Still burning - Village Magazine

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harry brOWne OPINION

IME to fess up, here. Some of us used to be quite fond of

John Waters. We even had evidence to back up our feelings:

In Dublin, under his editorship in the s, was a pretty

good, sharp index of the urban zeitgeist. Some of us still

envy him. What combination of his ability and Geraldine Kennedy’s

cack-handedness a decade ago managed to render him undroppable

as a newspaper columnist? For years he has represented viewpoints

that are at least as unpopular among the general population as those

of, say, the far left, but various editors seem convinced

that he should be permitted to carry on. Fair play to him,

it must be a knack.

It’s worth asking, though, what it is about the Waters

form of authoritarian populism that ﬁts it within the

norms of an elite that ostensibly rejects his views. (I

realise it’s hard to squeeze resistance to parking regula-

tion, for which Waters has now done two hours of hard

time in Wheatﬁeld, under the heading “authoritarian”,

but the man is not entirely inﬂexible.)

Compare that success, for what it’s worth, with the

professional fate of another man who like Waters was

often wrongly labelled “contrarian”, probably the ﬁn-

est journalistic writer, as measured in sheer quality of

prose, that Ireland produced over the last half-century

or so, the late Alexander Cockburn.

The comparison is prompted by the recent pub-

lication of ‘A Colossal Wreck’, the ﬁnal collection of

writings by Cockburn, who passed away at  last

year. Ireland produced him all right, but it shared the

task, not least with his father, the great British jour-

nalist Claud Cockburn, and with his equally brilliant

mother Patricia, formerly Arbuthnot and of Anglo-

Irish stock. Alexander had probably already mentally

transcended Ireland by the time in the late s, as a

teenager home from school in Scotland, he was writing

unsigned humorous leaders for the Irish Times. (The

obituary in the Irish Times itself managed to mangle

the chronology.)

He lived for the last four decades of his life in the

US. His ﬁrst collection, ‘Corruptions of Empire’ (),

was selected from a wide range of renowned and well-

paying publications where Cockburn plied his trade

in the s and s, plugged right into Washington and New

York society, though withering in his assessment of it. ‘A Colossal

Wreck’, on the other hand, ﬁnds him, no less hilarious, erudite and

insightful, on the outer fringes of US life, at least as deﬁned by main-

stream-media success.

This may have been a professional disaster – no more fat pay-

cheques from glossy magazines and the Wall Street Journal – but the

collection shows it to have been a political and literary boon.

Living, for most of the period covered in ‘A Colossal Wreck’,

deep in the beyonder portions of the back of beyonds in

northern California, and driving around America in barely

road-worthy but dearly beloved old cars, Cockburn shows

a connection with the unfashionable lives of “ordinary”

Americans that would be unimaginable in most success-

ful journalists.

He didn’t, despite the distance, grow entirely indiﬀer-

ent to the concerns of DC and Manhattan. In fact he mocked

them and their elite opinion-formers more mercilessly

than ever. In this passage, for example, he could be talking

about the Anglo tapes and the eternal, diversionary search

in any given scandal for a “smoking gun”: “... committee

rooms on Capitol Hill and Sunday talk shows were ﬁlled

with people holding up guns with smoke pouring from the

barrel telling one another solemnly that no, the appear-

ance of smoke and the stench of recently detonated cordite

notwithstanding, this was not yet the absolute, conclusive

smoking gun”.

Sometimes hard to pigeonhole politically – Cockburn

happily met some libertarians and paleoconservatives

on what was for him the most valued common ground of

anti-imperialism, for example – he diﬀered from the vast

majority of journalists, and probably sealed his career fate,

with an unfailing mistrust of power and authority. He was

the loyal son of the father who coined the oft-quoted, and

more-oft-ignored, dictum: “Never believe anything until

it is oﬃcially denied”.

Alexander perhaps never came up with a one-liner quite

as good as that, but ‘A Colossal Wreck’ is packed with pas-

sages that are irresistible for quoting aloud to whoever

will hear you. The fact that for his last  years the main-

stream media no longer wanted to hear him makes those insights

feel all the more vital.

Still burning

Alexander Cockburn,

a contrarian who died

last year, was the Irish-

produced journalist

with the best prose.

By Harry Browne

His father

was the

great

British

journalist

Claud

Cockburn,

and his

equally

brilliant

mother was

Patricia,

formerly

Arbuthnot

and of

Anglo-Irish

stock

“

Alexander

Cockburn