http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=12895
Over the past few weeks, progressive writers such as the Guardian's
George Monbiot have attempted to engage Counterpunch editor and
Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn's provocative writing on the
subject of human-caused climate change. Wrongly presupposing that
his argument denying man-made global warming comes "from the left"
(or, for that matter, from any particular politics whatsoever), these
writers have missed a problem that goes beyond Cockburn or any
particular political issue, but rather goes to the heart of the
hollow, contrarian parlour tricks that invariably come along with a
certain brand of charismatic journalism predicated on personality.
Regular readers of Cockburn's Counterpunch know that among his
favourite targets are the blogosphere (referred to routinely as the
"blathersphere," though discernable from Counterpunch only in that
most blogs have far fewer typos), Christopher Hitchens, and now the
pointy-headed "grant farmers" of climate science who defy logic and
bend backwards to justify their continued employment. The contempt
which Cockburn reserves for those who use the space provided by
internet ersatz-journalism to natter impotently ad infinitum, or for
those who resort to intellectual gymnastics and petty theatrics to
keep themselves in work, comes off as a combination of projected
self-loathing and, in the case of Christopher Hitchens, professional
jealousy. After all, Hitchens is a writer who has done much of what
Cockburn has tried to do which is to say he's punctuated a vague
association to left-wing politics with 'wacky,' 'out-there,'
'telling-it-like-it-is' rightist stunts and postures aimed at
improving the salability of books and columns (the best assessment of
this tendency of "maverick unpredictability", to which I'm deeply
indebted, is Norman Finkelstein's 'On Chritopher Hitchens') to
infinitely greater effect, wealth, popularity and influence than has
Cockburn. Whether writing against equal marriage, espousing lunatic
politics that require a complete ignorance of the dynamics of racial
violence in America such as defending militias or, more recently,
the posse as an instrument of popular justice Cockburn has yet to
attain anything approaching the notoriety of his anti-choice,
pro-NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, pro-War on Terror fellow British
ex-pat, who just this week received another gushing assessment of his
contrarianism in the New York Times review of his book God is Not Great.
Of course, there's no reason to pick on just Cockburn. There's a
litany of progressive columnists who've upped their devil's advocate
credentials by making similarly nutty conservative
pronouncements. As Finkelstein wrote of Nat Hentoff, he "would jazz
up his interminably dull Village Voice columns by suddenly coming out
against abortion or endorsing Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court
nomination." Here in Canada, a cottage industry has cropped up of
fake and/or former leftists writing conservative columns dressed up
as progressives making (for them) 'anomalously' conservative
points. Look, I'm a progressive just like you, but
The 'but' here
is instrumental; like the one that follows the self assessment 'I'm
not racist
'.
The most successful has been Andrew Potter, a vacuous and
self-contradicting lightweight who has managed to secure a column in
Maclean's Magazine and who authored The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture
Can't be Jammed, which has the distinction of being one of the
emptiest books written in the past decade. At one point in the
tract, still nominally posturing as progressives, Potter and his
co-author Joseph Heath assert that African-Americans themselves are
to blame for the bleakness of the Detroit cityscape, because of their
rioting this comes quick on the heels of the un-referenced
statement that "[d]uring his lifetime, Malcolm X's popular approval
ratings among blacks never got out of the single-digit range [
]
while his disapproval ratings were at 48 percent." A footnote here
could not only have answered how Potter and Heath arrived at these
numbers, but also what in Christ's name they possibly mean (maybe
Malcolm wouldn't have been elected to a second term?).
A slightly more pathetic Canadian attempt at staking a claim on
Potter and Heath's territory has come from a self-proclaimed fan of
their work, Terry Glavin, an accomplished British Columbian writer on
labour and environmental issues. Far less competently, Glavin turned
his writing talents to a Simple Simon "left" reading of Samuel
Huntington. Writing from relative isolation on one of B.C.'s Gulf
Islands, Glavin asserted the anti-Semitism and pro-fascism of the
anti-war left, before taking a break from his regular columns. As
someone with a degree in Middle East History and Islamic Studies
(take that, potential employers!), I've often likened reading
Glavin's writing on the Muslim world to a trained biologist's being
made to listen to a Young Earth theorist. Part of that coterie of
white writers who try to up their ethno-credits by peppering their
writing with random snippets of Gaelic, Glavin's been somehow unable
to see in, say, Hezbollah any parallel to the homophobic, sexist,
rhetorically-religious anti-imperialists of the Irish Republican movement.
Living in British Columbia, I've come into contact with scads of
Glavin's former comrades who wonder aloud "What's happened to Terry?"
as though the transformation were one based on bad politics but good
faith. Similarly, writers like Monbiot are trying to draw out from
Cockburn a meaningful defense of his position, as though he dearly
held it and were willing to fight for it. As Finkelstein correctly
had it in his article, if this sort of thing were based on actual
political conversion, we could expect the traffic to be fairly
equally divided between those traveling left and those traveling
right, but that's not what happens. Furthermore, Bill O'Reilley and
Glenn Beck never do the equivalent of what Cockburn is doing Anne
Coulter never says "You know what, I'm going to break from the mould
here and insist that agree with Fidel about the Third World debt."
Being a writer is a fun life you get to write down your ideas, read
a lot of books, you get to eat lunch whenever you want, you inhale no
aluminum dust or asbestos, your hands are soft and you get to tell
girls you meet that you're a writer. Because of this, there are
shitloads of people who want to be one. Most pick some area in which
to specialize (I do mostly book reviews and comedy writing, myself),
but some the lucky ones get to weigh in weekly or monthly about
the issues of the day, and get paid to do it.
The problem is, there's no premium on a columnist who agrees with
broad social consensus, and personality-driven essays require
dynamism and unpredictability. And so if one wants to retain one's
privileged spot in the division of labour, one has to be quick on
one's feet. Having for years nurtured the image of the cranky,
Democrat-hating leftist curmudgeon, Cockburn's denial of climate
change we're supposed to believe that Cockburn, who is undeniably a
very brilliant man, is actually willing to hitch(ens) his wagon to
one lone kook against the scientific world is, I would argue, less
about his actual politics, and more about keeping with a script, the
following of which is one of the duties attending the maintenance of
certain social and material privileges.
Getting beyond this hollow, theatrical contrarianism and into a realm
of real, good-faith debate will require overhauling the way that
writers, especially political writers, make their living. Perhaps
the left critique of professional politicians who despite the best
of intentions tend to become empty shells, enslaved to the
prerequisites for maintaining a social and political position
abstracted from society at large, cushioned from the drudgery of
daily work routines ought to be turned against the very people
who've been mounting it all these years.
--
www.marxmail.org
