Alexander Cockburn and the Radical Power of the Word

Alexander Cockburn and the Radical Power of the Word


By John Nichols

The Nation

July 21, 2012

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168996/alexander-cockburn-and-radical-power-word#

Alexander Cockburn and I met in the 1980s, when
we shared places on a panel in Detroit, where the
topic was the latest murders of Catholic priests by
Latin American death squads. Alex was talking
about the horrors of US foreign policy. I was talking
about the horrors of US media coverage of US
foreign policy. We were sufficiently in sync that our
mutual friend, brilliant music writer and thinker
Dave Marsh, came up at the end of the evening and.
presuming that we were comrades long-standing,



told us we really should take the show on the road.







We did, more or less, appearing frequently together



over the years. But most of our time together was



spent at my home in Madison, Wisconsin, where



Alex was a frequent guest. He would pull up in a



great big American car, the trunk packed with



favored libations, new books and the facsimile



machine he used-even after the Internet had its



moment-to send columns to The Nation. (Alex



regularly proved that his knowledge of history, his



memory and his veteran reporter's knack for asking



the right people the right questions could be the



superior of even the most powerful search engine.



Eventually, however, he did with Jeffrey St. Clair



develop a politically potent website, CounterPunch.)







Alex, who has died too young at age 71 after a two-



year battle with cancer, loved writing-so much so



that he missed just one deadline even as his illness



progressed toward its final stages. His commitment



to the craft-to the radical power of the



word-extended far beyond his own contribution. He



poked, prodded and inspired the rest of us. When I



was working on an article at my home computer, he



would lean over me and make suggestions.



Invariably, Alex wanted to see a paragraph added on



some new evil done by a corporation, some third-



party candidate who had not gotten enough



attention or some third-world cause that had gotten



even less attention. Alex's suggestions did not



always fit where he proposed that I add them, and I



asked them about this once.







"Sometimes you just have to get the story out," he



said, "anywhere you can."







But, of course, Alex never just got the story out. His



prose, honed during an Anglo-Irish childhood when



he learned at the side of the master - his father



Claud, the great radical British journalist of mid-



century who lent him the title of his column, "Beat



the Devil" - never failed. Alex knew how good he



was. He knew that he could take readers where



other writers could not, to the fields of India where



Coca-Cola was stealing water from peasants, to the



barricades of neglected labor battles in Austin,



Minnesota and Toledo; to "The City" of London



where the Libor scandal now unfolds.







Alex's last column for The Nation was a delicious



takedown of all the dark players involved in the



scheme by the biggest bankers in the world to fix



rates. The bankers got their due, of course, but so



did the regulators and, of course, the pliant media.



"Now it turns out that the whole thing is a fix-a



grimy hand all too visible," Alex wrote. "Is is



possible to reform the banking system? There are



the usual nostrums-tighter regulations, savage



penalties for misbehavior, a ban from financial



markets for life. But I have to say I'm dubious. I



think the system will collapse, but not through our



agency."







Casual readers might imagine a darkness in the



closing line of what Alex's last Nation column



published in his lifetime. But that is a misread. Alex



shared Tom Paine's faith in the necessity of



information and insight, of speaking truth to power,



as an essential element to the activism that would



behind the world over again. He was a radical



democrat who believed ultimately in the power of



the people to overturn that which politicians and



the press left standing.







He kept the radical faith, steadily, constantly, going



to the ends of the earth to cover the next story of



revolt and revolution, going to the far corners of the



United States to uncover the news that Americans



were not taking it anymore. If a crowd had gathered,



and if they were raising the red flag, or any flag of



protest, that was enough for Alex. He would report



their struggle, usually in The Nation, but also in the



pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper's,



Esquire and (for a brief period as remarkable as it



was ironic) the Wall Street Journal.







Alex chose as the title and the underlying theme of



his finest collection of essays a line from the



anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. From Tristes



Tropiques:







If men have always been concerned with only one



task-how to create a society fit to live in-the



forces which inspired our distant ancestors are



also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything



can still be altered. What was done but turned



out wrong, can be done again. The Golden Age,



which blind superstition had placed behind [or



ahead of] us, is in us.







Alex taught me, he taught us all, that those were not



blandly optimistic words. They are demanding. They



suggest that we have fewer excuses than we



thought, that this is the place, that now is the time



and that there is truth in the Gandhian maxim that



we are the people we've been waiting for.







© 2012 The Nation



_______________







John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The



Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in



Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is The



"S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition.



A co-founder of the media reform organization Free



Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W.



McChesney of The Death and Life of American



Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin



the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the



American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and



Destroy Democracy. Nichols' other books include:



Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of



Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.