A Colossal Wreck (13 page)

Boyd conceived of a simple lightweight fighter plane appropriate to his doctrine of OODA loop maneuverability. The Pentagon high brass and their business allies resisted bitterly. Boyd deployed his strategic and tactical ideas in a brilliant campaign of bureaucratic warfare. With allies in what became known as the Fighter Mafia, Boyd captured the attention of James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, in the early 1970s, and persuaded him to back their vision, which ultimately took the form of the F-16.

All through the 1980s the Boyd reformers fought their battles through the Armed Services Committees and through thousands of patient explanations to sympathetic journalists who were furnished with the headline-making exposés about faked tests and kindred lies of the arms lobby. Boyd, by now out of uniform, became an underground hero in Washington, delivering his ideas in what was known as the Boyd Briefing.

In its ultimate form this briefing took thirteen hours to deliver, as Boyd gave enthralled audiences—often military officers—what amounted to a unified field theory of human activity, ranging from the tactics of fighter combat to the rivalries of economic and political systems. The briefings were open to anyone interested. Among the keenest students of Boyd were a bunch of young Republicans including Newt Gingrich, who lost no time in inviting Boyd to lecture at
the Republican Campaign Academy, Gingrich’s staff college. Though Boyd would have been equally willing to instruct Democrats in the art of war and maneuver, not a single one ever bothered to show up at his talks. Boydians would say that they certainly paid a price as the Democrats were consistently outmaneuvered in the early 1990s.

Boyd had that rare talent: relentless intellectual focus on the task at hand. To hear him dissect tactics employed at the battle of Leuctra, when the Thebans beat the Spartans in 371 BC, was as overwhelming as to hear him discuss the relevance of Gödel, Heisenberg and the Second Law of thermodynamics to human behavior. Beyond all that, Boyd was an honest, modest, populist who never lost his humanity amid a life devoted to the consideration of war.

April 9

Maddened by what she regarded as my insufficiently alarmed posture on the “population crisis” and my censorious remarks about coercive family planning, a woman from the Santa Cruz area on California’s Central Coast accuses me of ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy. Reading further into her letter I find Carol Fuller’s final defiant charge: “I don’t know anything about Mr. Cockburn personally other than he is an aging Marxist, British aristocrat, but I would bet he has numerous children raised by a variety of wives while he gave us the benefit of this thoughtful political analysis …” So much for Santa Cruz.

“Aging,” I grant you. None of us, Carol Fuller included, has figured how to get round that one. “Marxist”? These days I’d say Marxish, the way Jonathan Miller used to joke in
Beyond the Fringe
when someone asked him if was a Jew and he’d say, “Hmm, well, Jew
ish
.” “British”? Not so. Irish by nationality, Irish-Scottish by blood. Just two wives, which is probably well below the average, and one daughter. So there are my credentials for talking about population. I’m a mongrel underbreeder.

The best and brightest have always been the most assiduous advocates of population control. The gung-ho, can-do spirit of these fanatics was embodied by Reimert Ravenholt, a director of
USAID’s population program. “Like a spring torrent after a long, cold winter, the United States has moved with crescendo strength during recent years to provide assistance for population and family planning throughout the developing world,” he wrote in 1973. In a 1977 interview—in which he said that his agency’s goal was to sterilize one-quarter of the world’s women—Ravenholt warned that a population explosion, by supposedly causing a fall in living standards in the South, could spark revolt “against the strong US commercial presence” in the Third World.

The policy underlying Ravenholt’s exuberance was National Security Study Memorandum 200, commissioned and prepared in 1974 when Henry Kissinger was head of the NSC. In a prefiguring of the present “empowerment” nonsense HK’s planners stressed that the US should “help minimize charges of imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children.”

The true concern of the study’s authors was maintaining access to Third World resources (the document was prepared during the height of the “commodity crisis”). NSSM-200 worried that the “political consequences” of population growth could produce internal instability in nations “in whose advancement the US is interested.” In extreme cases where population pressures “lead to endemic famine, food riots and breakdown of social order … the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized.”

