A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  May 22

  The hysteria about teen violence is more than matched by the alarums about a pubescent rutting boom, with “children having children” and children giving one another AIDS. Bill and Hillary seldom stop sermonizing on this. Adults listen agog to the boastful lies of teenage boys and then rush to judgment. In 1970, 20 percent of boys and 4 percent of girls in junior high schools claimed on self-reporting surveys to have had sex. In 1992 the figure had risen to 27 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls.

  And if rising legions of pubescents were “sexually active,” how come the pregnancy rate among ten to fourteen year olds hasn’t similarly skyrocketed? In 1976, 3.2 babies, abortions, and miscarriages per 100 junior high school girls; in 1988 3.3. Amid this supposed “junior high sexual revolution,” 98 percent of the girls arrived at age fifteen never having been pregnant. Junior high students must be America’s most skilled condom deployers. Seventh graders should be enlisted to hold seminars for US grownups, who sport the industrial world’s highest rates of unplanned pregnancy.

  Just 1 percent of all births in the United States each year and 8 percent of all teenage births involve partners under eighteen. From the point of view of both pregnancy and AIDS, the riskiest option for teenagers (for both girls and boys in the latter instance) is to have sex with adults. Prudent teenagers should stick to their own cohort.

  Responsible for these misrepresentations have been core liberal nonprofit groups such as Planed Parenthood, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Urban Institute, all massaging the Clinton Administration’s Blame Kids First strategy. In the small print of its technical reports you’ll find Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund—of which Hillary used to be a board member—mentioning the role of adult misbehavior, abuse and/or impregnation in connection with teenage mothers, but not in the fund’s PR campaigns. Similarly, Planned Parenthood and the Alan Guttmacher Institute hype the “epidemic of 1 million teenage pregnancies every year,” ignoring seventy years of birth statistics showing that, in the main, teenage mothers have adult partners.

  On the bottom line here is sotto voce Malthusianism. Much of the screaming at teenagers about condoms, pregnancy and AIDS risk is a way of saying don’t ever have children if you’re poor (and of course, don’t have fun).

  May 29

  The liberal prostration before Clinton is unprecedented. When Jimmy Carter veered right in the late 1970s, the unions put together the Progressive Alliance and Teddy Kennedy ran as the radical challenger (itself somewhat of an irony considering that Ted has probably damaged more worker’s livelihoods than almost anyone in the US Senate by leading the charge on deregulation of trucking and airlines).

  The only challenge now is from Ralph Nader, and he doesn’t seem to be putting much heart into his run in California under the Green Party label. Former California governor Jerry Brown, who now has a talk show on Pacifica, is saying that when he interviewed Nader recently, the latter didn’t even mention he was running for President.

  Meanwhile the New York Times Magazine gave Clinton a warm kiss in the form of a profile by its White House correspondent, Todd Purdum. Specimens from the hero-gram: “He is charming, informal, PC-profane as he sips ice water and searches face to face for approval, his beefy hands and long, oddly delicate fingers cutting the air. Even after announcing that he is losing his voice, he talks for thirty more minutes. The performance is, in the end, overwhelming.”

  White House correspondents tend to find almost any President overwhelming. The late John Hersey even managed to be overwhelmed by the executive majesty of my favorite Commander-in-Chief, Jerry Ford. The New York Times Magazine ran the Hersey piece almost exactly twenty years ago. Nothing much changes in the relation between press and power.

  Probably the greatest fawner has been Time’s Hugh Sidey. Back in the early ’60s he had a piece in Life about JFK headlined, “He Eats Up News, Books at 1,200 Words a Minute.” All over America people rushed to sign up in speed-reading classes. Fatalities were recorded as word sprinters blew their cerebral cortices. In 1994 Sidey admitted to the Washington Post, “I haven’t any idea how fast he read. The figure was kind of hoked up.”

