Well-Groomed Housepet

...They are heated by the flames of the White House behind them, burning to the ground...

...Edward W. Said...

...Claud and a Czech colleague reported "an entirely fictitious battle, to illustrate the gallant but unequal struggle the Republicans were waging...

...Cockburn] got a grant from a bona-fide institution...

...The voice, properly amplified and outfitted with an echo chamber, can be easily magnified into a growl...

...The fight accordingly took place in very short streets and open squares...

...As for President Reagan, his "policies are racist to the core, causing misery, deprivation and shortened lives for poor blacks, beyond all others, but he would be in serious trouble as a racist only if he matched words to deeds and called them 'worthless niggers...

...Cockburn acknowledges that his father is mentioned therein as "unfit to report the Spanish Civil War, insofar as he was writing copy supportive of the Republican cause, to the exclusion of adverse material, and also because he wanted other people to share his belief...

...What it delivers is a pussycat...

...But foremost and radical...

...Corruptions of Empire comes on like a tiger...

...a quote from Vanna White suffices: "It's a fun game that everyone of all ages can play at the same time, instead of watching all the murders and crime...

...Cockburn amusingly savages Gay Talese's almost-forgotten volume, Thy Neighbor's Wife: "In the end the only orifice that matters is the bank teller's window...

...During the siege of Madrid, when it looked as though the Fascists were going to come storming in, Koestler suddenly found good reason to attend to revolutionary affairs in Paris...

...One must arch one's back regularly, snarling on cue with magnificent fury—all the while assuring the homeowners that one will not claw the couch or make a mess on the floor...

...Inside, I found an unexpectedly modulated voice, about as threatening as an afternoon TV talk show...

...One turns from the oil-rich sands of Arabia to the parched earth of the West, expecting proof of the publisher's statement that Cockburn "has established himself as the foremost radical journalist in the United States...

...He "tried to defend himself by arguing that facts were facts and that his readers had a right to read the truth...

...Cockburn's publisher informs us that the author collects Chryslers of the '50s and '60s, that he is "one of the most popular radical speakers on the campus/progressive circuit,' and that he has made frequent appearances on Nightline and the Phil Donahue Show, just the sorts of news programs he affects to deplore...

...On one of them he visits the set of Wheel of Fortune and gives it a Veblenesque workover: "The competitors I saw were not crazed with greed...

...Yes, he concedes, the Reverend's remark was deplorable, but it is typical of Americans to attack a man for his phrases instead of examining his record...

...Still, Alexander Cockburn's secondgeneration hostility to Koestler, and his exclusion of a few piquant details concerning Claud, may be ascribed to filial piety, rare enough in these days of pressure on the nuclear family...

...indeed, both...

...Christianity did not oppose slavery...

...Early in 1984, the Boston Phoenix made a provocative discovery...

...Claud confessed later, 'Our chief anxiety was that with nothing to go on but the plans in the guide books, which were without contours, we might have democrats and Fascists firing at each other from either end of an avenue which some traveling night editor might know had a bump in the middle...

...No wonder the Wall Street Journal keeps him...

...Here is the solemn village atheist on the Judeo-Christian Tradition: "To take the 'Judeo' part first, we need only glance at the Old Testament to find a deity of savagery, urging his chosen people to acts of suicide...

...His father, he tells us, was Claud Cockburn, a British journalist and member of the Communist Party until 1947...

...One must displease so many people...

...A prodigy...

...With the true instincts of the social-issues liberal he touts the trip as a journey toward liberation and a better world, with 'real life' stenciled on the side of the suitcase...

...Some additional deep background might be appropriate here...

...This objectivity was sustained when it came to the prizes, as though Dolores recognized that it was absurd to have both an RCA and a Sharp video recorder, yet simultaneously accepted the entirely correct proposition that, as presently constituted, American capitalism (and Japanese capitalism, too, for the show's ideology is internationalist and antiprotectionist) can survive only if the consumer buys as many video recorders, microwave ovens, et al...

...The flag that Cockburn waves is assumed to be red or at least pink, but on examination it turns out to be a standard black-and-white number, colorized for the subscriber...

...But it belongs, as any reader can now see, to a well-groomed housepet and a good mouser...

...There's no hoarding on Wheel of Fortune, no obeisance to the exigencies of capital formation, the need for thrift, and other virtues dear to the heart of the Chamber of Commerce...

...Basically the state of Israel was founded by people who were not conscious of the rights of non-Western people...

...That periodical's editor, questioned about the Iraqi connection, responded, "It wouldn't change my understanding of what happened...

...Claud was also an occasional novelist (John Huston's cull film Beat The Devil was based on one of his works) and, from the son's affectionate account, an amalgam of wit, raconteur and adventurer...

...The siege was lifted, Koestler returned and the comrades made some disparaging remarks about his fortitude...

...His Mideast commentaries would appear to have another motive...

...seemed much more excited by the fact that they had won rather than what they had won...

...In one article, he compared the Israeli invasion to Nazi blitzkriegs...

...Denwrtuis has no place in his lexicon...

...From the editor of Commentary: "Cockburn's weekly pieces...

...have setanew standard of gutter journalism in this country...

...Even in a piece on Jesse Jackson's reference to Hymietown the author, with the leaping congruities of dreams, manages to bring the wicked Zionists onstage...

