A Colossal Wreck Read online




  First published by Verso 2013

  © Alexander Cockburn Living Trust 2013

  Introduction © Andrew Cockburn 2013

  Afterword © Daisy Cockburn 2013

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cockburn, Alexander.

  [Essays. Selections]

  A colossal wreck : a road trip through political scandal, corruption, and American culture / Alexander Cockburn. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Alexander Cockburn was one of the most influential journalists of his generation. As the Atlantic noted, he was a towering figure who ‘would say all the outrageous things his bland counterparts lacked the wit, courage, erudition, or epater-spirit to utter on their own.’ In A Colossal Wreck, written prior to his death in July 2012, Cockburn reveals his great literary spirit, incisive reading of the situation, and campaigning vim into a single volume that will undoubtedly be seen as his masterpiece. Whether ruthlessly exposing the hypocrisy of Washington from Clinton to Obama, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed or silenced, Cockburn was the most gifted contrarian of his generation”— Provided by publisher.

  eISBN: 978-1-78168-182-4

  1. United States—Politics and government—1993-2001. 2. United States—Politics and government—2001-2009. 3. United States—Politics and government—2009- 4. Politics, Practical—United States. 5. Political culture—United States. 6. Political corruption—United States. 7. United States—Social conditions—1980- 8. World politics—20th century. 9. World politics—21st century. 10. Cockburn, Alexander. I.

  Title.

  E885.C625 2013

  320.0973’0905—dc23

  2013018400

  v3.1

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Shelley, “Ozymandias”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction by Andrew Cockburn

  Part 1

  1995

  1996

  1997

  1998

  1999

  2000

  Part 2

  2001

  2002

  2003

  2004

  2005

  2006

  2007

  2008

  Part 3

  2009

  2010

  2011

  2012

  Afterword by Daisy Cockburn

  Introduction

  By Andrew Cockburn

  Some fool back in the ’90s excoriated Alexander in the leftish English weekly the New Statesman for being “anti-American.” The context, as I recall, was a paean to the supposedly radical initiatives of the Clinton administration, as contrasted with the moribund conservative regime in Britain. My brother, as readers of the present volume will shortly be reminded, never had any illusions about Clinton (or Hillary, “one of nature’s bluestockings”), his reports on that theme thus exciting the indignation of this transatlantic Clintonista. It may have been the very stupidest of all the insults hurled over the years at Alexander. From the moment he landed here in 1972 (following the Mysterious Affair of the Balham Parrot, see this page), he embraced with arms flung wide what he called “the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.”

  His knowledge of those landscapes was profound, deepened over decades by wide-ranging and meticulously planned voyages of exploration into the hinterland, in which disparate samples of historical, biological, cultural, anthropological, and political interest were eagerly scanned and evaluated. See for example his description of Midland, Texas, as surveyed in July 2001. In a scant 900 or so words we learn about the incredible heat of the place; its economic position relative to neighboring Odessa; Audubon’s condition (sedentary) at the time he painted his electrifying series on viviparous quadrupeds (look it up, Alexander always believed people should use the dictionary); the vulgar gossip that Laura Bush, wife of George W., had a “racy twenties” before settling down; a review of the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum—“does for hydrocarbons what the Uffizi does for Renaissance Italy”—segueing into a history of oil in west Texas; the Bush family’s unsuccessful efforts to make a big pile of money in same; a telling reminder that while grimier Odessa has been a contender for Murder Capital USA, the more upscale Midland is the rape capital of Texas. A few days later he has moved on to a knowledgeable analysis of the political and journalistic trajectory of Katherine Graham, erstwhile proprietor of the Washington Post. (She had just died.) Many of us will never go to Midland and didn’t know Mrs. Graham, but as with so much of the landscape that fell under Alexander’s enthusiastic inspection, we need feel no loss. We can go there with him.

  He could get interested in anything or anyone, which is why he got on so well with children. Rarely did he encounter someone for whom he had no kind word whatsoever, though exceptions included Barbara Bush, wife of forty-one, mother of forty-three—“one of the meaner women I’d met in a long time”—and various highway patrolmen insistent that some ancient vehicle had managed to exceed the speed limit: “His ferrety little eyes swivel around the back of the station wagon, linger on some cactuses I’ve picked up in a nursery in Truth or Consequences, linger further on my Coleman ice chest and then came back to my car papers …” The station wagon in question, a 1964 Newport, had spent the previous six years sitting in a field. A wood rat had built a nest in the glove compartment, and three of the four door locks were frozen. This was just one of the fleet of classics whose mechanical shortfalls were guaranteed to supply the necessary elements of chance and serendipity on his expeditions, connecting him to an archipelago of AAA tow-truck operators, garage mechanics, motel desk clerks, barbeque chefs and other denizens of the hinterland he loved. It was a better way than most of connecting with various emotional wellsprings in the American psyche, as on the day we pulled into a gas station in eastern Oklahoma in a newly acquired ’59 Chrysler Imperial convertible sometime in the early 1980s and a fellow customer broke down in tears at the sight of the proud machine, exclaiming “that was when America was worth something; you ought to take that thing to Detroit and park it outside Chrysler headquarters so they’d be ashamed of themselves.” (Later, Alexander did just that, tracing the actual car’s precise heritage via its Vehicle Identification Number and the UAW to the production line that birthed it, manned at the time by middle-class Trotskyites from Long Island w
ho had migrated to Detroit years before in confident but misplaced anticipation of the proletarian revolution.)

