turns the interview into a game Republic owner Martin Peretz of snake and mouse, but Shafer in the '80s: and who, during the 1992 Clinton cam- at least he makes it fun. paign. double-bar- The Tale reled reporters Joe Klein and Sidney Blu- menthal with this riposte: "The only reason [Klein] has not entirely vanished up the of an Asp governor's backside is that Blumenthal is already occupying half the available space." Truth be known, it's Cockburn's serrated If you've ever handled a venomous snake, wit that attracts readers (at least this read- you already know what its like to chat with er) to his "careful analytic work" in defense . Not just your average of labor and ancient forests, and against the poisonous Marxist reptile, Cockburn is all Kennedy assassination conspiracists and grins and hisses and eye contact and bared the economic preachings of Jeffrey Sachs. Irish fangs as he chomps his soft-shell-6-ab Cockburn is a critic at heart, paid to road- sandwich at George's Global Kitchen. It's a test books and political ideas and the Zeit- giddy thrill to be inside the kill zone of the geist. and if the alternative to his curmud- greatest living exponent of bilious journal- geonry is the pallid civility of the nation's ism, and in my reverie l ponder the original editorial pages, then we're lucky to have - Irish diaspora in which St. Patrick chased the serpents from the island and for a Page 4 SF Weekly moment fantasize that Cockburn himself is descended from a race of socialistic bog- trotting snake people who escaped to sting and paralyze capitalists such as myself. But it's a sunny clay, and life is just a hot rock for Cockburn, who is (lacking his new book, The Golden Age Is in Us (Verso, 434 pp., $24.95), by cruising these in a pair of Plymouth Valiants — a 1960 that he owns to tour the West, and for the dissatisfied bastard around. the East a 1963 model that belongs to a Like H.L. Mencken ("cursed" by his friend. admirers, he writes), Cockburn built his With charm and modesty, and more than journalist reputation by using words as a jigger of perfidy. Cockburn disavows the weapons, aiming for the heads of foes on presence of bile in his work and life. the left and right (centrists almost never "Bile is something eating at you all the grace Cockburn's cross hairs). Over the time," he protests. "Bilious people hate. last 23 years, Cockburn don't hate." has spilled blood with "1 think I'm funnier than 1 am Wilier, if press criticism in the that's a word," he says. "After column after Village Voice, regular column of careful analytic work, you take a op-ed work in the Wall few swings and all that people remember Street Journal and the are the vivid slaggings, and all the careful Los Angeles Times, theory goes for naught." magazine work galore, It's a pitifully cheap plea for sympathy and books about chess, coming from the leftist who taunted neocon politics, and the Ama- godfather Norman Podhoretz as a "frother" zon. You can sense the for a decade: who, in the wake of the Soviet presence of the ghost invasion, wrote, "I yield to none in my sym- of the Sage of Balti- pathy to those prostrate beneath the Russ- more when Cockburn ian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved applies his acid logic to rape its Afghanistan": who champions the the McMartin child- Church of Scien- abuse case and other tology in its battle hysterical allegations with Time maga- zine; whose rou- tine invective put a spell on New think I'm funnier than I am billier, if that's tttat Satanists nave inut- trated the day-care a word." industry: If we permit children to give sworn Alexander Cockburn testimony in such legal proceedings, he ar- and the Church of L. Ron. flashbacks to his journalist Commie dad, gues. we should jail "I decline the invitation," says Cockburn, the notorious Claud Cockburn. Also show- them if they perjure a veteran defiler of the Catholic Church. cased in Cockburn's passing display are As I pose the Scientologist question a cou- friends like Ben Sonnenberg and the late themselves. Case closed. ple more times, he repeats, "I decline the Andrew Kopkind, as well as the kitchen Also like Mencken, invitation," with a massive smile on his cabinet that advises him on political and face. "What is their big crime? That they Cockburn so adores vit- economic matters — Noam Chomsky, riol that he collects and