Cockburn's Elixir

 "The Golden Age, which blind superstition had placed behind (or ahead of) us, is in us.'"

In "The Golden Age Is In Us" Alexander Cockburn calls the left back to its rationalist roots. Not through citations to authority, but by honest and insightful observation of the world around him, and thoughtful analysis of what he sees.

The book includes not only Cockburn's writings culled from several publications between 1987 and 1994, but also diary entries, letters sent and received and conversations with the likes of Noam Chomsky. The book's title derives from a conversation between the communistic Cockburn and the anarchistic Chomsky.

The son of a Scottish communist journalist father and a mother descended from an aristocratic Anglo-lrish family, Cockburn got his primary education in a Protestant parochial school and his college degree in art history. His artistic eye transcends mere visual aesthetics to take in the full range of culture.

This immediately shows when in the book's first pages he notes the social effect of visible changes - drug-watching blimps, abandoned smuggling stations in the mangrove swamps - that 80s drug wars wrought on Key West: " A marijuana culture is at least tranquil, if a shade moronic. Cocaine culture is megalomaniacal, paranoid, corrupting." He also criticizes some of the works that the alternative culture wrought: 'The Beats pointed the way for Dylan, to the gay movement, to the politics and culture of both self-realization and the spectacle. They also pointed the way to a lot of very bad writing." Cockburn's ambition as cultural critic extends to children's literature: "One day I will write a long political history of Babar's kingdom from a Gramscian perspective, showing how Babarismo ossified social relations in the kingdom and chained the productive forces."

Now the dourer campus Marxists will complain that that's not serious. But Cockburn gets way more outrageous than that. Like when he discusses Nancy Reagan's former reputation as Hollywood's blowjob queen. And when he notes that "Republican women, in their proximate physical aspect, have an undercurrent of erotic violence or ill-pent sadism that doesn't really come through on camera." Or when he dismisses Bill Clinton's appeals to church, family, work and community: "This from a man who spent slabs of the eighties with his nose between Gennifer Flowers's thighs...."

Which in turn will get Cockburn roasted as a sexist by that part of the left which considers any discussion of sexuality beyond detailed masturbation instructions inappropriate. As if that troubles him. Cockburn spends a number of pages savaging law professor Catharine MacKinnon and her penchant for censorship in the name of feminism.

He also dismisses the frenzy about "ritual child abuse" that ruined a number of day care workers' lives. Cockburn casts the idea of automatically accepting whatever a child can be coached to say as a modern version of a witchcraft trial.

Cockburn's European viewpoint on America, still evident though he's lived here since 1973, affords him the ability to see us from outside the hysterical fog and cultural myopia that occasionally sweep over the states, obscuring the view from all points on the political spectrum. He decries the paranoia in American political life, and holds the JFK assassination conspiracy theorists up as a leftist version. Cockburn's is the best defense of the single bullet theory, and of the notion that Oswald was a troubled leftist seeking personal revenge for what the Kennedys were doing to Cuba.

Is Cockburn anti-religious? It looked that way to me when I read his column about how Ollie North speaks in tongues. Though not explicitly religious, his defense of the Soviet war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan strikes me in a similar vein. But in a telephone interview, the author said it isn't really so: "I'm very against the idea of designating people as cults so you can exterminate them. If somebody wants to be a Scientologist or a Christian Fundamentalist, fine, so long as they don't start hurting or destroying people."

This book's most entertaining "other people's writing" is the hate mail. A letter in which David Horowitz threatens a lawsuit if a critical article is published, will go down as the textbook example of a turncoat's petty sensitivities. Then there's the note from a man in Toronto who said that he was glad that Cockburn's mother died.

Cockburn's personal stuff exposes us to the life of a radical writer. For example being guilt tripped by a leftist group which will remain nameless unless you read the book. And memories of a father who wrote for the British CP's Worker and was denounced in Stalinoid purge trials as a British spy and in UK tabloids as a Soviet spy. There are chronicles of his mother's last illness, and that of his friend Andy Kopkind. Then there are notes on the writer's lot - the irritations of bad editing and alcohol's heavy toll on the profession. Not that Cockburn is a teetotaler - one essay expounds on the techniques of making hard eider, which he treats more as a modern science than as an ancient art.

Cockburn's main reputation is as a news media critic. His book shows us why. On the occasion of a particularly dull interview that Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham did with Mikhail Gorbachev, the media barons who have a lot more money than ability are duly dismissed: "These are the veritable Exocets of ennui." The myth of how lraq took incubators from Kuwaiti babies and allowed the premies to die is dissected and i is proponents taken to task in masterful style - much to the dismay of human rights groups which gol caught being used in that sorry affair.

When Cockburn speaks in Ann Arbor this month, people will come to hear the political analyst. Though Cockburn told me that "lecture might be too dignified a word," he'll talk about the current political siluation and his book. Before taking audience questions, Cockburn will also discuss Andrew Kopkind's posthumous "The Thirty Years' (SEE PAGE 13)

(FROM PAGE 9) Wars." Kopkind, a gay liberation pioneer, once shared a London apartment with Cockburn, who called him "the greatest radical journalist of his time."

Come to the Shaman Drum Bookshop prepared to hear different perspectives on the news. For example, the book details how the IRA drove theBritish to peace talks by bombing London's banking district and prompting Japanese threats to leave if the old dispute wasn't settled and how Clinton's visa for Gerry Adams was payback for John Major's giving intelligence files on Slick Willie's Oxford days to the Bush campaign. "I always felt from way back when, that in the end the English would want to get out, that they wouldn't want to go on spending the money," Cockburn told me. "I think that Sinn Fein under Gerry Adams has fought a very sophisticated political game, which I support."

Cockburn 's book steps on some progressive toes. He writes that corporate foundations buy environmental groups, and concern with overpopulation leads some environmentalists into anti-immigrant xenophobia. He credits the Crips and the Bloods with the best plan to rebuild post-riot LA. He blasts Bernie Sanders for supporting Clinton's crime bill.

Those who want to be offended will find ample opportunities: "The folks in Oklahoma City, the militias, talk about an evolving world government," he said over the phone. "Well, they're right to the extent that there is an evolving world government." The perfect chance for some sectarian dweeb to call Cockburn a fascist. But rather than nihilism, his book's answer to globalization is found in a letter by Dr. Nguyen Khac Vien, a Vietnamese psychologist and revolutionary: "If a world front of capital is being founded, its counterweight, the democratic popular front on a world scale, is also in formation."

In our interview, Cockburn minced few words about liberals: "A big theme of mine is liberal bad faith," he said, "whether it's Janet Reno torturing this poor Honduran woman when she was the prosecutor down in Miami, or whether i t's destroying those people at Waco. " He also takes a dim view of "all this M althusian stuff, this population control stuff" which many liberals expound.

If you go to the Shaman Drum for advice on which party to join, you may be disappointed. Cockburn is a journalist, not an organizer - a thought provocateur: "If the left is going to provide any vision in the years ahead, it has to think seriously about what 'ending the cold war' actually entails."

Cockburn teaches a way of thinking, not a dogma. It's a mindset without illusions or blind faith, intellectually rigorous, questioning authority. You probably won't hear Marx quoted. But you will observe Marxist methodology practiced by a powerful mind. To get jargonese, it's the left side of the synthesis emerging after the contradictions of the Cold War. Or in more artsy terms, it's a masterful example of the Irish literary tradition turning its gaze to American madness. Trust me either way - Cockburn's elixir is good for your brain.