...Here is a piece about the MacNeil/Lehrer Report ("The Tedium Twins...

...Could any writer be versatile enough to satisfy these disparate organs and still manage to gnaw a hole in Norman Podhoretz's duodenum...

...Cockburn has criticized Israeli policies in Lebanon and elsewhere...

...Reaganbashing, after all, is now the sport of arbitragers...

...Besides the aforementioned, he writes regularly for House and Garden and American Film...

...Covering this disclosure, the New York Times reported that "in his Voice columns, Mr...

...Dolores referred to her treasures rather disparagingly as 'stuff,' and was plainly relieved that she would be able to dump much of it on her in-laws...

...No doubt that mud grew even thicker after the signing of the Ribbentrop pact...

...Who gave [the readers] such a right?' Cockburn told his wife later...

...its collection of paid egomaniacs, alcoholics, brigands, and propagandists could give the UN a good name...

...But the background, as Knightley shows, is a bit deeper than that...

...On the back a crossfire of endorsements arouses further interest...

...By now Cockburn, suspended from the Voice, had taken his column to the Nation, always responsive to the Arafat overview...

...Here is...

...It can be imagined with what anticipation I examined Corruptions of Empire, a collection of fugitive pieces by Alexander Cockburn, a veteran, the dust jacket continues, of the Village Voice, the Nation and the Wall Street Journal...

...At least Menachem Begin suited the motion of his lips to the movement of his tanks and called Palestinians 'two-legged beasts...

...Writing about the difficulties of tipping for House and Garden or the drones of PBS for Harper's, or about the inarguably repellent policies of Anastasio Somoza even for Establishment papers, hardly demands originality or fortitude...

...here is another about prizes ("What else can the Pulitzers be but show business if journalists—supposedly a critical lot— can only get together to tell each other how good they are, but not how bad...

...Here is a comic piece about Rupert Murdoch's plan to dump the New York Post ("It would be like Dracula selling his coffin"), and here is a spirited defense of the typewriter over the word processor...

...How they raise their money is a whole other question...

...Biography is followed by book reviews about cookery, sex, and sometimes both...

...Cockburn's economy of expression is echoed by his publisher, whoomitsan index or satisfactory table of contents, and is exaggerated by the columnist himself when he gets to politics...

...For larger pests a different animal is required...

...Duckwise, journalists and their bosses have always been sitting...

...but you get the idea...

...Corruptions takes time to praise Edward W. Said's book Orientalism, and spends many pages with an Israeli dove who testifies, "In the last four or five years I would agree with 80 per cent of the thesis of Edward Said, in his book The Question of Palestine, and also Orientalism...

...It isn't easy to keep up appearances and automobiles in the epoch of the sinking dollar...

...Except for a stolen gag from Neil Simon about a man with "clenched hair," and an occasional lapse of grammar, rare in an Oxonian ("Everybody had their hand out"), Corruptions offers no surprises...

...And why not...

...This, we are told, led Koestler to overcompensate for running off by staying too long in Malaga, getting captured and sentenced to death, only to be saved by a worldwide Communist campaign...

...in another, he said that 'the Israelis are behaving like war criminals.'" In a follow-up story, the Phoenix reported that the IAS had been founded with a $250,000 grant from the Iraqi Interests Section in Washington...

...This isn't an abstract question...

...It's a shocking war.'" Knightley dryly concludes: "If readers are to have no rights to facts, but only to what a war correspondent feels it is in his side's best interest to reveal, then there is no use for war correspondents at all...

...his Chief of Staff, General Rafael Eitan, likened them to 'drugged roaches...

...A few slashes at Talese and he is off...

...In these pieces Cockburn stays just long enough...

...This is an appallingly hilarious history of war reportage...

...On the front a collage of notables stare forward, among them Ronald Reagan, Andy Warhol, Margaret Thatcher, Anwar Sadat, Adolf Hitler, Fawn Hall, George Will, and Karl Marx...

...From the editor of Grand Street: "His work stands in the best tradition of Mark Twain, Hazlitt and Paine...

...Occasionally Cockburn takes a field trip...

...Perhaps one more millimeter of background will explain...

...Then I opened the package...

...after an author's suicide, Cockburn admits, "1 was never much of a fan of [Arthur] Koestler, probably influenced by my father, who loathed him...

...Journalist, yes...

...Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government and the Fascists are beaten in Spain they will have such a right...

...Alexander Cockburn, media critic of the Village Voice, had received a silent $ 10,000 grant from the Institute of Arab Studies (IAS), an organization then based in Belmont, Massachusetts...

...Jesus accepted it and so did Paul...

...His name was always mud around the Cockbum household...

...Well, let's check the inventory...

...Nevertheless, when a Leftwing reporter sent a dispatch saying the Republican militia was demoralized, he was attacked by the comrades...

...Earl Butz and James Watt, he reminds us, were dumped for making ethnic slurs, not for their policies...

...A more detailed examination of the Koestler affair lies in Phillip Knightley's book, The First Casualty, mentioned en passant in Corruptions of Empire...

...Here, then, must be one of the most forceful and multifaceted talents in American journalism...

...as the home will hold...

...Cockburn begins with a selection he calls " Deep Background, " concerning his early life in London and County Cork, Ireland...

...He was released and returned to England to issue a savage denunciation of Communism...

...The chairman of the group's board of directors was a Columbia professor named...