shares the insults flung at him, reproducing in The Golden Age this have Tom Cruise? I should say, 'Release Robert PoIlin, Frank Baracke, and Joe Paff. piece of hale mail from a reader "I was Toni Cruise and maybe he'd become Olivi- a neighbor of Cockburn's in Petrolia along very happy to hear the news of your moth- er'!?" Humboldt County's Lost Coast, where the er's death. As a Jew, whenever I hear Cockburn comforts himself with the writer moved in 1990. tragedy befall an evil person, I quote from knowledge that the Scientologists' "ene- Several million words into his caustic Proverbs 11:10. For a Jew-baiting goy like mies" (his word, by the way) — the CIA, career, Cockburn pauses briefly when you it means 'And when the wicked perish the pharmaceutical industry, the IRS - asked if he'd like to take back any of it. there is joy.' May you goyim who attack map almost one•to-one onto his. But later, "No, not really," he says, which is logical and criticize Jews and Israel suffer even when asked to produce his own enemies considering that snakes have no regrets. more." list (and a man who has written so wickedly But then boiling out of his brainpan comes Like every journalist made the object of a about so many surely has a long one), he the sorrow of having hurt a few feelings story, Cockburn turns the interview into a lies most unconvincingly: "I don't have an with a bad review of the cookbook of the game of snake and mouse, but at least enemies list." Lady's Club of Charleston in the pages of he makes it Yet reading The Golden Age you almost House and Garden. fun. Less cut- believe the fib. The book largely abandons "I was snotty about it," he says, with gen- ting in person his Mighty Achievements in Vituperation uine remorse. "And they wrote to me say- than he is in to explore the surface of a vivid and vigor- ing, We were so happy to see you review print — other- ous inner life. A huge garage sale of rewrit- the book, and so disappointed with what wise he'd get ten Nation columns, diary entries, letters to you wrote.'" punched - and from the author, and other literary left- And what about the "rape of Afghanistan" Cockburn is overs from stoppyers in Istanbul, Key wisecrack, for which he's been hounded for still a bit of a West, Ardmore, Topanga* London, Rio, and the last 15 years. brat, seizing other points. The Golden Age chronicles in "P.J. O'Rourke says things like that all my list of journal form the years bookending the last the time," he says, and then relents. "I questions and of Reagan (1987) and the beginning of Clin- shouldn't have written it he says. It was a speed reading them aloud, scribbling his ton (1992) — "a seismic period in my life," joke." own observations into my notebook when I Cockburn allows. Worried that the lunch might degenerate leave the table to make a phone call - "Here is a sort of me, as 'me' as I can fix into a hugfest, we conclude the interview "God, the man is brilliant, et etc.." he it," he says. "How I travel, who I talk to ... and Cockburn repairs to the parking lot to writes about himself — and, assuming that the evidence of my emotional life." rearrange the piles of boxes and loose traps are being set for him when they Emotional life, yes, but at a distance. papers littering his trusty Valiant. His mind aren't, adamantly refusing to answer per- Don't read The Golden Age for romantic dis- already on his next stop on the book hus- fectly reasonable questions. closures. "I'm a public fellow — not a con- tings, Cockburn offers one last thought "I see where this is going," he says archly fessional writer," he says in mammoth apropos of nothing. when asked about his least greatest hits - understatement. But Cockburn sloughs off "The Pulitzers!" he says. "A prize that like the Afghanistan quip and his alleged enough 54-year-old skin to expose some hasn't been won by Herb Caen isn't worth Stalinist leanings. Suspicion abounds, too, pink, scaly flesh. He shares his thoughts winning!" when I inquire about the moral support he about and correspondence with other has lent the money-hustling Church of Sci- members of the immediate Cockburn clan entology and I ask if there is any moral — daughter Daisy. scrivener siblings By Jack Shafer equivalence between the Church of Rome Andrew and Patrick, his ailing mother, and

July 5—July 11, 1995 Alexander Cockburn, the Lizard King of journalism