April 16

Zoyd lives! The Place: The Joyce Theater, New York. The Date: Monday, April 7, 1997. The Occasion: A fund-raiser for Dance Theater Workshop, honoring the Jerome Foundation of Minneapolis.

The Big Event: After an hour of fiddle-faddle the stage darkens. Slowly from the ceiling lowers a yellow window frame, which comes to rest about thirty inches above a blood-red mat. From stage right enters my dear friend Elizabeth Streb, in blood-red spandex. She is
wearing swimming goggles and a mien of high purpose. She takes several long strides to upstage center, sixteen feet from the frame.

The audience is now looking through the dangling frame at Elizabeth, who executes a pop turn to the left, now facing the crowd. After a lengthy period of spiritual preparation, in which a profound silence falls upon the perplexed audience, she starts her run toward the frame, issues a sharp war cry and dives headfirst through what turns out to be glass. There is an explosion of shards, a perfect hole and Elizabeth lands safely in a perfect line on the mat, her Movement Moment triumphantly achieved. The new “dance” is called Breakthrough. Meanwhile the wealthy donors mustered in the front two rows delicately and nervously dust the glass from their prosperous bodies.

June 18

Down in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago I passed swarm after swarm of bicyclists whizzing down the Pacific Coast Highway and it wasn’t long before I realized this was an AIDS charity ride, all the way from San Francisco. Later I met someone who’d been to the triumphal concluding ceremonies. Mayor Riordan was there, and when someone wheeled in the riderless bicycle—reprising the riderless horse at big-time national obsequies with boots of the departed one shoved backwards in the stirrups—there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

The kitsch thing with the riderless bike sent me straight back to a chapter, “The kitschification of AIDS,” in Daniel Harris’s
The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture
, just published by Hyperion. Starting with the famous Benetton ad of a man obviously dying of AIDS under a cheap print of Jesus calling from the Other Side while his parents clutch and sob, Harris observes accurately that “in a little over a decade AIDS has become so thoroughly commercialized that the marketing of compassion now sustains a number of flourishing cottage industries, such as those represented in Under One Roof, the gift store housed in the San Francisco headquarters of the Quilt.”

Those in charge of marketing the disease have attempted to place
its primary commemorative monument within the context of a wholesome tradition of American history, to turn it into a kind of faux antique, an artifact from a phantasmal Arcadia. In this mythic, prelapsarian America, AIDS is stripped of its stigma as the scourge of depraved homosexuals and endowed instead with the integrity of a bucolic community in which good-natured rustics of unspoiled simplicity produced their handicrafts in a utopic atmosphere of democracy and cooperation.

July 16

In the old days of not-so-long ago, there was no mistaking about the transition from poor to rich when you traveled from Cork to London. The roads around Cork were full of Ford Escorts and low-end Toyotas. A BMW in the smaller towns was a rarity. These days the square in my old hometown of Youghal, thirty miles east of Cork, is choc-a-block with BMWs, Audis and Mercedes. There’s money around. In 1996 the Irish Republic produced more wealth per head of population than the UK. Only a quarter of a century ago, by the same measure, gross domestic product in Ireland was half that of England.

The natural instinct of an Irish person with title to a field and $50,000 spare in the pocket is to build a bungalow, preferably faced off with pebble dash or concrete or raw, liverish sandstone. Something, in fact, whose prime esthetic function is that of
not
—at any price—resembling an old Irish thatched cottage.

The result, particularly in the west of Ireland, has been the imposition of ribbons of these ugly buildings along the coast and inland rural roads, while simultaneously the country towns are being abandoned by those with the money to build and the patience to commute, usually at lethal speeds.

In another decade or so, the Irish countryside will no longer exist and the place will have transmuted into a sort of suburbia
in rure
.

Concrete is the outward and visible manifestation of affluence. My village of Ardmore, at the west end of county Waterford, has its Business Development Council busy devising ways of showing that
the place is on the cutting edge of progress. The beautiful cliffs now sport dreary guideposts, benches, concrete steps. Public lavatories and then perhaps a heritage center will soon finish off one of the loveliest vistas in Europe.