  Traversing landscapes both beautiful and grotesque (“Martha’s Vineyard … that hateful island”), Alexander’s last book in no way stints on the scandal—those vulgar rumors about Laura B., for example—and political corruption as promised in his subtitle. In fact it delivers far more, presenting future generations with a highresolution view of the great pileup, the colossal wreck, of the system as it careened off the end of the twentieth century and into the rocky landscape of the twenty-first. As such, it should be on the reading list of all school and college contemporary history courses, an honest chronicle from one who followed faithfully the injunction of the nineteenth-century London Times editor quoted on this page regarding the role of the press and its prime duty of disclosure: “whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times.”

  So, fortunately, future students puzzled by the Gadarene rush of America’s economic overseers into the credit bubble and consequent financial smash-up may note his reaction to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s February 1995 statement of intent to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act that had kept Wall Street vaguely honest since the New Deal: “The Clinton administration, dominated in economic and financial matters by Wall Street’s man Rubin, is now aiming to give banks and the securities firms everything they have yearned for.” What followed, therefore, should not have come as a surprise. If in the future Mrs. Clinton is accorded treatment even more reverent than she receives today, it will be bracing to discover his trenchant comparison, early in 1996, between the then First Lady and the British Fabian reformer Beatrice Webb: “There’s the same imperious gleam, the same lust to improve the human condition until it conforms to the wretchedly constricted vision of freedom which gave us social-worker liberalism, otherwise known as therapeutic policing. The Clintonite passion for talking about children as ‘investments’ tells the whole story.”

  That was before Monica Lewinsky came along to entertain us all and, as Alexander never tired of pointing out, save Social Security. In thrall to Wall Street, Clinton had been well on the way to privatizing the system, but dependence on congressional liberal democrats, necessary for avoidance of impeachment, meant the bankers and gougers were balked of their promised booty. Normally harsh on Clinton, the ubiquitous hypocrisies of the affair elicited Alexander’s militant support for the embattled president, not least in his savage condemnation of his former friend Christopher Hitchens following the latter’s betrayal of his old friend Sidney Blumenthal. While the press reveled in Pecksniffian admonitions of the chief executive, Alexander was there to strike a more sympathetic, sadder note: “Bill Clinton, leader of the free world, couldn’t engage in a furtive embrace of a woman not his wife in the Oval office because he thought the gardener would peer in the windows. For the pitifully few moments of semi-gratification he and Monica Lewinsky were able to indulge each other, the two had to seclude themselves in a windowless corridor, a love site without even the close excitement of a broom closet.”

  Sympathy gave way to outrage when Clinton took to bombing people. “This was the Cowards’ War,” he wrote in June 1999 of the aerial war on Yugoslavia, “bombing a country for two and a half months from 30,000 feet. It was the Liberals’ War waged by social democracy’s best and brightest, intent on proving once again that wars can be fought with the best and most virtuous of intentions: the companion volume to Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village turns out to be It Takes an Air Force.”

  Derision of such manifestations of hypocrisy was a recurrent theme in his writing, leading him now and then into interesting associations (not least his veneration for Jerry Ford, “our greatest president”), and thereby inducing casual observers to label him a “contrarian.” This silly term, proudly adopted by some as self-description, denotes in reality a discard of principle in favor of reflexive posturing. That was emphatically not Alexander’s course. Whether it was the Fully Informed Jury Association, a cause normally associated with the right, or the fashion for hate crime legislation, or the ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Serbs from Krajina in 1995, Alexander was always stimulated by his unerring scent for an injustice. Our father Claud used to say that his own lifelong radicalism was no less inspired by regular doses of the Magnificat (“He hath put down the mighty from their seats”) in his public school chapel as from Marx, and my brother was no different, never really shifting his aim-point from deserving targets. “There was indeed a vast criminal class coming to its full vicious potential in the 1990s,” he observed in 2002, “a group utterly vacant of the most elementary instincts of social propriety, devoid of moral fiber, selfish to an almost unfathomable degree. The class comes in the form of our corporate elite.”

