A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  On the back of the pamphlet a paragraph calmly explains that it has been produced “for any woman living in the boroughs of Camden or Islington who is thinking about ending her pregnancy.” This paragraph is reproduced in Turkish, Bengali, Chinese and Greek.

  The bookcases carried good selections of fiction, biography, politics, and so on. I picked out a volume of The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, exchanged in the 1950s between two cultured gents, one a teacher, the other a publisher. Indeed, Rupert Hart-Davis published the first volume of my father’s autobiography, In Time of Trouble, in 1956. My eye falls on a quote from William Johnson who, under the name Cory, instructed upper-class youth at Eton between 1834 and 1872: One of the faculties a good education develops, Cory wrote, is to “express assent or dissent in graduated terms.” I was still laughing over this as I ate a plate of chicken kebab and fresh salad, in the Guzel Café round the corner, cost £4.50.

  April 21

  Walmart’s planning to move strongly into organic food. The company’s CEO, Lee Scott, said at Walmart’s last annual general meeting, “We know that customers at all ends of the income spectrum want organic and natural food. But, frankly, most of them just can’t afford the high prices the specialty stores charge. Well, we don’t think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods.”

  It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when organic food meant a bin of expensive potatoes looking like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, in the local hippy co-op. Wait a decade or two and every potato coming out of the state of Idaho will be labeled “organic,” a word already under very serious stress. The process will be entirely predictable. The big food companies will buy federal and state legislation designed to put the small producers out of business, same way the meat companies finished off the small packers and processors years ago, by insisting on hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stainless steel and other “sanitary” equipment, all intended to bankrupt the local sausage or ham maker.

  Repositioning of the definition of “organic” is already proceeding apace. Again according to BusinessWeek, “Last fall, the Organic Trade Assn., which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a rider to the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would weaken the nation’s organic food standards by allowing certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing, and packaging of organic foods. That sparked outrage from organic activists. Nevertheless, the bill passed into law in November, and the new standards will go into effect later this year.”

  It’s true, of course, that organic food—in any acceptable use of the term—is better for us and good that consumer demand is prompting this huge shift. But the priorities of corporate farming are not those of the small organic producer. The bottom line will be premised on large-scale production, relentless lowering of costs and attrition of standards.

  July 1

  Perry Anderson and his wife, Chaohua Wang, came to stay. Chaohua left me this poem:

  Jasper

  Blue sky, white clouds

  familiar from elementary school textbook

  Jasper leaping into the water

  a black sword through the silence

  Tidal sound of pine grove, unchanged

  a countryside summer dream

  Wars break suddenly, gunfire coming from afar

  Mid-East conflict, Nagasaki, Governor’s recall …

  A dagger, a javelin, a counterpunch,

  A Lu Xun secluded in his Wang River estate

  Has “fair play” been postponed?

  Second stanza refers to the rifle-practice in distance, the topic of your book on Palestine-Israel, and the conversations of the evening.

  Third stanza links the two images which Lu Xun—our Brecht—used to describe the thrust of his essays, and your magazine; then refers to the lyrical poetry of Wang Wei (seventh-century Tang poet), about his rural idyll by the river of the same name.

  Last line alludes to the title of Lu Xun’s famous piece of 1925, attacking compromisers with the established order, rejecting their calls for fair play with the authorities.

  September 24

  A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat.

  Edward Said, the greatest Arab of his generation, died in hospital in New York City Wednesday, September 24 at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the early 1990s.

  We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms we know to be marching with us, under the same banners, flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may not have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they are with us in the world.

  Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others beside. How many times, after a week, a month or more, I have reached him on the phone and within a second been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our updates: his trips; his triumphs; the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself.

  He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed, was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that would have felled a man half his age and ten times as healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on to Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York. And all the while he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery diatribes he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless, relentless clarity of Swift.

  The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial permission, putting together from three of his essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was seized, as so often before, by the power of the prose: how could anyone read those searing sentences and not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward’s generosity of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for his people came the humanity that called for reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

  His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism, homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in the nineteenth-century tradition of a Zola or a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius is a promontory in the infinite. I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual and political landscape that forced people, however disinclined they may have been, to confront the Palestinian experience.

  Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make available my apartment in New York, where I lived at that time, as the site for a surprise fortieth birthday for Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed. The evening arrived; guests assembled on my sitting room on the eleventh floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining-room table groaned under Middle Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were ascending in the elevator. Now we could all hear Edward’s furious bellow: “But I don’t want to go to dinner with ******* Alex!” They entered at last and the shout went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise and then recovered, and then saw about the room all those friends who had traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation.

  He never became blasé in the face of friendship and admiration, or indeed honorary degrees, just as he never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter of century ago he would call, with mock heroic English intonation, “Alex-and-er, have you seen the latest New Republic? Have you rea
d this filthy, this utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven’t? Oh, I know, you don’t care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself.” I’d start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read Martin Peretz, or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention.

  He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to dump sewage on his head.

  Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the abyss. I don’t even have to close my eyes to savor your presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d’Artagnan, the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory, as you will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you.

  September 25

  As one who once wrote a book titled The Golden Age Is in Us, I took myself off on a Saturday to look at an exhibition in the National Galley on Trafalgar Square, called “Paradise,” a traveling show which had already been shown in Bristol and Newcastle, attracting 160,000 people, apparently double what they would have expected normally in those galleries. People want to know the lineaments of paradise, whose earthly possibilities utopians used to spend much time usefully describing, though not much anymore.

  The exhibition turned out to be patchy, with the curator scraping together a show from available ingredients, such as a Boucher, a Gauguin, a Constable, a Monet, a Rothko, a couple of Renaissance paintings and so forth. But making my visit entirely worthwhile there was one marvelous painting, one of Stanley Spencer’s Cookham paintings about the Last Judgment, done in 1934. It shows a dustman resurrected in his beefy wife’s arms, she in “ecstatic communion with the dustman’s corduroy trousers” as Spencer put it. Other dustmen and women, plus a cat, surround the couple.

  “I feel in this Dustman picture,” Spencer wrote,

  that it is like watching and experiencing the inside of a sexual experience. They are all in a state of anticipation and gratitude to each other. They are each to the other, and all to any one of them, as peaceful as the privacy of a lavatory. I cannot feel anything is Heaven where there is any forced exclusion of any sexual desire …

  The picture is to express a joy of life through intimacy. All the signs and tokens of home life, such as the cabbage leaves and teapot which I have so much loved that I have had them resurrected from the dustbin because they are reminders of home life and peace, and are worthy of being adored as the dustman is. I only like to paint what makes me feel happy. As a child I was always looking on rubbish heaps and dustbins with a feeling of wonder. I like to feel that, while in life things like pots and brushes and clothes etc may cease to be used, they will in some way be reinstated, and in this Dustman picture I try to express something of this wish and need I feel for things to be restored. That is the feeling that makes the children take out the broken teapot and empty jam tin.

  Small things these, but there was also a big new thing in Spencer’s life, namely his attraction to a new arrival in Cookham, Patricia Preece and her companion Hilda. Patricia was famous as having been the cause of the death of W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the noted team of Gilbert and Sullivan. Aged seventeen in 1911 and under her birth name of Ruby, she caught the eye of randy old Gilbert, who invited her to come for a swim in the lake at his Harrow home. As she splashed about he conceived, or professed to conceive, the notion that she was out of her depth and might drown. Swimming out, no doubt planning to clasp her in a savior’s embrace, he had a heart attack and died in front of her. The press had a fine time describing her as a “fair-haired seventeen-year-old schoolgirl.”

  It’s the presence of Patricia, though not her image, that suffuses the painting with sexual ecstasy, even though it’s the ample Hilda, who’d fled from Cookham to her mother in Hampstead, who is in ecstatic communion with the corduroy trousers. It’s as earthy and beautiful an expression of the paradise of carnal passion as Joyce’s pages in Ulysses about Bloom looking at Gertie. Though Spencer was a member of the Royal Academy and had the right to hang four paintings in the annual show, it was rejected, prompting his furious resignation. This great painting was without a purchaser till a Liverpool gallery bought it in 1947.