People are better off than they used to be, but in many ways the place has gone downhill. In the late 1950s you could walk clear across Dublin in the middle of the night and be reasonably confident nothing untoward would occur. I did so many times. Not any more. Dublin is in the midst of a heroin plague, and desperate addicts hold up shopkeepers, brandishing syringes of blood they claim to be AIDS-infected, threatening a lethal jab at the slightest sign of resistance. There are plenty of thieves in the countryside, too, many of them very violent.

I can remember my friend Gareth Browne developing an appetite for traditional Irish music that led him to found Claddagh Records, which first showcased the Chieftains. In the late ’50s he’d come to stay and drag round his vast reel-to-reel tape recorder to one cottage after another, while old ladies droned their way through all ninety-six verses of “The Walls of Limerick.” These days much of this tradition of music has degenerated into awful Celtic kitsch, a new-age O’Muzak stew.

July 23

It pains me to say it, but English food—at least in London—has truly improved. I took my daughter to a restaurant in Knightsbridge. It was pretty fancy, with a bizarre mix of distressed green walls, Balthus-type art and big plates done in the Constructivist manner with Russian words on them. I ordered fish soup and pig’s foot, and felt a father’s burst of pride when my daughter ordered oysters and the pig’s foot too.

When they arrived, the pig’s feet lay starkly, one on each plate next to a little cloud of mashed potato. I sliced in, and there was no resistance. A normal pig’s foot has about thirty pieces of bone and cartilage. This had none. Instead it had braised sweetbreads and a chicken stuffing. The only piggish thing left in our feet was the braised skin.
They were very good. The
maitre d
’, in an accent that veered oddly between Parisian French and East End Cockney, swore he ate them for breakfast every day.

July 30

My brother Patrick phones from Israel. Patrick is the London
Independent
’s correspondent in Jerusalem, having spent much of the last quarter century working first for the
Financial Times
and then for his present employer throughout the Middle East.

What was irking Patrick was the utter predictability of most press photographers. He’d been out covering a confrontation in Hebron between Israeli soldiers, fundamentalist settlers and Palestinian kids throwing rocks. “The sole ambition of these photographers,” Patrick said, “is to get behind the kids throwing the rocks, and get their shot at the precise moment the rock leaves the kid’s hand and arcs toward the soldiers.” And it’s true. We’ve all seen that shot a thousand times.

“Meanwhile,” Patrick went on, “not far from these kids is the school where the girls come out and walk down the steps and there are settler women screaming at them and spitting at them, guarded by Israeli soldiers in case one of the Palestinian schoolgirls tries to retaliate. Not a photographer to be seen, even though it was a wonderful opportunity for a dramatic photograph that told a story. Since I was writing about this scene I went over to the photographers massed behind the rock-throwing kids and told them that if one of them photographed the scene at the school they would be assured of a sale of that photograph to my newspaper. Not one of them would do it. Not one of them wanted to leave off taking exactly the same photograph that they have all taken thousands and thousands of times.”

August 1

To: Daisy Cockburn

Cc: Patrick Cockburn

Subject: Dark Days for Nigel

JAIL TIME FOR SCIENTIST GUILTY OF TRAP-MAKING

By Court Reporter

A former MoD scientist who set a mantrap in his garage has been given an 18-month jail term. The judge also ruled there should be an extended licence period in respect of the sentence as he thought 53-year-old Nigel Cockburn was “potentially very dangerous.”

Earlier this month, Cockburn, of Cloonmore Avenue, Orpington, was convicted at Maidstone Crown Court of setting lethal booby traps at the garage in Wood Street, Swanley. He had set the traps after suffering a spate of burglaries.

The trap was found after police were called to a garage fire on July 10 last year at a row of three dilapidated cottages Cockburn owned in Wood Street.

One of the traps injured an Army explosives expert called in to investigate after a quantity of ammunition was found there by police and fire crews.