Cheers, DC
LOYAL OPPOSITION -- New York Press -- December 16, 1998
By DAVID CORN
Left At Sea As I write this, the petulant House Judiciary Republicans are deliberating upon the proposed articles of impeachment, and instead of prowling the hallways of Congress I am confined to the m.s. Veendam of the Holland-American Line, bobbing on the torquoise Caribbean sea, adrift with a dozen *Nation* magazine colleagues and four hundred fervent Nation readers. And I must report--alas, Mugger--that this *Nation* cruise, for long the target of media jabs and snickers, is proceeding splendidly. Mostly smooth sailing. A few days prior to departure, a reporter who covers the media rang to ask for the inside dope on the cruise-to-come. The curiosity was natural. Many of the stars of this eight-day, sun-and-seminars holiday have recently been at each other's throat. Brit-wits Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens were feuding over how to characterize and judge George Orwell's tattling on Popular Front intellectuals fifty years ago. Katha Pollitt and Eric Alterman were feuding with one another in the non-existent pages of *Slate*. Cockburn and Pollitt were also feuding over a column he wrote in the *New York Press*. The week before the cruise, Victor Navasky, publisher of the magazine, chuckled heartily when I advised that he ditch the seminars on the left media and labor in an era of global capitalism and instead offer a face-off between Cockburn and Hitchens, another between Pollitt and Alterman, and a group attack waged by *all* columnists upon editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Call it, "Sink the Veendam.") In fact, Pollitt, who turned down an offer to do a *Slate* diary on the trip, had suggested a non-aggression pact. And more than a few non-voyagers made pre-trip cracks about how they were glad they would not be prisoners on what would be a ship of ill-will. The magazine, friend of the workers and the poor, also received much grief for organizing what seemed to be a luxury event. *Mother Jones* pronounced the trip politically suspect. But it's no more suspect than most touristic travel in the non-industrialized world. Once aboard the ship--which Texan Jim Hightower dubbed a "palace of populism"--Hitchens offered a good retort for all the naysayers, recalling a line deployed by a socialist friend in England who often could be located in the finest London restaurants: "Nothing is too good for the working class." The Hitchens position was validated somewhat when I was eating barbecued chicken on Orient beach in St. Maarten, escaping a temporary deluge, and ended up sharing a sheltered picnic table with a late-40s couple from Lincoln, Nebraska. They were cruising on another ship. Both worked on the floor at a Goodyear parts plant. The conversation quickly turned to Goodyear's plans to relocate jobs from this facility to Mexico. The pair cursed out Nafta and Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, for having voted for the trade accord. They had never heard of *The Nation* but said they would have been delighted to listen to what its wirters had to say about Nafta and the consequences of global corporatism. Then the husband asked where they could find a nude beach on St. John's. You never know where you'll run into the working class. By cantankerous *Nation* standards, the cruise, as of the sixth day, had been a journey of peaceful coexistence, one of drinks not daggers. A formal non- aggression pact was not needed. The *Nation* scribblers, by and large, played well with another. The highlights had not been fierce and bloody intellectual jousts but, say, Molly Ivins' parasailing adventure above Half Moon Cay in the Bahammas. Several Nationites bonded on a snorkling jaunt at the reefs of Trunk Bay at St. John, a large chunk of which was once bought by the Rockefellers, turned over to the United States, and now is overseen by the U.S. National Park Service. (Hooray for the federal government. Chasing after electric blue fish, I never felt better to be a taxpayer.) My advice to vanden Heuvel and Navasky: yes, the trip raises money for the magazne and no doubt will spawn future *Nation* jaunts, but perhaps there will be less internal tsuris if once a year you put the *Nation* family feuders in pleasant environs and keep the rum flowing. But being stuck on a boat with four hundred *Nation* readers? Surely, stereotypers might wonder, wouldn't the presence of all those lefties spark a crank-fest? There were the predictable moments. After a seminar was cancelled when author Barbara Ehrenreich failed to make her flight, an unmerry band organized a protest, declaring they'd rather hear from other *Nation* contributors than have an afternoon at the beach. (No comment.) Overall, though, I was impressed by and enjoyed the company of those who had dished out much money to spend time with us scribes. The roster included a trial judge from a middle-America state who files as a Republican in his one-party county, a public environmental lawyer who recently won a $20 million case against an oil company, a honeymooning couple (he's a wallpaper-hanger, she's a librarian), a retired juice manufacturer who was a codebreaker during World War II, a farming couple who were on their first vacation in twenty-five years, a neurosurgeon who has fought the growth of unnecessary neurosugical procedures, one of the first female engineering students at CUNY, a Microsoft veteran who now funds environmental and social justice outfits, a Japanese- American woman who after being interned as a child during World War II went on to become a linguist. This was a fine bunch of good-hearted--and, often, damn