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The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994

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by Bob Smith

The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994, by Andrew Kopkind. Verso. 514pp.

For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports, by Christopher Hitchens. Verso, 1994. 339 pp.

The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994, by Alexander Cockburn. Verso. 426 pp.

I won a few bucks betting on the O.J. Simpson verdict and immediately spent some of the take renewing my subscription to the American liberal weekly magazine, The Nation. It seemed fitting for it was in the pages of The Nation that I first read these three journalists, and it was through their writings and two other regular contributors (Patricia Williams and Adolf Reed) that I gained an insight into the gruesome state of race relations in the United States.

The way I had it figured, it was like Orwell said of Salvador Dali: "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being." The jury was able to hold in their heads the two facts that O.J. was guilty, and the racism of Mark Furhman and people like him had been tolerated in their police force and their society for hundreds of years. They merely decided what was the greater crime.

They also probably wanted to go home to their segregated neighbourhoods and not be picketed, harassed, assaulted, or killed.

It is not just for gambling tips and insight into American society, however, that I regularly read The Nation. Hitchens and Cockburn are columnists for the magazine and reading them weekly is a pleasure, a purgative ritual that is a welcome relief from the shrivelled prose and obfuscation found almost anywhere else, including the other pages of The Nation. Both write in the language of the political brawl. Hitchens, writing in his biweekly Minority Reports column, calls Henry Kissinger a mass murderer who identifies with "sub-Darwinian depravity;" in his alternate weekly media column Beat the Devil, Cockburn has fumed at President Bill Clinton's hypocrisy and once described "our President McMuffin" looking up in the Bible to discover that blowjobs did not constitute adultery.

These are the second collections for both columnists. Hitchens's Prepared for the Worst came out ten years ago, and Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire collected the Irish writer's journalism from his arrival in the US in 1972 to the end of the Reagan era.

Both columnists are fun to read and bring to their columns considerable historical knowledge of events, political precedents, and commitment. Their method of journalistic investigation is founded in a profound cynicism and a will toward authenticity that regularly rewards the reader with a perspective on current political affairs that eclipses the mass of uninspired punditry regularly churned out by a captive North American Fifth Estate.

All three authors would probably describe themselves as Marxists, but Hitchens and Cockburn's politics are not identical, and they occasionally rail against each other in alternate columns, lately on the subject of Bosnia (Hitchens is for lifting the arms embargo, Cockburn sees this as idiocy). Cockburn is also more engaged in the various left-wing causes in the United States than is Hitchens who spends much of his journalistic energies writing lengthy, erudite, and name- dropping reviews for the London Review of Books, and he was Washington editor of Harper's the last time I looked. Cockburn makes his living writing everyday for one low-paying journal or other and flies around the country making minute speaker's fees at various community or environmental fundraisers.

I once found myself in Seattle six years ago on a day the telephone poles around the university were advertising Alexander Cockburn and a speech on something like the recent developments in the Middle-East. I decided to stay over and had the opportunity of attending the extraordinary event. The entrance to the hall that evening was crowded with every political groupescule I had ever heard of selling their newsletters, and the hall itself filled to overflowing with more than a thousand people. I can't remember the actual subject of Cockburn's talk, because a two hour question period covered everything from the rain forests in the Amazon to the need for a labour party. From the groupsescules came attacks on the minutiae of Cockburn's political perspectives as though he were a competing Leninist party of one. But there were also tens of respectful, almost pleading requests of Cockburn to lay out a program of action for everything from the urban renewal of Seattle's ghetto to the organizing of course unions within the university. Cockburn was combative and respectful as the need arose in this scene that was at once inspiring and pathetic. It was inspiring in that Cockburn showed a great understanding of most of the issues presented, and pathetic in that it showed a hopelessly fragmented American left that was looking at Cockburn as some sort of lefty messiah come to sort it all out.

A reading of Andrew Kopkind's The Thirty Years' Wars would have prepared me for that scene. Like Cockburn, Kopkind was a participant observer (he died of cancer in October 1994). He covered the civil rights marches of the 1960s for The New Republic (when it was a progressive journal); he was engaged in the antiwar movement when he wrote for Ramparts, The New York Review of Books (when it, too, allowed a progressive view within its pages), and the New Statesman; he was in Prague in 1968; he participated in the development of Students for Democratic Society through to their obliteration as the Weatherman Underground; after the disintegration of the American left that followed the victory of the Vietnamese, he licked his wounds on a New England commune and did "a lot of acid," attended John Lennon's funeral, chased down former leaders of the movement in ashrams, boardrooms and liberal hideaways, and wrote about it all; the Stonewall riot of 1969 encouraged his coming out and his subsequent involvement in the Gay Liberation movement; he was in Russia in January 1993.

Reading The Thirty Years' Wars does more than give insight to the present state of the left in the United States. The book is "the history of an era, the evolution of a sensibility at once personal, generational and [inter]national," as Cockburn says in the introduction.

The Kopkind collection is not an exercise in nostalgia for some disenchanted leftist. His journalism, though committed, is never sentimental and always compassionate. To read of Kopkind's thirty-year journey is to read of cautious hope, critical concerns, deep resentment, personal loss, and a profound melancholy at what might have been. His melancholy is not a loss of hope. It is not sadness. At no time was he the euphoric hippie expecting the revolution tomorrow, but he knew of the need for radical change, and he carefully chronicles the mistakes of the left and the barbarism of the governments and their police that resulted in the ultimate defeat of those attempts at radical transformation of a corrupt society. Liberals, in particular, have much to answer for. For instance, the liberals who engineered a compromise that allowed for the refusal to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the 1964 Democratic convention are asked by Kopkind to view the profound consequences: the emergence of black power, the fragmentation of the multiracial left, the rise of Louis Farrakhan. Encouraged by their newly found peace and prosperity, these contrite neo-liberals find solace in the post-modern where all views command legitimacy. Their po-mo celebrates insecurity and inspires timidity: instead of general strikes to defeat NAFTA, we have union-financed roadshows bleating to audiences of bureaucrats; instead of Stonewall, we have tenured Queerologists in anemic cloisters fussing about Foucault; instead of visions of full-employment we have campaigns to raise juvenile offenders into adult court; instead of class solidarity. We have every

Fascinating book,from a remarkable writer. His point of view is predictable leftist but his choice of topics is pretty unpredictable.