  Whoever thought to put Spencer into the Paradise exhibit got it right. In ancient times death in the Golden Age was always incorporated into life as a sensate pleasure, followed immediately by an improved life, the way most folks including all those flocking to the show in Bristol and Newcastle would like it. In those earlier times they had Saturnalia which meant not so much drunken sex sprees as subversion of the conventional moral order.

  October 7

  People on the left spend a lot more time than they should complaining about the mainstream papers, most particularly the New York Times. They fume at the breakfast table, and often in print, or on the airwaves, bitterly decrying falsities in the “newspaper of record.” What do they expect? In fact, they should rejoice when the Times gets things wrong, which it mostly does, and take it as a singular event when it blunders into accuracy.

  The dreariest place on any campus is the J-school, and whenever any young person comes to me to write a testimonial for them to get into journalism school I rail bitterly at their decision, though I concede that these days a diploma from one of these feedlots for mediocrity is pretty much mandatory for anyone who wants to get into mainstream journalism.

  Now the Times is nursing its bruises from the Jayson Blair affair. There are so many smellier corpses in the New York Times’s mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the American Fourth Estate, that it’s hard to get too upset about what Blair did. This same Blair was a young black reporter on the New York Times, exposed and denounced at colossal length on May 11 by a team of reporters from his own paper. The guy is now in hiding, his career in ruins.

  From all the editorial hand-wringing you’d think he’d undermined the very foundations of the Republic. It reminds me of a New York Times editorial back in 1982, commenting on what began with my own exposé of Christopher Jones, a young man who had written an article in the New York Times magazine about a visit to Cambodia during which he claimed to have seen Pol Pot through binoculars.

  In this same piece Jones made the mistake of plagiarizing an entire paragraph from André Malraux’s novel La Voie Royale, and I pointed this out in a column in the Village Voice, adding the obvious point that Jones’s binoculars must have been extremely powerful to have allowed him to recognize Pol Pot, let alone describe his eyes as “dead and stony.”

  My item stirred the Washington Post to point an accusing finger. Then the Times itself unleashed a huge investigation of the wretched Jones and ran a pompous editorial proclaiming, “It may not be too much to say that, ultimately, it debases democracy.”

  I remember thinking at the time that as a democracy-debaser Jones looked like pretty small potatoes, and it’s the same way with Jayson Blair now. He made up quotes, invented scenes, and plagiarized the work of other reporters, and if senior Times editors had not been as optimistically forgiving as, say, the Catholic hierarchy in dealing with a peccant priest, Blair would, and should, have been promptly fired after his second major screw-up.

  But in the larger scale of things Blair’s improprieties are of no great consequence. The people into whose mouths he put imaginary words, and from whose imagined f
ront porch he pretended to see tobacco fields instead of tract homes are not notably put out. Ordinary Americans reckon that since you shouldn’t believe a word of anything you read in a newspaper or hear over the airwaves, what’s so different about Jayson Blair.

  The Jayson Blair scandal comes on the heels of what was one of the most intensive bouts of botched reporting, wild speculation and straightforward disingenuous lying in the history of American journalism, a bout which prompted an invasion, many deaths and now—given the way things are currently headed—the likelihood of mass starvation. In other words, the lousy reporting really had consequences.

  The invasion of Iraq was premised on the existence of weapons of mass destruction. None has yet been found and most of the US detective teams are now wanly returning home. Did the New York Times assist in this process of deception? Very much so. Just look through the clips file of one of its better known reporters, Judith Miller.

  It was Miller who first launched the supposedly knowledgeable Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza on the world, crucial to the US government’s effort to portray a nuclear-capable Saddam. Miller it was who most recently wrote a story about a supposed discovery of a chemical WMD site, based entirely on the say-so of a US military unit about an Iraqi scientist whom Miller was not permitted to identify, let alone meet and interview.

  Thus far there’s been no agonized reprise from the New York Times on its faulty estimate of the credibility of Hamza. And though Blair’s fabrications about the homecoming of Jessica Lynch were minutely dissected neither the Times nor any other US paper that I’ve read has had anything to say about the charges made in the London Times that the “heroic” rescue of Lynch was from an undefended hospital in circumstances very different and less creditable than those heralded by a Pentagon desperate for good publicity during a time when the invasion seemed to have faltered amid unexpectedly stiff resistance.