  July 17

  News just in from England: it turns out George Orwell was a police nark. In 1949 he supplied a Secret Service unit based in the British Foreign Office with just the sort of list Senator Joe McCarthy flourished a few years later. Orwell, then dying of TB, gave Celia Kirwan of the covert Information Research Department eighty-six names of people he regarded as “crypto-communist” or “fellow travellers.” One of the names was former Labour Party leader Michael Foot. Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick, is quoted in the Guardian for July 12 as saying Orwell had kept a notebook of “suspects,” in which “many were plausible, a few were far-fetched and unlikely.” Of course, once Orwell had played the informer, Big Brother opened files on them, however “far-fetched” or “unlikely” they may have been as Commie collaborators. Let’s see what Orwell lovers have to say about this.

  The revelations about Orwell’s blacklist came in the form of documents released at the British Public Records Office last week. The papers show that the Information Research Department was particularly keen to promote Animal Farm. One Foreign Office official in Cairo remarked that “the idea is particularly good for Arabic in view of the fact that both pigs and dogs are unclean animals to Muslims.”

  July 28

  At least in the old days Bob Dole used to have suavity and aplomb. He flicked insults at his enemies with a caddish leer. Now his barbs have all the force of marshmallows, and he whines just like another loser, Mondale, a dozen years ago.

  He got into trouble for trying to claim that cigarettes aren’t addictive. Now it’s true that the word “addiction” is seriously overworked. The trouble really took off when the twelve-steppers took the stupid position that even one teensy sip made you an alcoholic, as debased on the ladder of self-indulgence as the man who puts down half a bottle of gin before breakfast.

  The AA crowd didn’t invent “alcoholism.” That came somewhere in the 1890s when the self-respecting “drunkard” or “sot” was transmuted into the pitiful, helpless “alcoholic.” Throughout most of its etymological and semantic career “addict” had a judicial connotation, as in “to deliver over formally by sentence of a judge,” which is the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, published in the early 1930s, but depending on work done fifty years earlier.

  Morphine was what brought “addict” to its modern, pejorative meaning. The supplement to the 1930s OED, published at the same time, has “addict” defined as “one who is addicted to the habitual and excessive use of a drug … as in morphia addict.” People like Sherlock Holmes, shooting up his 7 percent solution, brought the word to its new, low station, though Orientalists would probably claim that after the opium wars of the mid-nineteenth century in which the British forced the Chinese to accept imports of opium, the imperial power developed the notion of the addicted Chinese masses to excuse their own low behavior.

  August 7

  A Democratic President has just destroyed a big chunk of the New Deal and not one major Democratic figure has defected because this President destroyed the tiny protections for those down on their luck, for children, for single mothers, for immigrants between jobs, who have been paying taxes for maybe ten or twenty years. Donna Shalala didn’t quit. Robert Reich didn’t quit. Peter Edelman of HHS did quit. Marion Wright Edelman cancelled a demonstration before Clinton’s decision “because I didn’t want to be Sister Souljah,” then issued a bitter statement, but she didn’t say she was shifting her support to Ralph Nader. Ron Dellums’s office was saying that he understood Clinton’s need to “hold the center.” Barney Frank said that Clinton had done more for the poor than Ralph Nader. (There may be a personal edge there since Nader once said publically it was disgusting of Frank to run a homosexual prostitution ring out of his congressional office.)

  Here, for the third time in thirty yea
rs, we have a historic opportunity for the rallying of left forces beyond the Democratic Party. It happened in 1968 with Eugene McCarthy; and in 1984 and 1988 with Jesse Jackson. Now we have another chance. And who steps forward as our public champions? Bernie Sanders, the “independent” hot-air factory from Vermont, requests everyone to vote for Bill Clinton. The Labor Party, born in Cleveland a month ago, insisted that no labor candidates be fielded for the foreseeable future, and further stipulates that no labor-affiliate field independent candidates. Prominent Labor Party folk are simultaneously on the Democratic National Committee. Unions active in promoting the Labor Party have made a deal with the Democrats that the Labor Party will do nothing impertinent or subversive, such as actually run candidates against Democrats. From day one, with all that nonsense about doing nothing till 100,000 advocates are signed up, the entire Labor Party effort has been an exercise in demobilization, achieving the miracle of a Third Party that is the wholly owned subsidiary of the party it is challenging.