interesting--liberals and leftists, many retired but far from all. An environmental activist from New Orleans told me about the time in 1986 she confronted her Congressman, Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston. She demanded that Livingston, then a contra cheerleader, respond to an article in *The Nation* reporting links between contras and drug dealers. Livingston, she recalled, sputtered that he had been briefed by the CIA, the agency had not mentioned anything so untoward, and, thus, there was nothing to the story. This reader related her pleasure when weeks ago she read in the magazine about a CIA Inspector General's report that grudgingly acknowledged the agency had worked with contras suspected of being drug dealers. At one seminar, a young fellow was strolling about in a t-shirt that proclaimed on the front, "This Life is for Suckers." On the back, it read, "Satan Rules." But I never spotted him again and assumed he was a gate-crasher. The first seminars were not seminal events for the floating left--as if they could be--but they had the occasional entertaining and enlightening moment. At a session titled "Come Together: Building a Progressive Majority," Alterman argued that now that President Clinton had sacrificed the left's position on welfare and crime--defensible positions indeed, Alterman asserted, but hard to defend in a soundbite culture--he had more running room for his "progressive" agenda. Furthermore, Alterman claimed, it was Clinton's "progressive" proposals that had frightened Republicans and Kenneth Starr and caused them to resort to scandal-mongering extremes to stop him. In polite and swift fashion, Hitchens chopped Alterman's argument into chum. No, he replied, "what [Clinton] gave away was not his to give." The crowd signalled its approval, though many did squirm when Hitchens in his tongue-in-and-out-of-cheek fashion called for more hatred, contempt, and partisanship in politics: "Politics is division by defintion." Not all *Nation* loyalists are that blunt. Alterman compounded his misstep when he came to Clinton's defense after Hitchens said the President had retained consultant/pollster Dick Morris, the toe-sucker- turned-thumb-sucker, "because of" Morris' creation of a racist ad for Senator Jesse Helms. How do you know, Alterman asked, that was the reason Morris had been hired by Clinton? Alterman may have had a point. But Hitchens didn't have to respond, for he had positioned Alterman into sounding as if he were either a) defending or b) excusing Clinton's relationship with Morris. That did not fly on this boat. The next seminar--"Ten Years After the Fall of the Wall: The Post Cold War"--held the potential for what the clucking pre-cruise handicappers had anticipated. Both Hitchens and Cockburn were panelists, and one could expect (or hope?) that their in-print cat-fight over Orwell would spill out on to the stage of the disco-ish Rubens Lounge of the Veendam. Nah. After Cockburn eloquently assailed "neoliberal triumphalsim" and called for grander thinking on the left in response to the pressures of global capitalism, the conversation concentrated largely upon the remaining nuclear threat (leaking Russian nuclear subs, future Chernobyls, loose nukes, the destabilizing consequences of enlarging NATO). Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers and an arms control expert, made the case that the United States has done little to oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons. (Why only last week, he noted, Defense Secretary William Cohen had declared that the United States still reserves the right to strike first with nuclear weapons--a position that makes it hard for Wahington to argue that other nations ought to refrain from developing their own nuclear armaments.) Russian expert Stephen Cohen pounded Clinton for his "mindless" commitment to Yeltsinism, maintaining that Russia is "on the verge of total political, social, economic and military collapse." He noted that there could be five or six Chernoblyls and that the United States, which spends (or wastes, if you prefer) billions of dollars on preparing to fight a nuclear war, needs to spend a few billion to prevent nuclear catastrophe. That makes sense, but currently Washington devotes a measely couple hundred million to the cause. This was--like it or not--the left at its best: attacking powerful common enemies, questioning the conventions of the day, and gazing at what is most real and pressing. (As the post-Cold War panelists cogitated upon these dramatic, globe-threatening, and depressing matters, Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, was telling former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman that there "should be no difference" between a presidential lie about bombing a country and one regardining an act of sexual misconduct.) Yes, in one late-night conversation at the bar, Cockburn and Hitchens did spar long and tendentiously over Orwell; neither yielded ground. And not all the other feuds faded into peace and harmony. Good manners dictate that I leave it to others to detail the current status of their tiffs. But this has not been a boat of internecine bickering. (In the two days that remain, we shall see if this stays the course.) Nor has it been a parody of oceanliner liberalism. (Hell, you go hang wallpaper for a living, or work a small family-owned farm.) The cruise--wish you were here and all that--did not live up to the pre-departure hullaballoo and gleeful predictions of leftie civil war on the high seas. Sorry if that disappoints you. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/19981219/1b764ec1/attachment.htm>