A Colossal Wreck

A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture

Alexander Cockburn

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781682951
• eBook ISBN: 9781781684931
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Alexander Cockburn was without question one of the most influential journalists of his generation, whose writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn's name.

Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect.

This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of cross-country journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the "thousand landscapes" of the United States.

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.”

In one of his collections, The PreHistory of the Far Side, Larson offers what are purportedly childhood sketches saved by his mother from the kindergarten period of his career. These feature prison bars on the windows, slavering hellhounds, a father holding him above a crocodile’s jaws and other fun scenes from the dark vale of infancy.

In PreHistory, Larson offers some cartoons he never even bothered to send out for syndication. “Jesus rises from the grave,” says the caption under a picture of a rather haggard Redeemer frying up some breakfast next to an open coffin and thinking: “I wonder what time it is … I feel like I’ve been dead for three days.”

January 11

The duty of the press—an over-roasted chestnut. For uplift we may turn to the editorials written by Robert Lowe for the London Times in 1851. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity. The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times; it is daily and forever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion—standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizon of the world … For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences—to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

From which high-minded sentiments we may turn to the views expressed by Sir Melford Stevenson, who was a British high court judge from 1957 to 1979. To a group of journalists discussing ethical procedures he remarked: “I think you’re all much too high-minded. I believe that newsworthiness is a firm realization of the fact that there’s nothing so much the average Englishman enjoys on a Sunday morning—particularly on a Sunday morning—as to read a bit of dirt. And that would be my test of newsworthiness … There is a curious synthetic halo around these people who are called ‘investigative’ journalists. Now so far as most courts are concerned—and I think most jurors—the concept of a journalist driven by moral fervor to investigate a public scandal is a lot of nonsense. He enjoys the comforting thought that he has a bit of moral fervor which is filling his pocket as well. And there are few more desirable positions in life than that.”

January 15

The Polish director Andrzej Wajda writes in his little memoir about movie-making, Double Vision, that once he started directing Hamlet and realized the whimsical, arbitrary quality of the plot, the hardest thing was to relate onstage the sequence of the events in proper order, from Hamlet’s first meeting with his mother and the king to Fortinbras’s victorious entrance in the final scene. That sequence of events could have been different if:

1. Hamlet had come to terms with his uncle, the king.

2. He had refused to believe in his father’s ghost.

3. He had not succumbed to Ophelia’s charms.

4. He had succeeded in killing the king while he was at prayer.

5. He had not killed Polonius by mistake, thinking he was the king.

Plus a whole lot of other “ifs.”

And yet, Wajda goes on, “we have to admit that Hamlet has a steel-like logic.” One thing just inevitably leads to another.

Wajda also tells a good story about something that happened the day the French left Algiers. People took to the streets and, in the course of events, still in a state of euphoria, arrived at the television studios. The gaping, empty studios, the television cameras and equipment scattered here and there, did not in the minds of the surging crowd seem to have any connection with what they conceived as television—that is, at least until the moment that someone in the know plugged in the cameras. Suddenly the blank screens of the monitors lit up, and the demonstrators saw their own bodies and faces on-screen. At first they were amused. Then they were emboldened. Hey, we’re on TV! They realized if they could see themselves on the monitors, the rest of the population could also see them on TV sets throughout the city. Maybe even further. They began to sing, dance, recite. The result was an uninterrupted television show that for once was completely authentic. It finally ended, as do all such spontaneous demonstrations, with the arrival of the police and armed officers.

January 18

Being without electricity for four days here in storm-lashed Petrolia gives one a keen admiration for gas-fired water heaters (to which I will be converting shortly). I enjoyed the recovered memory of living by lamplight, which I did for a number of years when I was growing up in Ireland. After 6:00 in the evening until about 7:00 in the morning, life becomes a matter of moving through a darkened house from one small pool of warm light to another. I have two lamps. Unlike the hard-edged world of the light bulb, everything is imprecise in outline. Everything looks like one of the those dark seventeenth- or eighteenth-century paintings. Most of my friends look better by lamplight too. Cooking becomes a different enterprise, based much more on smell or on the noise of a sizzle or a rolling boil. I’m fairly short-sighted, but in lamplight, it doesn’t matter, because you can’t see much anyway.

