On the Deaths of Cockburn, Hughes, and Vidal

By Brett Warnke

First, the death of political journalist Alexander Cockburn, then the essayist and novelist Gore Vidal, and now the art critic and historian Robert Hughes.  This year, the English-language polemic has taken a rapid-fire assault to the head.  If ever there were critics, equipped with the sorcery of forceful argument, it was these three conjurers.  Their prose could sing and scream (Hughes), slice and scorn (Vidal), as well as slash and burn (Cockburn).  Yes, they brought style to the tedium of public affairs.  But beyond this, these three writers brought not only radical attitudes, but radical arguments.

            In the case of Hughes, a Time magazine critic and author, warning against the art establishment’s journey into the flooded basement of post-modernism was more risky then than it seems now.  One must remember how many influential millionaires Hughes must have pissed off and how many of society’s elite he must have humiliated.  His was a voice not of reaction, though his shredded targets claimed this.  “I have never been against new art as such,” he argued.  “Some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.”  He could scrape off an artist’s gimmicky coating and leave them bare for reasoned evaluation.  He also pushed criticism to its highest form, one in which the critique becomes a necessary reference in the interpretation of a work.  I’ll admit, I still can’t read a memoir without a smirk, remembering Hughes’ pungent corollary:  “The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.” 

Hughes’s writing demanded that the new generation of critics grapple with past titans before evaluating the “merely new.”  The quality and power within the history of art was not quaint, but necessary.  To Hughes, who sculpted and shaped wood in his free time just as he polished his unmatched prose, the very task of a critic was unending personal training.   Thinking was perfected through rigorous exchange with other thinkers in a tumble and clash of ideas; this would inform description and strengthen argument.  Who in today’s newsrooms is fortunate to have such exchanges?  Hughes, himself, could change direction in his evaluations, even of Warhol.  And The Great Aussie was never an indiscriminate hater.  In his amazing series “American Visions” (heaven’s gift to every secondary social studies teacher), assaults on artists like Thomas Hart Benton were salted with adoration for Jack Levine or Lucian Freud.    

            Like Hughes and Vidal, Cockburn was a choosey lover and a righteous hater.  A columnist, author, and pamphleteer, he started his own newsletter and wrote a “Beat the Devil” column for a quarter of a century at The Nation.  The word that comes most quickly to mind in regards to a Cockburn polemic is “onslaught,” from the Dutch aanslag, for attack.  When I sent my first freelance piece to Alex’s Counterpunch in 2011, I was writing about Obama’s cuts to community action programs.  I had no headline, no dek.  “No problem” Alex wrote me.  He immediately christened my meager piece:  “Obama’s Onslaught on Community Action.” In many of his interviews, articles, and speeches, the word arises again.  Yet, for this spiky writer, was it not the world that had undertaken an onslaught on all that he had known and cared for?  While Vidal, Hughes, and (another fallen star) Christopher Hitchens, travelled on the circuit, Cockburn secluding himself in the hills of northern California.  And from his leafy perch, he hunted liberals.  Not content attacking his own publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, he leapt upon his fellow Nation columnists, like Eric Alterman whom he called a “bedraggled little plume on the funeral hearse of the Democratic Party.”  Yet, Cockburn was unique:  a sunny Jacobin, not a radical pessimist like Vidal or Hughes.  He would urge the left to “be of good cheer” just as he could, without irony, bring a tumbril to a small crowd and re-enact Robespierre’s purges. 

            Contrastingly, Vidal had no blood lust for the elite.  From his view as elite son and expatriate, he wanted to shake America’s elite of their sanctimony and illusions.  He demanded they wise-up.  But he was no mere “reformer.”  As he wrote in one of his most excellent collections, “The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root.  Therefore if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical.”  He scratched the surface of public life with his aphorisms and wit but dug at America’s roots in his fiction.  It was as if, through his voluminous creations and evaluations, Vidal believed thought and history could redirect the wayward Republic.  Or that a truer past could be revealed, say, by disclosing Lincoln’s syphilis.  One of his cleverest creations, Charlie Schuyler of 1876, was like the author—both insider and outsider—paid by the establishment but not paid for. 

             What these three men produced was more than stylish copy, though there was plenty of that.  They generated proof in the power of the written rebellion, real fighting words.  Admittedly, they were imperfect men; but is it really necessary to even write that?  Cockburn's absurd assertion that Stalin's victimes were far less than has been documented by Robert Conquest and others gave me pause.  As did his ignorance about the fact of climate change.  Vidal, too, collapsed into a rambling and conspiratorial shadow of himself in the dark close of the Bush years.  But their commitment and contributions to the written word remain.  And their work needs distinction from the lachrymose babbling of the loony right and the wised-up snark in liberal "critiques," both of which seem ever blessed with the label of “dissent.”  True dissent consists in understanding the role of the writer, the traveler who bears the weighty responsibility of seeking out and revealing truths.  On that ever darkening road, the company of Hughes and Vidal and Cockburn will be missed.  

