A Colossal Wreck (35 page)

January 14

For sale: Rare 1985 Ford Escort diesel station wagon, which of course you won’t have to smog. Acquired by Alex Cockburn in South Carolina two years ago. Driven reliably hither and yon, until fuel feed problems developed from broken off sending unit in the tank. Tank was cleaned out, new sending unit installed, but there’s still a feed glitch. This is the car’s only problem so far as Cockburn knows, but now he’s got other fish (’62 Belvedere SW, ’60 Valiant, ’67 300 convertible, etc.) to fry. New clutch assembly; new rotors and pads on front brakes; new battery; nice upscale paint job. Newish tires. Does about forty miles to the gallon. Odo probably accurate at about 68,500 miles. $1,800. Car’s in Boonville.

April 7

One house I stayed in for a few days was in Thornhill Square, three quarters of a mile or so north of King’s Cross. The neighborhood is on the way up in the world, but still agreeably humble along Caledonian Road itself. Each morning I would walk along, enjoying the simple dramas of the shop fronts, the hopes and despairs of small retail entrepreneurs. The tasteful element always hate them and dream of bulldozers, but I love streets like this, such as the old Main in Montreal twenty years ago, or Lincoln Boulevard today south of I-10 in Los Angeles.

Running north on the east side of the street, from the corner of Caledonian Road and Richmond Street we have: a smart pub called the Tarmon, with a fine display of hanging floral baskets; Caly Gents Hairdresser (wash and cut £8, dry cut £6, child’s cut £5, OAP £4), a
smart-looking place; Skaters take-away, with pictures of a chicken and a fish; Uncle Eric Kebab House; Pleasure Garden (grimy, shuttered, broken signage advertising SAU, SPA and UB); Kings Pizza; double frontage of “Kaim Todner, solicitor, crime, prisoners’ rights, mental health, family”; print and copy shop; Caledonian supermarket (a small store with good vegetables on display); Austin Daniel Property; Guzel Café and Restaurant; smart double front of Istanbul Social Club; Dental Surgeon (shuttered and barred, with note, “Dr Kylahs would be pleased to attend Dr Mean’s patients, or any other patients, at his surgery at 2 Biddland Road)”; four more shuttered stores and bags of rubble, including Logman Ltd, “specializing in watermelons”; William Hill, betting shop (Ladbroke’s across the road); E&A Drycleaner; Leonard Villa, picture framer; Somal Hair and Beauty Center (“stand-up sunbeds, hair extension, nail extension”); post office (also newsagent); KIG café and restaurant, with sign in window, “Full breakfast, bacon, bubble, eggs, beans, sausage, mushroom, tomato, black pudding, 2 slices of bread, tea or coffee, £4.50”; chemist; two shuttered stores; smart double façade of Rigpa Tibetan Buddhist Center; drear frontage of London Taxi Club; Wear-2-Rave, selling trendy gear; Parker Sales and Lettings; Islington Bar, under repair; then Bridgeman Road.

Round the corner was Islington Council’s West Branch library, with comfortable reading room, nicely stocked shelves, and a big children’s library across the hall. The rack by the entrance featured helpful pamphlets for owners of missing cats and dogs (contact the Lost Dogs Line, run by the Metropolitan Police and Battersea Dogs Home); for male victims of sexual assault (“research shows that the majority of sexual assaults against men are committed by heterosexual males”); for frustrated litigators (“Have You Been Injured? Was Someone Else to Blame?”), issued by the Law Society; for the worried, a detailed pamphlet titled “NHS Abortion (termination of pregnancy services in Camden and Islington).” Denizens of hysterical America, note the tranquil, confident tone: “Having An Abortion: This section describes how the NHS abortion service is organized, and how to access it. If you have decided that abortion is the right option for you, your GP or local family planning clinic can refer you. If your GP has
a conscientious objection to abortion, he/she should say so and refer you to another doctor who does not hold these views.”

On the back of the pamphlet a paragraph calmly explains that it has been produced “for any woman living in the boroughs of Camden or Islington who is thinking about ending her pregnancy.” This paragraph is reproduced in Turkish, Bengali, Chinese and Greek.

The bookcases carried good selections of fiction, biography, politics, and so on. I picked out a volume of
The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters
, exchanged in the 1950s between two cultured gents, one a teacher, the other a publisher. Indeed, Rupert Hart-Davis published the first volume of my father’s autobiography,
In Time of Trouble
, in 1956. My eye falls on a quote from William Johnson who, under the name Cory, instructed upper-class youth at Eton between 1834 and 1872: One of the faculties a good education develops, Cory wrote, is to “express assent or dissent in graduated terms.” I was still laughing over this as I ate a plate of chicken kebab and fresh salad, in the Guzel Café round the corner, cost £4.50.

