Something should be said early on, in this newly-revived column of press clips, about the dean of press clips himself, Dr. Press Clips, the successor to Hunter S. Thompson for our favorite cult journalist. We refer, of course, to Alexander Cockburn--pronounced Coeburn. For our money (and this is one of his favorite phrases), he is the best around. His weekly columns in The Village Voice have an obsessive quality, achieving for the mid-seventies what Dr. Thompson did for the violence and insanity of the Nixon years. Nixon's debacle finished Thompson--it was a final irony for the president to drag along with him, when he retired to EI Cass Pacifica, the man who understood him best. So Thompson is holedup in Boulder Creek, listening to tapes of Jimmy Carter speeches and reading about himself in Doonesbury. Thompson was best in writing about thugs and goons, from San Bernadino's Hell's Angels and the burnt-out geeks of Las Vegas, to the inhabitants of the Oval Office. Covering Saigon at the time of NLF victory, when Nixon was gone, Thompson seemed trivial, almost offensive. At the same time the presidential tapes were revealing that H.E. and P. even talked like Thompson ("Take Pat Gray out and shoot him (laughter)"; "Fuck the lira, there's no votes in that"). But his day was done.
Ah, but we're wandering. At first glance, it's difficult to see how someone of Cockburn's credentials could be the logical successor to a maniac like Thompson. His fatner was Claud Cockburn, the British Communist journalist of the 1930's, and Cockburn himself started out on the editorial board of New Left Review, the kind of magazine which was the first to publish Althusser's "Contradiction and Over-determination" in English. But when confronted with American popular culture, he went wild. On a serious level, Cockburn is in the forefront of a group of leftist journalists writing in a wide variety of popular publications (from (MORE) to Parade Magazine) about what might be called "power in America". Along with writers like Andrew Kopkind, Emma Rothschild, Kirkpatrick Sale and James Ridgeway, he seeks to cover politics in the broad sense, evading Washingtonitis and other diseases afflicting mainstream pundits, the Krafts and Restons of the world.
Kraft and Reston, in fact, are two of Cockburn's pet peeves. He may have started by seriously criticizing these men--and he still does--but now, in the best gonzo tradition, they have gotten to him. He is positively obsessed with them, and also with Jerry Brown (whom he feels represents a new fascist politics of scarcity), and Jimmy Carter (totally bogus), and C.L. Sulzberger, the major foreign policy voice for Cockburn's "Center Right Coalition," an auspicious group including the likes of Daniel P. Moynihan, Marty Peretz, and half the Harvard faculty.
Anyway, Cockburn is suited to these times because he understands what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." The wild-eyed potential generalissimos of Thompson's day have given way to the faceless bureaucrats, unknown corporate executives and "liberal" intellectuals who really make the rules. His weekly columns written with Ridgeway--an Institute for PolicyStudiesradical--under the heading of Surplus Value (economic issues) and The Greasy Pole (presidential politics), are generally thoughtful and serious pieces. Cockburn saves his true Private Eye spirit for the Press Clips. Also featured are "Dear Dr. Pressclips; Helpful Hints for Harried Hacks" (where Marshall Frady was advised that his case of "penny a word" was terminal.)
All in all, despite the awarding of prizes like the C.L. Sulzberger Memorial Plate and the Franco-Quinlan Memorial Tent, Cockburn is a serious and orthodox journalist. Unlike Thompson, he uses sources and formal interviews--he has credibility. Not only is he the best media critic in the country, he is seriously committed to social change, and is an important critic of society as well. His articles on the business community fill a gap that has been the greatest flaw in American journalism for year. But all with a light touch--when he tells us that California oil and banking interests have traded in Ford for Reagan, and gives convincing evidence for his claim, he titles his revelation "Bozo Must Go."