The Twilight War: By David Crist

The image of twilight elicits a bright day shrinking slowly into night.  As we see from Mossadeq to the hostages and from Iran-Contra to recent cyberattacks, the relationship between Iran and the United States was born at night and has struggled through the dark ever since.  Upon reading David Crist’s 572 page history that documents the three-decade long non-relationship, can anyone describe our policies as anything but a needless and enduring failure?  Crist, a historian for the federal government and advisor on Middle East issues, has produced The Twilight War:  The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran, a clear arc from tragedy to farce in this very special relationship.   

Crist begins in the collapsing scenery of Shah Pahlavi’s detested reign and ends with Obama’s success in leading an international coalition towards comprehensive sanctions on a thirty-three year old “Islamic Republic.”  His narrative is not just stuffed with excellent anecdotes about covert activities (did you know that during the Cold War U.S. war planners hid caches of weapons and explosives in Eastern Europe?) it exposes the inner workings of bad and worse policymaking.  

There are also some delicious cameos:  The US hawking F-16’s to Sheik Hamad bin isa Al-Khalifa (the future king of Bahrain) as a bulwark against Iran.  The cat-clever Kuwaiti emirs who manipulated both the Soviets and the U.S.  And Moammar Gadaffi, insane as ever, sinking sixteen ships in the 1980s by inexplicably mining the Red Sea.

And the details about our own leadership are provocative as well.  If William Hartung’s excellent Prophets of War showed Reagan napping as defense contractors feasted on the Treasury, Crist’s portrait is of a dithering mooncalf.  Upon defeating Carter, Reagan refused to meet with the Joint Chiefs (a cheap snub) and began pushing the CIA to supply resources to Iraq, Iran’s longtime foe.  Crist cites the smug “realist” Richard Armitage saying, ““Neither side [of the Iran-Iraq War] was a good guy.  It’s a pity the war could not have lasted forever.”  With the help of U.S. and many members of NATO, the gunrunners earned their cash, and the protracted conflict ended with a whimper after eight years with nearly a million dead.   

During the war, when the Iranian ally Hezbollah kidnapped seven hostages, Reagan decided that he could do business with Iran.  After all, he had written letters citing America and Iran’s mutual religiosity as a reason to ally against the Soviets. (Of course, this was right before his administration supplied fabricated Soviet invasion plans.) 

But before Reagan's notorious, unconstitutional arms-for-hostages scheme supplied guns to the mullahs and offered American society the lachrymose speeches of Oliver North, Defense Secretary Weinberger supplied the President an admonition:  “This will undermine…our entire effort to contain Iran.  We will lose all credibility with our allies.  There are legal problems here, Mr. President, in addition to the policy problems.  It violates the Arms Export Control Act, even if done through the Israelis.  It violates our arms embargo against Iran.  It is illegal.” 

Reagan responded to Weinberger and other critics, “Well, the American people will never forgive me if big, strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free the hostages over this legal question.”  

Then on Nov. 13 he lied to the public about the deal and his sordid role in the deal.  As the great Alexander Cockburn once wrote of Reagan, “Truth…was what he happened to be saying at the time.”  Crist is less certain.  “Whether the president deliberately lied or was merely self-delusional remains debatable,” he writes, “but the United States had not only negotiated with a declared terrorist regime, but sold senior officers of the military arm of the Islamic Revolution—the Revolutionary Guard—planeloads of advanced weapons that could easily be used for offensive action.  They had even provided [the Iranians] a tour of the White House.”    

   The last minute pardons by Bush 41 nixed the multiple indictments that would have exposed the shameful and illegal behavior of those sheltered by the interstices of the national security state. Ironically, Khomeini would later turn U.S. weapons on the superpower in minor clashes that Crist describes with pointillistic detail.    

It is the contradictions of our position with Iran that are the most vexing about The Twilight War.  It seems that whenever U.S. policymakers were serious about a rapprochement—the mullahs would shout vitriol that Americans pols would take too seriously.  (And vice versa).  “The U.S. saw threats everywhere,” Crist writes.  And the conservatives in Iran’s leadership were even worse.  Iran would offer a “Roadmap” in 2003 that would address every issue of contention between Iran and the US—agreeing to full transparency in its nuclear program and agreed to halt its support for Hamas and take actions that would lead to a demilitarization of Hezbollah. 

What did the Iranians want?  A stop to “regime change” policies, turn over MEK members, and to recognize Iran’s “legitimate security interest in the region.”  They also wanted a statement that withdrew Iran from the ‘axis of evil’.  Kharrazi, Iran’s ambassador to France said in a statement:  “We are ready to normalize relations.”  But all this went nowhere and was undermined by narrow ideology, bogus preconceptions, lack of imagination, and bureaucratic suspicion. 