  This leaves us with Ralph Nader, who has the public status, the knowledge and the right political instincts.

  August 21

  Back in 1980, I spent a day on Senator Ted Kennedy’s campaign plane amid his futile effort to wrest the Democratic Party nomination from Jimmy Carter. We flew to South Bend, Indiana, to get a photo op of Kennedy with some steel workers in front of a smokestack. Then we rushed to Nebraska to get another shot of the Senator in front of a grain elevator, with farmers. Back then to New York to line up the next day’s opening shot, which would be the Senator eyeballing urban devastation in the South Bronx.

  I suggested to Kennedy’s press man that it would surely be more a rational use of everyone’s time and money to have a central campaign studio in the Washington suburbs, entrusted to one of the big Theme companies. Here the essential “theme rides” of American electioneering could be permanently installed, under appropriate corporate logos. Campaigning politicians would be able to use the facility, getting the corporations to pick up some of the tab and collecting the balance from the press corps.

  The “Conventionworld” theme exhibit mounted by the Republicans last week found its home most appropriately in San Diego, where techniques of theming and artful manipulation of space find expression at the famous zoo. Old-fashioned zoos had animals pacing about in cages, with labels giving information about their origins and the Linnaean category of the denizens. The human visitors gazed from a safe distance. It was thus with political conventions, where informed commentators would discuss the social anthropology of state delegations which would in turn often defiantly display themselves in vulgar shows.

  These days zoo staging has transmuted from older modes of confinement, whether the cages or moated enclosures—derivative from romantic painting—designed by the German Carl Hagenback at the start of the century. The trend now—pioneered by Jon Coe and Grant Jones, who constructed the Woodland Park gorilla exhibit in Seattle in the mid-1980s—is called “landscape immersion,” with visitors enveloped in the appropriate habitat of the exhibit. As Mellissa Greene put it in an interesting article for the Atlantic for December 1987, describing Woodland Park, “There are no fences or walls against which to calculate depth, and the visitor’s peripheral vision is deliberately limited … Wider vision might allow a visitor to calculate his position and give him an inappropriate glimpse” of something at odds with the affecting gorilla experience.

  Conventionworld this month in San Diego showed that the Republican impresarios have taken all this to heart. There was no moat between podium and audience. Landscape immersion was so complete that when, for example, Republican Asian-Americans were being “themed,” TV onlookers were allowed no peripheral vision of the white human landscape surrounding the relatively few Asian-Americans present.

  SeaWorld, owned by the Anheuser-Busch Corp. and host to about four million visitors a year—same as the zoo—was a favored venue for convention events, nourished by the kitsch atmospherics of purity and la mer, with dolphins and orca recruited with behavioral techniques to exhibit the fundamental harmony of creation, under corporate auspices.

  SeaWorld is non-union, with minimum wage levels for the attendants. (At least the zoo is Teamster-organized, through there should be more interspecies union work. Why leave it all to the human society?) In the polar bear exhibit (a big new pool with enhanced underwater availability) three of the bears had salmonella poisoning and were confined to what the guide brightly termed their “bedrooms.” This meant compulsory overtime for eighteen-month-old Chinook, who was putting in thirteen-hour days. I thought Chinook looked frayed and angry, but the guide insisted the cub was doing “a real good job” in exhibiting polarbearishness to the audience. Chinook could do with a union rep same way poor Dunda the elephant needed one a few years back when it was discovered she was being savagely beaten for disciplinary infractions. Don’t snarl, organize!

  Every now and again orangutans organize an intifada. The last was in 1990, when the Bornean apes carefully built up reserves of rocks and caused $570,000 worth of damage to the 1.5″ glass.

  September 11

  When I was sixteen I developed a passion for the baroque and in my enthusiasm hitch-hiked part of the way by barge up the Rhine—price of the ride, playing chess with the captain—to Würzburg to admire the Bishop’s Residenz with its ceilings by Tiepolo, which supposedly prompted Napoleon to say that if he could not be emperor of France he would want to be bishop of Würzburg.