April 21

Walmart’s planning to move strongly into organic food. The company’s CEO, Lee Scott, said at Walmart’s last annual general meeting, “We know that customers at all ends of the income spectrum want organic and natural food. But, frankly, most of them just can’t afford the high prices the specialty stores charge. Well, we don’t think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods.”

It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when organic food meant a bin of expensive potatoes looking like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, in the local hippy co-op. Wait a decade or two and every potato coming out of the state of Idaho will be labeled “organic,” a word already under very serious stress. The process will be entirely predictable. The big food companies will buy federal and state legislation designed to put the small producers out of business, same way the meat companies finished off the small packers and processors years ago, by insisting on hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of
stainless steel and other “sanitary” equipment, all intended to bankrupt the local sausage or ham maker.

Repositioning of the definition of “organic” is already proceeding apace. Again according to
BusinessWeek
, “Last fall, the Organic Trade Assn., which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a rider to the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would weaken the nation’s organic food standards by allowing certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing, and packaging of organic foods. That sparked outrage from organic activists. Nevertheless, the bill passed into law in November, and the new standards will go into effect later this year.”

It’s true, of course, that organic food—in any acceptable use of the term—is better for us and good that consumer demand is prompting this huge shift. But the priorities of corporate farming are not those of the small organic producer. The bottom line will be premised on large-scale production, relentless lowering of costs and attrition of standards.

July 1

Perry Anderson and his wife, Chaohua Wang, came to stay. Chaohua left me this poem:

Jasper

Blue sky, white clouds

familiar from elementary school textbook

Jasper leaping into the water

a black sword through the silence

Tidal sound of pine grove, unchanged

a countryside summer dream

Wars break suddenly, gunfire coming from afar

Mid-East conflict, Nagasaki, Governor’s recall …

A dagger, a javelin, a counterpunch,

A Lu Xun secluded in his Wang River estate

Has “fair play” been postponed?

Second stanza refers to the rifle-practice in distance, the topic of your book on Palestine-Israel, and the conversations of the evening.

Third stanza links the two images which Lu Xun—our Brecht—used to describe the thrust of his essays, and your magazine; then refers to the lyrical poetry of Wang Wei (seventh-century Tang poet), about his rural idyll by the river of the same name.

Last line alludes to the title of Lu Xun’s famous piece of 1925, attacking compromisers with the established order, rejecting their calls for fair play with the authorities.

September 24

A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat.

Edward Said, the greatest Arab of his generation, died in hospital in New York City Wednesday, September 24 at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the early 1990s.

We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms we know to be marching with us, under the same banners, flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may not have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they are with us in the world.

Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others beside. How many times, after a week, a month or more, I have reached him on the phone and within a second been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our updates: his trips; his triumphs; the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself.

He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed, was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that would have felled a man half his age and ten times as healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on to Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York. And all the while he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery diatribes he distributed to
CounterPunch
and to a vast world audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless, relentless clarity of Swift.

The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial permission, putting together from three of his essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming
CounterPunch
collection,
The Politics of Anti-Semitism
. I was seized, as so often before, by the power of the prose: how could anyone read those searing sentences and not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward’s generosity of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for his people came the humanity that called for reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.

His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism, homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in the nineteenth-century tradition of a Zola or a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius is a promontory in the infinite. I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual and political landscape that forced people, however disinclined they may have been, to confront the Palestinian experience.

Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make available my apartment in New York, where I lived at that time, as the site for a surprise fortieth birthday for Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed. The evening arrived; guests assembled on my sitting room on the eleventh floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining-room table groaned under Middle Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were ascending in the elevator. Now we could all hear Edward’s furious bellow: “But I don’t want to go to dinner with ******* Alex!” They entered at last and the shout went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise and then recovered, and then saw about the room all those friends who had traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation.

He never became blasé in the face of friendship and admiration,
or indeed honorary degrees, just as he never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter of century ago he would call, with mock heroic English intonation, “Alex-and-er, have you seen the latest
New Republic
? Have you read this filthy, this utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven’t? Oh, I know, you don’t care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself.” I’d start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read Martin Peretz, or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention.

He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in the
Atlantic Monthly
. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to dump sewage on his head.