I just received a review copy of Alexander Cockburn’s 570-page “A Colossal Wreck” from Verso Press and could not be more excited. I had already ordered one from the CP website that I will present as a gift to a good friend who has been reading and supporting CP for as long as me.
“A Colossal Wreck” appears to be a journal that Cockburn kept from 1995 until a week before his death on July 21, 2012. As one might have guessed, there appears to be not a single word about his illness in the entire book. While skimming through the book, I came across an entry that reminded me (as if I needed any reminder) about why I loved him. It was not just the politics (of course we did have our differences but as Joe E. Brown told Jack Lemmon at the very end of “Some Like it Hot”: nobody’s perfect) but also his writing that remained bracing until the very end. He hated shitty prose in the same way that he hated shitty politicians. In this exegesis on the jargonistic use of the word “grow”, he articulated what has bothered me for the longest time. I first hear the term “growing the firm” when I was a consultant at Mobil Oil in the early 80s and thought it an assault on the English language. I am particularly irked by its use on the left, even if infrequent. When Carl Davidson talked about “growing the economy” in one of his flabby pieces on the American political scene, I gave him a piece of my mind. I only wish that I had this piece at my fingertips at the time, not that it would have made any difference. The book can now be ordered from http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html. Be there or be square. January 27, 2012 Last week revolutionary Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville announced the capture and imminent trial of “grow,” long sought in its counter-revolutionary mutation as a transitive verb governing an abstraction, as in “grow the economy,” a formulation popular among the Girondin faction. “Grow,” said the Prosecutor, was being held in the Conciergerie, under constant surveillance. I’ve no doubt that the Tribunal will not long delay in sending “grow” in this usage to a well-deserved rendezvous with the fatal blade. I associate the usage with the 1992 Clinton campaign, where talk about “growing the economy” was at gale force. My friends and neighbors here in Petrolia, Karen and Joe Paff, tell me that when they were starting up their coffee business, Goldrush, at the start of the 1980s, the local bank officials were already hard at it, talking about growing the business.” I hate the usage, with its smarmy implication of virtuous horticultural effort. As CounterPuncher Michael Greenberg writes, “It sounds phony, aggressive, and even grammatically incorrect, not the nurturing ‘grow’ that one associates with living things.” full: http://louisproyect.org/2013/07/15/a-colossal-wreck/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