Oh, and terrible American leadership. 

            George H.W. Bush, for instance, communicated to the Iranians that “goodwill leads to goodwill.”  But as was his custom, Bush lied and reversed himself for political expediency.  The corrupt but pliable President Rafsanjani was abandoned and the toughs in Tehran—the Revolutionary Guard, the supreme leader, the Guardian council, and the parliament-- denounced moderation with Americans.  If Reagan set back the relationship through contradictions and dithering, Bush worsened it through cynicism and hubris.  Then, unbelievably, hoping for a deal with newly elected Bill Clinton, Rafsanjani awarded a $1 billion contract to Conoco to develop an underwater oil field.  Contract on America Republicans (along with the craven Clinton) killed the deal because they wanted to rub elbows with Israel! As you may remember, Clinton’s eight years were a nullity—save scandal and the Democrats deepening support for corporations—his attempts at a legacy through talks with Iran went the way of Hillarycare. 

                  But it was “The Decider” and his crew of fools, rowing up the Euphrates without a map, who went out of their way to worsen relations with the Iranians.  In Decision Points, he admits to leaving the Iranian issue “unresolved.”  (Though, what resolution he ever sought escapes me.)  In 2000, Bush was no internationalist.  In that campaign, he showed little interest in Iran or Iraq; isolation and “realism” was his nostrum.  After the attacks, Bush snubbed the moderate President Khatami, a reformer who was attempting to modernize a regressing country.  Khatami had hoped to light a candle to pay his respect to the victims of the Sunni attack and was refused because Iran, Iraq, and Syria were seen by administration hawks as equivalent evils in the “war on terror.”

Crist rightly declares this as a lost opportunity for an alliance; by using the “natural divisions” within the region, better policy could have been crafted for the U.S. and the peoples of the Middle East.  (As Bush will undoubtedly claim credit for emerging economic growth in Iraq, this failure is notable.)  Instead, as Rumsfeld once famously noted in his famous “snowflake” memos, all was swept up “things related and not.”  Iran was denounced as totalitarian—though Washington’s own allies were no angels.  The opportunity of exploiting the narcissism of small differences dissolved.  The administration refused any consideration of Iran in a postwar role—despite the obvious Shia majority within Iraq.  And by 2006 over 140 soldiers were killed by Shia militias.  How much of this could have been prevented with foresight from Bush’s “Vulcans” and the most basic of diplomatic communication?  Iran had cooperated during the Gulf War—even helping evacuate hostages from annexed Kuwait.  Why was it so unthinkable now considering the overtures by Khatami and his own domestic reforms?   

                  By the time Obama reached the White House and offered to talk without precondition to Iran’s leaders, it seemed too late.  Years of suspicion and mutual distrust (as well as the brutal and erratic behavior of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) jammed negotiations.  The reckless behavior by the Basiji in 2009’s stolen election pushed the pro-American youth underground and discredited Iran’s leadership more than anytime since Khomeini needlessly prolonged the conflict with Iraq. 

Recently, Obama successfully cut off Iran and the two countries now wander towards possibilities:  Nuclear conflict, an Israeli strike during a post-election interregnum, or an underground earthquake that could devastate hidden nuclear material.  (These are some of the more lurid ones.)  But a protracted stalemate seems unlikely.  The strength of The Twilight War is Crist’s ability to illuminate the shadowy history; it illustrates the repeated incompetence of officials whose decisions have led us into the uncharted dark.  

