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By DWIGHT GARNER
A COLOSSAL WRECK
A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture
By Alexander Cockburn
586 pages. Verso. $29.95.
The radical Irish-American journalist Alexander Cockburn — he called himself Marxish, not Marxist — liked to bomb around America’s blue highways in large, decrepit cars, preferably convertibles, faxing in and later emailing his rowdy political columns (for The Nation, The Village Voice and elsewhere) from the road.
In “A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture,” we witness Mr. Cockburn, who died last year at 71, collect traffic ticket after traffic ticket with resigned sang-froid.
“His ferrety little eyes swivel around the back of the station wagon,” he wrote about a patrolman, “linger on some cactuses I’ve picked up in a nursery in Truth or Consequences, linger further on my Coleman ice chest and then come back to my car papers. Either this is a training session for Ferret Eyes or a pretext stop to see if I’m carrying drugs.”
“A Colossal Wreck” is an acerbic new compendium of Mr. Cockburn’s work from the past two decades, and the volume he was completing at the time of his death. It’s an untidy book — it mixes published and unpublished material in a series of journal-like entries — that captures an untidy mind. It’s alive on every page, this thing; its feisty sentences wriggle.
It’s worth lingering on Mr. Cockburn’s Kerouac-ian impulses (“I love scrubby old state highways, warm with commercial life”), because out in the middle of America was where he seemed happiest. From his mobile war rooms, he kept an eye on his adopted country. A class warrior, he kept closer watch through his windscreen on unchecked corporate power.
He was able to shift effortlessly from the personal to the political. Noticing that American radio has gone to hell, for example, he reminds us why.
“Since the 1996 Telecommunications ‘Reform’ Act, conceived in darkness and signed in stealth, the situation has got even worse,” he wrote in an entry from 2001. “Twenty, 30 years ago, broadcasters could own only a dozen stations nationwide and no more than two in any single market. Today the company Clear Channel alone owns more than 800 stations pumping out identical muck in all states.”
Those who have followed the career of Mr. Cockburn (it is pronounced CO-burn) will find his usual obsessions here. He loathed the Clintons, finding Hillary “the candidate for corporate power at home, and empire abroad.” He tangled often with Christopher Hitchens, whom he considered a hack writer, a warmonger and a tattler. “The surest way to get a secret into mass circulation is to tell it to Hitchens, swearing him to silence as one does so.”
He banged away relentlessly against what he called “the criminal tendencies of the executive class,” writing in 2002:
“The finest schools in America produced a criminal elite that stole the store in less than a decade. Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter and Kennedy, of the Chicago School, of Hollywood, of God’s demise? You’d think there’s at least a Time cover in it.”
He considered the establishment media, including The New York Times, to be apologists for the status quo. Noting in 1996 that newspapers tend to adore free trade, he wrote: “The day that column-writing is subcontracted to high school students in Guatemala, I expect to see a turnaround on the trade issue among the opinion-forming classes.”
He added: “Free trade is a class issue. The better-off like it. Their stocks go up as the outsourcing company heading south lays off its work force. The worse-off see the jobs disappear.”
Mr. Cockburn was prescient. He saw Wall Street’s 2008 collapse coming from a mile away, with the partial overturning in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking. He nailed Barack Obama from quite far off, too. He observed during the 2008 campaign: “I don’t think Obama is a real fighter. He’s too pretty, and he doesn’t want to get his looks messed up.”
Mr. Cockburn ended up on the unexpected side of some issues. He liked gun shows, for example, because “they are anti-government, genuinely populist and lots of fun.” (He was a gun owner; he describes shooting, hanging, plucking and consuming a wild turkey at Thanksgiving.)
In response to a school shooting in 2007, he argued that “appropriately screened” teachers should carry weapons. He admired the Tea Party’s zeal, even if he disagreed with most of its ideas. He wished America’s socialists had as much brio.
Collections of political essays, even those presented in offbeat form, as is this one, tend to date quickly. “A Colossal Wreck” will have a long life among those who care about the crackling deployment of the English language, partly because Mr. Cockburn had such a wide-ranging mind. He was interested in everything.
This book contains vivid writing about food, art, orgasms, Halloween costumes, blues singers, tear-jerking movies, surprise parties and dozens of other things. Mr. Cockburn was a fan of British obituaries, noting that in America “jaunty frankness about the departed one is not tolerated.”
This book is filled with jaunty little obits. Upon the death of Tim Russert, for example, Mr. Cockburn wrote: “He could be a sharp questioner, but not when it really counted and when courage was required.”
There are many other free-range put-downs. The former Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, he says, “would drill through his mother if he thought there was oil in substrates below her coffin.”
My favorite parts of “A Colossal Wreck” are Mr. Cockburn’s catapult volleys against the nanny state and the culture of therapy. “It was when the Challenger blew up on national television in 1986 that the idea of counseling children in the wake of such disasters seems to have caught on,” he wrote, adding: “In my experience kids are pretty realistic and most times enjoy a good disaster. They can take it.”
There’s a witty section in which he worries aloud in a grocery store that soon it will be mandatory to wear a helmet during sex. “And mandatory kneepads against carpet burn,” a woman behind the counter adds.
Mr. Cockburn opposed euphemism and coddling of every sort. His book is a stay against boredom.
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