  I made my journey in 1957 and now find from his very fine article in the Catholic Worker of June–July 1996, that Gordon Zahn was there at the same time. Zahn recalls how, at 9.20 p.m. on March 16, all the bells of Wurzburg began to ring, a reminder of the time, twelve years earlier, when British bombs hurtled down, destroying 85 percent of Wurzburg in twenty minutes and killing 3,000 men, women and children now buried in a common grave in Wurzburg cemetery. The Bishop’s palace was heavily damaged, though the Tiepolo ceilings were spared.

  Wurzburg had no military significance. There was no reason for the raid, beyond the desire to exterminate and destroy. Like myself, Zahn had walked about Wurzburg back in that 1957 spring, brooding on the Apocalypse twelve years before. He’d been a wartime conscientious objector, and reflected on his Wurzburg visit that the bombing “must be described … as a work of calculated barbarism and the slaughter of its inhabitants as calculated murder.” But this piece in the Catholic Worker discusses a new memoir, The Withered Garland, by the RAF commander Peter Johnson, who led that raid. After reading The Withered Garland, Zahn now confesses that “impossible though it may have seemed then, I believe that, were Peter Johnson and I ever to meet, we could be good friends.”

  Johnson’s father was a captain in the British Navy, killed in 1914, at the very start of World War I, in a German submarine attack. Young Peter grew up with a great hatred of Germans. World War II found him in the Royal Air Force. In 1942 he applied to join Bomber Command. Here he was soon furnished with vivid evidence of the moral context for his activities. Soon after he had assumed active command of his squadron, a visiting high-up from London was inspecting photographs of the results of a raid on Dusseldorf. The VIP woofed with satisfaction: “Capital, capital. This is really getting somewhere. I do congratulate you.” Johnson looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the photos.

  “I had never seen anything like them. Seen through the stereoscopic glass, the detail was staggeringly clear, showing just rows and rows of apparently empty boxes which had been houses. They had no roofs or content. This had been a crowded residential area, long streets of terraced houses in an orderly right-angled arrangement, covering virtually the whole of the six-inch square photograph. There were one or two open spaces, but the chief impression was just those rows and rows of empty shells, a huge dead area where once thousands of people had lived. There were no craters, simply those burnt out houses.”

  Johnson began to have “reflections and doubts.” He wondered why incendiaries were necessary in t
he raids on the Krupp’s munitions works at Essen and Kiel. “Nothing but the end of the war,” he wrote in an undelivered letter intended for a girlfriend killed in a German raid on London, “can stop the destruction of practically every city in Germany.” Johnson was beginning to fathom the fact, as Zahn writes, that “though Hitler may have proclaimed and boasted of the Third Reich’s commitment to Totaller Krieg [Total War] … it remained for British and American airpower to develop, perfect and practice it without moral restraint.”

  Johnson evokes British bombing policy, in particular “de-housing,” introduced by Lord Cherwell, scientific advisor to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was reckoned that a ton—2,000 pounds—of bombs dropped on a town center would destroy forty buildings and de-house one to two hundred people. Factoring in rates of warplane production it was happily computed by Cherwell and his men that soon a third of the entire German population would be “turned out” of house and home.

  In February 1942 Lord Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, declared that “operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, of industrial workers,” adding later “I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not for instance the dockyards or aircraft factories.” Churchill, with his usual bluntness, called upon the Minister of Aircraft Production for “an absolutely devastating extermination attack by very heavy bombers.”

  Assigned, on the morning of March 16, 1945, the target of Wurzburg, Johnson did ask, “Why?” “Bit of railway junction,” he was told. Johnson wondered what to do. He could refuse to order his squadron into this mission, which would mean court martial and maybe execution. It would not prevent the raid and, Johnson reflected, would mean his wife and children would get no pension. He enquired again about the merits of the target, and was told by the intelligence officer with great irritation, “I’ve said it’s an important railway center [which Johnson knew was not so] and also there are thousands of houses totally undamaged, sheltering tens of thousands of Germans. I hope that will not be the case tomorrow, which will be another nail in the enemy’s coffin.”