Beirut: The Last Home Movie Review by Brett Warnke

            Destroyed cities are not anomaly in modern life.   In Indiana, I've worked in depopulated Gary and my father worked in ever-shrinking Detroit.  When I was in college, two planes attempted to destroy downtown New York.  And when I taught in New Orleans, the levees buckled and destroyed the school in which I began teaching my first English course.  "THAT A CITY could die; for a European, that is unthinkable," wrote BHL in American Vertigo.  But in the excellent 1987 documentary, "Beirut:  The Last Home Movie" we are able to watch a Fracophone-Lebanese family--the country's urban Christian elite--talk through their lives as gunfire snaps in the emptying city around them.                    
            Three sisters, one brother, and a mother are all that's left of the old money Bustros family of Lebanon.  The memory of the family matriarch, Evelyn Bustros, acts like a re-emerging specter.  A writer, painter, and social activist, Evelyn's portrait--with its unblinking coldness--stares out at the anxieties and crippling uncertainties of her successors.  Will the family sell the estate?  Will the family be run out of Lebanon?    
             Gaby is in her mid-thirties, a long-time New Yorker, wised-up but fragile and artistic.  Mouna, the eldest, is a lonely and self-described "egocentric."  She describes the end of her marriage (which occurred for no particular reason, save Mouna's coldness) and describes her love of "absolute" destruction.  Meanwhile, mother, Nyla, a quiet younger sister, and the youngest brother, Fady, play much lesser roles.
              The family talks and talks more, but nothing changes.  What the film succeeds in creating is a two-hour long exploration--alluded to in one frame--of a family stuck in a web of their own making.  The setting of this entrapment is a massive 18th century house, in some ways a psychic symbol in which all family-members live and squirm.  If the outside war reunited the family, the psychological irresolution they endure keeps them there, reflecting and examining their relationships and past.  The house, even when full of chain-smoking revelers, always seems empty.  Within the home are azure chandeliers, photographs, and all the quiet tedium and protection one would need, say, if a civil war is unraveling your country.
             There is no next in this movie, there is simply more.  The flashes of Beirut's destruction appear as blips, minor transitions in the narrative.  Could this film have been made elsewhere?  Perhaps, with an uptown family in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose.  There is then, an enduring truth of a detached elite, hidden in plain sight to an alien outside world.  A chaotic world with its internal rivalries and international sharks waiting to hungrily snatch the Lebanon's left-overs seems as far-away as the subway Gaby took to JFK.
              So what's at stake in this movie?  The well-being and future of the Bustros dynasty?  The future of Lebanon?  It's Christian elite?  While not a political movie, the Bustros' seem unaware of their own biases and social standing.  Gaby's mother wants to entertain and please, yet her reason for being has evaporated since her husband death and the destruction of her city.  What use is she in a world devoid of gossip, parties, and culture?  Servants and landscapers quietly do the family's bidding and any talk of the ferocious politics of the outside world is met with quiet and anxiety.  They are an entire family retreating into besieged self-reflection; an examination that is strange, arresting, and sad.

Beirut: The Last Home Movie

            Destroyed cities are not anomaly in modern life.   In Indiana, I've worked in depopulated Gary and my father worked in ever-shrinking Detroit.  When I was in college, two planes attempted to destroy downtown New York.  And when I taught in New Orleans, the levees buckled and destroyed the school in which I began teaching my first English course.  "THAT A CITY could die; for a European, that is unthinkable," wrote BHL in American Vertigo.  But in the excellent 1987 documentary, "Beirut:  The Last Home Movie" we are able to watch a Fracophone-Lebanese family--the country's urban Christian elite--talk through their lives as gunfire snaps as the film's soundtrack of a disintegrating city.                      
            Three sisters, one brother, and a mother are all that's left of the old money Bustros family of Lebanon.  The memory of the family matriarch, Evelyn Bustros, acts like a re-emerging specter.  A writer, painter, and social activist, Evelyn's portrait--with its unblinking coldness--stares out at the anxieties and crippling uncertainties of her successors.  Will the family sell the estate?  Will the family be run out of Lebanon?    
             Gaby is in her mid-thirties, a long-time New Yorker, wised-up but fragile and artistic.  Mouna, the eldest, is a lonely and self-described "egocentric."  She describes the end of her marriage (which occurred for no particular reason, save Mouna's coldness) and describes her love of "absolute" destruction.  Meanwhile, mother, Nyla, a quiet younger sister, and the youngest brother, Fady, play much lesser roles.
              The family talks and talks more, but nothing changes.  What the film succeeds in creating is a two-hour long exploration--alluded to in one frame--of a family stuck in a web of their own making.  The setting of this entrapment is a massive 18th century house, in some ways a psychic symbol in which all family-members live and squirm.  If the outside war reunited the family, the psychological irresolution they endure keeps them there, reflecting and examining their relationships and past.  The house, even when full of chain-smoking revelers, always seems empty.  Within the home are azure chandeliers, photographs, and all the quiet and tedium and protection one would need, say, if a civil war is unraveling your country.
             There is no next in this movie, there is simply more.  The flashes of Beirut's destruction appear as blips, minor transitions in the narrative.  Could this film have been made elsewhere?  Perhaps, with an uptown family in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose.  There is then, an enduring truth of a detached elite, hidden in plain sight to an alien outside world.  A chaotic world with its internal rivalries and international sharks waiting to hungrily snatch the Lebanon's left-overs seems as far-away as the subway Gaby took to JFK.
              So what's at stake in this movie?  The well-being and future of the Bustros dynasty?  The future of Lebanon?  It's Christian elite?  While not a political movie, the Bustros' seem unaware of their own biases and social standing.  Gaby's mother wants to entertain and please, yet her reason for being has evaporated since her husband death and the destruction of her city.  What use is she in a world devoid of gossip, parties, and culture?  Servants and landscapers quietly do the family's bidding and any talk of the ferocious politics of the outside world is met with quiet and anxiety.  They are an entire family retreating into besieged self-reflection; an examination that is strange, arresting, and sad.