alexander cockburn RIP

cancer - http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/21/farewell-alex-my-friend/

Read nearly every one of his columns since 1980. He was usually right.

whaat

this sucks. RIP.

Chris Hayes blinked a tear away this morning.

bummer. RIP

shit. sad.

sorry but i was not a fan, because of shit like this

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-devil-you-know

I don't endorse everything he wrote (as with his global warming pos), but comparing him to Buchanan on Israel is, well, very New Republic.

(still published by an anti-Arab racist)

I don't endorse everything he wrote (as with his global warming pos), but comparing him to Buchanan on Israel is, well, very New Republic.

― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Saturday, July 21, 2012 2:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well yeah but ... they quote him directly, and it ain't flattering.

he had weird sharp edges on his opinions, which was a good and a bad thing both, but he always pushed for real investigative journalism (even if what he published sometimes missed) and swung for the fences, and sometimes he wrote things or published things that were very important and very different, and you couldn't really find elsewhere. i'm pretty bummed that he's gone.

i thought his "position" on climate change was so flabbergastingly stupid that i found it difficult to respect anything he wrote for a while, but i did enjoy much of what he wrote for the nation. RIP

it's a shame that when journalists keep working as they age, people remember them for what they wrote as aging journalists, and not always their work in their prime.

(not attacking Z S or anyone here, just pondering)

yeah, but i don't know if you can blame his climate change and general energy/environment idiocy on him getting old, can you? he was only 71!

anyway, sorry to bring that up, i really did respect his writing and ideas on non-environmental issues. it just sucks because it means that places like newsbusters are running articles saying that "although he was a leftist, he was our friend on climate change" (paraphrasing)

he started to go off the rails way before the climate stuff -- he was flirting with weird right-libertarian stuff since the mid-90s at least. But sometimes it was in useful and provocative ways, and sometimes not. like a lot of his contemporaries, he was really clearest about who he was and what he was doing in the reagan era, needed to redefine his journalistic world in the post-soviet clinton era, and made lots of strange feints and turns along the way. unlike some of them, he flirted with strange stuff, but he never really jumped ship entirely to, e.g., the neo-cons.

it's not just about age, it's about the world changing under you, in a sense.

chris hughes is an anti-arab racist?

I mean M Peretz, did he sell it? I don't read or follow it.

oh, so he did. In March.

counterpunch had some good stuff, it's too bad the web design WITH ITS INEXCUSABLY LARGE TYPE made it look like a fringe site for loonies. then again i think that of the fucking huffington post too.

never knew this about his father:

Claud Cockburn, under a pseudonym, also wrote novels, including “Beat the Devil,” which was made into a film with Humphrey Bogart and which his son used as the title of his column in The Nation.)

odd, i never knew his name was pronounced COE-burn (per the ny times)!

he said some silly shit here and there but 99% of the time he was a really sharp, great writer. a way more consistent and honest contrarian than hitch.

Titicaca

from time to time i'm kinda tempted to subscribe to the nation just so i can read the archive of cockburn (and hitch -- when he was good) columns. then again, that would mean actually getting the nation every week.

Perrin with a warts-included reminiscence:

He decidedly stood out [in The Nation's office]. Bright Hawaiian shirt. Straight-legged jeans. Red suede shoes. Longish brown hair uncombed. Aviator glasses. Wide smile.

I introduced myself. He was friendly and gracious. We made small talk. He lightly chastised me for reading too many right wing magazines. I replied that that was my corner at FAIR.

Alex said, "Oh yes! You're young! Ambitious! You want to read it all! Well, you have to make smarter choices."

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-golden-age-is-passing.html

he wrote the best takedown of 9/11 truthers ever:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/28/the-9-11-conspiracists-and-the-decline-of-the-anmerican-left/

There's also a funny clip of him on youtube on the same subject. Cause I'm from the south of Ireland, the Cockburns have an interest for me that than they otherwise might not. I think that Patrick might be the best of the three brothers. His books on Iraq are beautifully written and free of shrillness.

I guess a neat, glib soundbite might be to call AC the Hitchens of the paleoconservative-sympathising left. ;)

this bit from a 2011 piece on rick perry made me goggle:

For their part the progressives howl about Perry’s gesture towards secession. “We’ve got a great union,” he famously said in response to a reporter’s question. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” Big cheers from the crowd. I don’t see what’s wrong with Perry’s stand. I’m all for the right to self-determination, hence state secession. Aside from anything else, it’s how empires fall apart. Vermont, Alaska, Hawai’i, Texas – the empire crumbling just like the Towers. What’s wrong with that picture?

mostly for the 'just like the towers' bit.

James Wolcott remembers:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2012/07/The-Summer-of-So-Many-Sad-Goodbyes

Had no idea until seeing it on her Twitter feed, that he was Olivia Wilde's uncle!

Hertzberg's obit:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2012/07/alexander-the-great-and-the-grating-remembering-cockburn.html#entry-more

when did the WSJ last have a lefty on the op-ed page? none since AC? (and I don't mean a liberal, obviously)

i've seen several obits claim that cockburn was a soviet apologist, but no one ever seems to back that up by citing anything in particular, unless you view any serious criticism of the cold war consensus as soviet apologism. (given that hertzberg still bills himself as a 'reflexive anti-communist,' as if that were some kind of bold or brave or even particularly notable stance any longer, i'm guessing he does.) similarly, saying AC had 'contempt for mainstream american liberalism' seems offbase: well, yes, he hated liberals who weren't particularly liberal.

well there's his stalin body count revisionism

never really knew about his queasiness, for lack of a better term, w/ modern abortion - http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/14/health-plans-and-death-plans/

i don't know that arguing over how many ppl stalin killed should be dismissed as 'revisionism' -- there isn't a universal consensus on the exact number among major soviet historians.

here's a cockburn piece from 1989 on the matter: http://www.campin.me.uk/Politics/purging-stalin.txt

what does one expect from Cold War-style Democrats consistently ridiculed by Cockburn? Perhaps to pick a corpse total other than the highest one equals declaring oneself a Stalinist.

Yeah, I don't know about Cockburn personally vis-a-vis Soviet/Communist apologism, but he did let some odious shit get published on Counterpunch. I remember a piece on the 60th anniversay of Mao's coming to power, which, with no qualifications whatsoever, celebrated the advancement in women's rights that this brought about. There was also an anecdote I recall he made about his ailing father, expressing glee at the repression of the Polish Solidarity movement, which Cockburn didn't especially condemn. I know he wasn't a Stalin fan, but maybe there's an accusation to be made that he was a tad blase on the subject.

The liberals are howling bout the unfairness of these attacks, led by Sarah Palin, revived by her “Death Panel” talk and equipped with a dexterous new speech writer who is even adding footnotes to her press releases.

But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the scan.

Nothing less but Bill Maher's vision of "drive-through abortions" will do.

Dennis Perrin on a Brooklyn memorial for A.C.:

http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2012/09/all-crowds-left.html

Noam Chomsky spoke of when he and Cockburn sang ballads in an Irish pub.

prob too much to hope for that there's video of this.