This situation reminds me of a story I once read about endemic trachoma in the Egyptian village of Gamileya. Trachoma is an infection that causes the inner surface of the eyelids to become chronically inflamed. In Gamileya, people do not require conventionally “normal” vision to conduct their daily activities. Plowing, sowing seed and harvesting don’t require much vision. If there is some small task they are unable to do, their extended family does it for them, thus they do not perceive themselves as disabled.

Early last Wednesday morning, as I felt my way around the house, falling over the cats, listening to hear if the water was boiling, Petrolia played a final joke. Amid the violent thunderstorm that was raging, with the waters roiling not far from my window, the earth decided to heave in a fairly modest—4.3—earthquake.

February 10

I was astonished to see Robert Hughes confess in the New York Review of Books that he and his wife watch the MacNeil-Lehrer show every night. Imagine, day after day, week after week, year after year. “Good night, Jim. Good night, Robin.”

I parodied MacNeil and Lehrer once in Harper’s and that was it for Lewis Lapham. They never forgave him or me.

ROBIN MACNEIL (voice-over): Should one man own another?

MACNEIL: Good evening. The problem is as old as man himself. Do property rights extend to the absolute ownership of one man by another? Tonight, the slavery problem. Jim?

LEHRER: Robin, advocates of the continuing system of slavery argue that the practice has brought unparalleled benefits to the economy. They fear that new regulations being urged by reformers would undercut America’s economic effectiveness abroad. Reformers, on the other hand, call for legally binding standards and even a phased reduction in the slave force to something like 75 percent of its present size. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Charleston. Charlayne?

And so on.

Bob is an old friend. We’ve fished together. We’ve even done that most intimate, secret of things—we went to a tax accountant together. Back in the mid-1970s we formed a mutual support group of two, forcing ourselves to get abreast of the federal tax situation. At Jason Epstein’s instigation, Mr. Hoffman of Garlick and Hoffman agreed to see us. We arrived at the appointed hour with our shoeboxes filled with bus receipts and other records. Mr. Hoffman looked over the fine red velvet suit Bob had donned for the occasion. “Filing a joint return?” he asked cautiously.

March 1

On Monday, February 27, as Wall Street was digesting morning headlines about the Barings disaster, Treasury Secretary Rubin rose to address New York securities traders at a savings bond lunch. His chosen theme was “modernization,” which in Wall Street parlance—and Rubin, former chief of Goldman Sachs, is a Wall Street man par excellence—usually means the sweeping away of any regulatory inhibition on the power to make as much money as possible, as fast as possible.

And thus it turned out. Rubin announced that the Clinton administration plans to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act which separates commercial and investment banking. Separate legislation will allow banking–insurance ties.

Glass-Steagall was signed on June 16, 1933. It was designed to restore confidence in the nation’s banking system, reeling after a series of runs and panics. It established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In return for federal support for their liabilities the banks were required to submit to regulation. Glass-Steagall forbade banks from short-term trading of most securities and from underwriting corporate offerings. Issuance of stocks and bonds was left to the securities industry.

It’s the aim of every captain of finance to preside over a universal financial institution where the velocity of capital can approach the speed of light.

Banks want to get into the securities industry because there’s extra money to be picked up in handling stocks, bonds and kindred short-term IOUs. Securities firms want to get into the banking business because it gets them access to the Federal Reserve payments mechanism, whereby the Fed stands behind banks as their lender of the last resort.

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.

March 3

Dear Mr. Cockburn,

On March 29, 1994, my friend and associate, June Weinstrock, was severely beaten by a mob in San Cristobal, Guatemala. Her attackers were fired to hysteria by rumors that Americans were abducting Guatemalan children and selling their organs. Apparently unaware of the rumors, she approached and/or spoke with children at a bus stop in town. Meanwhile, nearby, a distraught mother called out for her child who had become separated from her in a crowd. A street vendor joked that “The Gringa took him … for body parts.” June is presently hospitalized in Anchorage, slowly convalescing from major brain damage—at present unable to walk, but beginning to recover speech.

I have been investigating the background of this event concerning child abductions and the so-called organ trade. I have read several journalistic accou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction by Andrew Cockburn
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Afterword by Daisy Cockburn