  Such forthright talk became commonplace after Wall Street’s collapse brought said elite into disrepute, but was not so fashionable in 2002. His contemporary musings on the inauguration of Bush-era monstrosities have a similarly percipient snap. Bush’s initial post-9/11 speech to Congress, for example, was “a declaration of lawlessness, with the concept of ‘justice’ being reduced to that of the freedom to shoot the other guy on whatever terms America may find convenient.” Two administrations and twelve years of drone killings later, we can see how right he was.

  Anyone commenting on the contemporary political scene, as Alexander did with unflagging energy for forty years, might possibly sound a little depressing at times. The wonder of his long road trip, ending in a cancer clinic in a small German town (whose history he immediately researched on arrival, unearthing many intriguing details), is that we never want to get off the ride.

  PART 1

  1995

  January 1

  To: Daisy Cockburn

  Last year a Mexican muralist with nothing to do was here, and so I got him to do an 18-foot-by-8-foot ceiling mural on the roof of my garage become library. Roof meaning ceiling. I said it should more or less address the theme of the meaning of the universe. So there were horses on the vault of heaven and then—being Mexican—he had a peasant crucified to a corncob and lower down a great big skull and lower down Adam and Eve looking really bummed-out. Then some nice birds and an owl with wings extended.

  After a year looking at this, I bumped into Daniel the painter back from Mexico and said that I was Anglo-Irish, not Mexican, and so I wanted everything more bushy-tailed. The peasant not crucified but waving a machete; no skull; and Adam and Eve looking excited as though they were off on a lovely picnic. He digested all this with relatively good grace and his (American) wife wagged her head in strong agreement. I felt like Pope Julius telling Michelangelo to give up this idea of god handing Adam a formal note of contract and just have the hands reaching out, know what I mean, Mike. Then what about instead of the skull, THE SPIRIT OF THE ETERNAL FEMININE. Daniel immediately wanted a Mayan-type woman crouching in eternal toil and suffering so I said No and dug up a painting by Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Prosperia, one of those pre-Raph girls, all eyes and raised shoulder and haunted mien, and said try this one for the pose.

  Then he needed a face so I think you are going to end up on the ceiling of the library holding a Humboldt lily which he’s made the size of a gladiolus. The lily will have to be curbed, and the eternal feminine is a bit at odds with everything else, so we’ll have to see. I hope you survive the final cut, as they say in Hollywood.

  January 2

  Dear Mr. Cockburn,

  You ask where Bill Clinton was during the Vietnam War and I can tell you; he was spying on the anti-war movement. I was told this by an acquaintance of David Druiding, whose wife learned this from Hoyt Purvis. Hoyt Purvis was the Chief of Staff for Senator Fulbright during the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton worked for Senator Fulbright during the war and was found out to be spying on him. Mr. Purvis is currently the director of the Fulbright Institute of International Relations at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

  Unclassified has speculated that Bill Clinton
may have been working for the CIA while he was at Oxford since other Rhodes scholars are known to have done this.

  Edward G. Qubain, Austin, Texas

  January 5

  The world has become a sadder and more boring place. On 1 January Gary Larson hung up his sketch pad, which means the end of the universe as Larson has successfully managed to reconstruct it in the past decade and a half. Larson is not the first satirist to tell parables through beasts. But, before him, cows never had the sensitivities of Proust, nor dogs the wisdom of Solomon. There have been great painters of nature, but none with that exquisite precision which catches the taut excitement of an anteater as it sits in its burrow watching television and shouting, “Vera, come quick. Some nature show has a hidden camera in the Ericksons’ burrow. We’re going to see their entire courtship behavior.”

  Often the before-and-after narrative is obscure, as in the great cartoon showing a duck and one of Larson’s patented mad scientists on a desert island, sinking ship in background, with the duck quacking triumphantly, “So, Professor Jenkins! … My old nemesis … We meet again, but this time the advantage is mine! Ha! Ha! Ha!” The joke comes out of the linking of the line from old kitsch thrillerdom to the abashed Jenkins–triumphant duck confrontation. But what were those past circumstances? And what will the duck do?

  There was an uproar in 1984 when Larson drew a cartoon of a woman shouting out of the window, “Here, Fifi! C’mon! … faster, Fifi!” The eager little hound is dashing up the path, aquiver with doggie trust, but we can see that the dog door is stoutly barred on the inside and that Fifi is going to fetch up against it with a tremendous wallop, a wallop that was as nothing to the torrent of complaint from the sort of citizens you meet in the newsagent’s, buying birthday cards for their pets. Brooding on the fuss, Larson wrote: “The key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable.”