A Colossal Wreck (64 page)

But of course most publishers and journalists are not vagabonds and outlaws, any more than are the professors at journalism schools or the jurors and “boards” servicing the racket known as the Pulitzer
industry. What the publishers were after was a 20 percent rate of return, a desire that prompts great respect for “the rule of law,” if such laws assist in the achievement of that goal. In 1970 this meant coercing Congress to pass the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, exempting newspapers from antitrust sanctions against price-fixing in a given market. Nixon signed the law and was duly rewarded with profuse editorial endorsements in 1972.

South of me in Mendocino County, California, is the
Anderson Valley Advertiser
, a weekly edited by my friend Bruce Anderson. I’ve written a column for it for over twenty years. The AVA does everything a newspaper should do. It covers the county board of supervisors, the court system, the cops, water issues, the marijuana industry. It’s fun to read and reminds people of what a real newspaper should be, which is why half its circulation is outside the county, often the other end of the United States. The AVA lives resolutely up to the injunction by Joseph Pulitzer it carries on its masthead, “A newspaper should have no friends.”

I asked Bruce about proposed bailouts of the mainstream press: “Do you like these bailout ideas?” “No I don’t. I don’t even want them to rest in peace. I want them to twist and turn in their graves eternally. Why? They don’t do any local reporting and haven’t for about twenty-five years. I’m talking here about the Santa Rosa
Press Democrat
, owned by the New York Times Company, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
.”

Does this remind you of a paper near you? Weep not for yesterday’s papers, for the old Fourth Estate. At every critical hour, in every decade, it failed us. And yet they do weep. It’s like the dogs in Konrad Lorenz’s book running up and down either side of the fence, barking at each other. One day they take the fence down and after a moment’s bewilderment the dogs continue as before. The other night I watched Bill Ayers at some bookstore being filmed by C-SPAN. He was asked what he thought about the press. Ha! I said to myself, here’s a fine opportunity for the Terrorist Ayers to throw some bombs, hail the rise of the internet. Come on, Bill, greet the new day. But no, Ayers said that he liked to settle down at the breakfast table with the
New York Times
and the
Nation
and have his daily little bicker with them.
Bark, bark, bark. It adds up to what Mark Ames just referred in an email to me as that “inexplicable cowardice that everyone here in print is infected with. Jesus, they don’t even shoot or club people here like they do in Russia [where Ames founded the splendid
Exile
] and still they exercise more freedom, take more risks there in print than they do here.”

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.