“There is almost no radical idea that you can’t get a cheer for in America as long as you can put it in terms people can understand.”
(Alexander Cockburn, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1994, p. B7)
Never hesitant to go for the throat, Alexander Cockburn, in his 29 years as a journalist in the United States, has escaped the imminent obscurity to which most radical voices are doomed, and now regularly graces the pages of more than 40 mainstream newspapers across the nation.
I caught up with Cockburn earlier in February at the old Arcata Community Center, where he took part in a panel discussion about the media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Exuding confidence, which some have taken for ego, the oddly charismatic 61-year-old with graying reddish-brown hair appears larger than his truly average stature would suggest. With freely moving hands, he speaks quickly and colorfully with an interesting Irish/English accent that has been mellowed by decades of living in the states.
Cockburn (pronounced CO-burn) lives in the secluded town of Petrolia on the Lost Coast of northern California. He was born in Ardgay, Scotland, in 1941, and was raised primarily in Ireland. Early in his childhood the family moved to London, where his father Claud Cockburn became a prominent journalist and for many years an active member of the Communist Party.
During World War II, the Cockburn house was blown up by a German V-2 rocket. No one was in the house at the time, except the cat. “The cat survived,” he said, “but it regarded my dad as the being that had dropped the bomb, so he was naturally very suspicious.”
Cockburn was educated at Oxford University and worked as a journalist before moving to the United States in 1973.
In the ’70s he established himself in alternative publications such as The Nation, Harper’s and The Village Voice, as well as more mainstream publications as Esquire and The New York Review of Books.
Then, in 1980, The Wall Street Journal approached Cockburn to write a column for the newspaper in an attempt to shake up the readers. How did a writer, who religiously attacks the sacred cows of the profit/security state, receive a platform at what many have called the newspaper of the empire? (Dow Jones & Company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, after a revenue fall of 20 percent scraped by last year on only $1.77 billion.) The bottom line is that he is a gifted writer, and has something to say for everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
In an entertaining and somewhat unconventional manner, Cockburn will fire off ruthless criticisms of a capitalist system that has allowed the top 1 percent of the population to own as much as the bottom 40 percent of the population, and then smoothly shift to the marvels of gooseberries in the summer. All the while he intersperses obscure and fascinating little tidbits of historical facts throughout his writing.
When his 11-year stint at The Wall Street Journal ended in 1991, he had established himself as one of the most prominent radical journalist in the United States.
He has authored and co-authored several successful books, such as “The Corruption of Empire,” “The Golden Age is In Us,” “The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon,” “Whiteout: CIA, Drugs and the Press,” and most recently the acclaimed “Al Gore: A User’s Manual.”
Cockburn has written a biweekly column for The Nation for years called “Beat the Devil.” He was asked what happened to The Nation during the most recent presidential elections when it ceased to be an alternative publication and effectively became a propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. The naivete of the question produced a big toothy grin, which, combined with his big round glasses, produced a Dave Letterman likeness. Cockburn said the Nation has indeed endorsed mainstream Democrats in recent presidential elections — with one ex-ception. “The Nation endorsed Jesse Jackson in ’88 as the Democratic nominee. That shows you that they were a lot more left than they are now.” The editors actually sent him a letter asking him not to criticize Bill Clinton, he recalled with a laugh.
At the panel discussion in Arcata, Cockburn explained the context under which the war was covered. (He has journalist friends around the world and his brother is a reporter for the London Independent, who was sent to Afghanistan to cover the war.) Journalists were nearly always kept miles away from any actions, and knew virtually nothing about what was going on, and by default were inclined to accept whatever the U.S. military told them. We must keep in mind that from the outset the Bush Administration came out and said that in the war on terrorism the media would be lied to.
In a piece that he wrote for antiwar.com on Sept. 20, Cockburn asked what it would take to exact proper revenge for the September 11 attacks.
The traditional valuation of one white American to members of the brown races usually runs about 500 to one, and the Western press is mostly incapable of rating Indians or Chinese in units of under 5,000. Such equations would require a minimum revenge killing of 500,000, a pretty tall order, given that the “revenge window (meaning the period in which public opinion is sufficiently fomented to exclude all moral qualms about mass murder of innocents) is not permanently ajar,” Cockburn stated.
Cockburn explained that September 11 proved a good example of what generally happens in times of crises. Soon after the attacks there was an open questioning throughout the nation about why this had occurred. Then after a couple of weeks a consolidation of support occurred. Those who asked questions became traitors, and good analysis and criticism from both the right and the left were pushed to the margins in a sea of flag waving.
I was sitting in Muddy Waters on a Sunday afternoon working on this story and staring out the window a lot. The jazz band had just finished its gig and was hanging out sipping lattes and chai. I was watching people walk down G Street when I overheard one of the band members say that he had just read a great article about Enron by Alexander Cockburn. Enron seems to be on everyone’s mind.
The significance of the Enron scandal was another matter discussed at the February panel. The media jumped on the bandwagon and congressmen found a popular bad guy in Enron who they could safely rail against. But how big a deal is Enron? Many, like Cockburn, are saying “corporate crime, no shit.”
It looks as though we might get some kind of campaign finance reform out of the Enron scandal and it has provided a good opportunity to point out that it didn’t just come out of the blue. In reality, every generation has had its Enron. Cockburn, like most journalists, will continue to write about Enron, but he believes that we need to keep perspective.
“Isn’t it a far worse crime for the biggest corporation in the world, Wal-Mart [whose profits exceed Canada’s GDP], to pay the majority of its 1 million employees minimum wage, and illegally prevent them from unionizing.”
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