Andrew Kopkind was an unsentimental jounalist to the end., June 24, 1997

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 polit