Left Review and Verso in the early ’90s, who were happy to make money off Hitchens’s books on Mother Teresa and the like, that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened? Between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa.

  One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’s part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final postmortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention—which fueled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst.

  He courted the label “contrarian,” but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being.

  He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, noting that “despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish,” and noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys’ Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the definitions of the Nuremberg laws.) I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”

  As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extempore speeches and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at the Nation, but I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.

  December 22

  A couple of months ago came a mile marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as President to order secretly the assassination, without trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

  Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. The detention bill mandates—don’t glide too easily past that word—that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes US citizens within the borders of the United States.

  Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. The corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. They are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed “battlefield preemption” and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any “battlefield.”

  You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces,” an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a “battlefield.”

  2012

  January 6

  Rumor is running rife. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville has agreed that there are certain words that have counter-revolutionary potential, in the sense they have the power, as Fouquier put it, to debase and coarsen common speech by repeated and thoughtless use.

  There’s a grinding noise, a squeaking of axle, and round the corner from its long journey from the Conciergerie comes the first load of the condemned.

  First up: “sustainable.” It’s been at least a decade since this earnest word was drained of all energy, having become the prime unit of exchange in the argot of purposeful uplift. As the final indication of its degraded status, I found it in President Obama’s “signing statement” which accompanied the whisper of his pen, as on New Year’s Eve—a very quiet day when news editors were all asleep—he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 which handed $662 billion to the Pentagon, and for good measure ratified by legal statute the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die, abolishing habeas corpus. Don’t bother asking what happens to non-US citizens.

  As he set his name to this repugnant legislation the President issued a “signing statement” in which I came upon the following passage: “Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustainable framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists …”

  So much for “sustainable.” Into the tumbrils with it.

  Next up: “iconic.” I trip over this golly-gee epithet thirty times a day. No warrant for its arrest is necessary, nor benefit of counsel or trial in a US court. Off to the tumbrils, arm in arm with “narrative.” These days everyone has a narrative, an earnest word originally recruited, I believe, by anthropologists. So we read “according to the Pentagon’s narrative …” Why not use some more energetic formulation, like, “According to the patent nonsense minted by the Pentagon’
s press office …”? Suddenly we’re surrounded by “narratives,” all endowed with equal status. Into the tumbrils with it.

  I think “parse” has almost run its course, though occasionally this shooting star of 2011 is to be spotted panting along in some peloton of waffle from the Commentariat. Off with its head, along with “meme,” an exhausted little word that deserves the long dark rest of oblivion.

  January 13

  The world’s press is chocabloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he launch the bombers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a corner, methodically demolishing its economy by embargoes and sanctions so that in the end a desperate Iran strikes back?

  As with sanctions and covert military onslaughts on Iraq in the run up to 2003, the first point to underline is that the US is waging war on Iran. But well aware of the US public’s aversion to yet another war in the Middle East, the onslaught is an undeclared one.

  As for the embargo of Iranian oil, Obama is most certainly doing the oil industry a big favor. There have been industry-wide fears of recession-fueled falling demand and a collapse of oil prices. That has led to industry-wide enthusiasm (aided by heavy pressure from the majors) for strongly cutting total world oil production (and enjoying the bonuses flowing from the subsequent world price rise), with all the cuts to be taken out of the hide of the Iranians. The Financial Times made clear the need to shrink world production in the following key paragraph in a report last week: “Oil prices have risen above $110 a barrel since Iran threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint, accounting for about a third of all seaborne traded oil. Oil fell to a low of $99 in October amid global economic growth worries.”