by B. R. GOWANI
Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012) at the Village Voice. He was journalist and co-editor with Jeffery St. Claire of Counterpunch. PHOTO/Sylvia Plachy/Counterpunch.
A great writer and one of the strongest pillars for the left took his leave last Friday, after losing his battle to cancer after two years.
He was a personal friend. He was also someone whose courageous, elegant, interesting, and powerful writing was a source of inspiration, and an ocean of knowledge. Consequently, it was extremely painful to see my friend Jeffery St. Clair’s, “Farewell, Alex, My Friend” message on the Counterpunch website Saturday morning, instead of the regular “CounterPunch Diary” piece by Alexander Cockburn.
Recently in May, when his regular Dairy did not show up on Friday’s weekend edition, I wrote him an email:
“Hi Alexander Is everything OK? Its 6:26 am Eastern Time Saturday morning but your Diary is not posted yet. I hope everything is alright.”
He replied:
“Hi Badruddin – everything okay – just late because of … Hope all well with you. Best Alex”
He did not mention his disease; instead alluded to a family business occupation. In the words of Jeffery:
“He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.”
Alexander made many people angry at his ideas and writing, and he was himself angry with many people, including Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens (very rightly so.) He once told me during a lively dinner conversation that his anger didn’t “last more than two years.” I remember that meeting vividly as if it were yesterday, that I had picked him up from his friend’s place in Venice, California, for dinner at a Thai restaurant. That rare instance he was without his ever-present camera (he was very fond of taking pictures.) We discussed many topics: the US wars, Pakistan, India, China, etc. Afterward, I offered to drop him back to his friend’s place, about half a mile away, but he was in mood to walk back.
What separated Alexander from Hitchens, Rushdie, and others like them was his ability to get over his anger. Alexander would be mad at George W. Bush Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon for their inhumane foreign and domestic policies, but his madness never turned into an obsession and did not blind him to the follies of the Democrats. Whereas Hitchens’ and Rushdie’s anger towards the Muslim fanatics had turned into hatred, that then morphed into their love for the US “war on terror”, forgetting (willfully) historical aspects of the US involvement in those regions.
With his vast knowledge of history, literature, and politics; in addition to his excellent writing ability and vast vocabulary, he could have easily switched from alternate to mainstream media and become a celebrity like Rushdie and Hitchens, by giving interviews to the big TV stations, and filling out pages of the dominant print media. However, he had a conscience.
Alexander was a leftist but with a difference. He did not take the leftist ideology as some kind of religious scripture that was unchangeable or un-discardable in changed times. He was critical of the Republican Party in the US. Nevertheless, in many instances he was more critical of the Democratic Party. This had understandably angered many liberals. One of his Diary described Obama as a “Cancer on the Presidency:
“We’ve had accounts of presidents dooming people to death: LBJ or Nixon thumping the maps and shouting Bomb them back to the stone age. There’s an altogether different, chill timbre to the account of Obama as maestro of the death list….”
USA is unlike Europe and many other countries, where there are multiple parties, including the Green Party who manage to get some seats in parliaments to push forward their agenda and to discuss or criticize the proposals of the other parties. The liberals and many progressives and leftists in the US, who would like to see equality and justice for the ordinary people through legislative reforms, have no strong political party of their own to enable inroads into the legislative branch. So where do they end up? The Democratic Party! That party, sans few differences, is nothing but a weak and sick shadow of the Republican Party.
When the Tea Party or the other right-wingers penetrate the Republican Party, they succeed. Although the momentum of the Tea Party has slowed down quite a bit, they succeeded in pushing further the Republican Party to the right.
Nothing of that sort happens in the Democratic Party. Occasionally lame, largely ceremonial steps are taken on certain issues: such as President Barack Obama’s announcement that lesbians and gays should be allowed to marry. However, he has not pushed the Congress to pass any such law. His other announcement on the undocumented students without criminal records could pursue their education. However, no procedure has been initiated to make them citizens.
In this situation, it is inevitable for people with a social conscience, like Alexander, to criticize the Democrats. That is how he irked many liberals and leftists.
Another group totally pissed off with him was the Israel Lobby, one of the most powerful lobbies in the US. Consequently, this Lobby used the most abused and deadly weapon in their arsenal: calling him “Anti-Semite.” This potent term invokes memories of the Holocaust, Spanish Inquisition, and injustices done to the Jewish people.
Alexander described the hostility he faced:
“Many Jews just don’t like hearing bad things said about Israel, same way they don’t like reading articles about the Jewish lobby here. Mention the lobby and someone like Fox will rush into print denouncing those who “toy with the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the press.” These days you can’t even say that the New York Times is owned by a Jewish family without risking charges that you stand in Goebbels’s shoes. I even got accused of anti-Semitism the other day for mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood, which they most certainly did, as recounted in a funny and informative book published in 1988, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, by Neal Gabler.”
Alexander’s former boss Rupert Murdoch, one of the most heinous characters of the media world, announced his resignation last Saturday, in the wake of telephone-hacking scandal. In May of 2011, in his regular column “Beat the Devil” in The Nation magazine, Alexander described Murdoch’s news empire in these words:
“In years gone by Murdoch used his newspaper empire as a bludgeon to crush regulatory obstructions. He has forged strategic alliances with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Republican administrations on this side of the Atlantic.”
Then in the final paragraph of the article, he had posed this question: “Will Rupert himself be enmeshed?” There is irony in that a day after Alexander’s departure from this world, Murdoch quit his directorship.
Alexander and Jeffery’s website Counterpunch provided an outlet to innumerable people for an array of subjects, including the Israel Lobby. I am one of its beneficiaries. My very long article on the Lobby, “What If the Israeli Lobby was the Islamic Lobby?” was posted on Counterpunch in three parts (excluding the fourth part).
He was available when I needed him. One time, I remember, my niece needed a judge for a photo exhibition. I called Alexander who placed a call to Tao Ruspoli, who graciously helped my niece out.
Alexander’s exit is a great loss. One has to be extra cautious in using superlatives in today’s word-saturated world where superlatives are thrown around mercilessly. However, in case of Alexander, his work is a testament to his greatness.
Jeffery is most likely going to continue the tradition of weekend
Counterpunch Diary and the annual report that Alexander used to write. Jeffery will have to cut down his sleep or his columns on music, etc.
Good-bye, dear Alexander. Please do not Rest in Peace. Continue your battles with the Obamas, Blairs, Bushes, Murdochs, (Billy) Grahams, and others like them … in the Underworld.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com