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