>There's a hell of a set-to between this list's moderator and
>Alexander Cockburn in the current NY Press letters column, which,
>unfortunately, isn't available at the NYP web site. Perhaps Doug
>would be kind enough to scan it onto the list for the benefit of
>all. What entertainment -- the World Wrestling Federation should
>really sign these two up.
Unfortunately, NYP scans very badly - too much bleed & print-through, like all newspapers. And Cockburn's reply is all in italics. I'll append my letter, which is a response to Cockburn's attack on Katha Pollitt, which is now up on the Counterpunch website <http://www.counterpunch.org/pollitt.html>.
Doug
----
[letter to New York Press]
In the course of an email exchange with Andrey Slivka on Tuesday morning, October 26 - ages ago in tabloid time, I know - I mentioned that I thought you guys should ease up on Katha Pollitt. Imagine my surprise to see in the paper that hit the streets that afternoon that Alexander Cockburn had devoted his entire column to an indictment of Pollitt. Her crime? Writing a condemnation of the Satanic ritual abuse madness ten years too late by Cockburn's calendar.
I thought Cockburn wrote great stuff on that witch hunt, as did Debbie Nathan and Dorothy Rabinowitz. Too bad there were so few others on their side. If he thought it was so important that Pollitt weigh in, did he ask her to write something? Did he suggest to the editor they share at The Nation that it might be a good topic for one of her columns? My preliminary research says he didn't.
If Pollitt's silence was a crime - or a mistake, or an oversight, or whatever you want to call it - then certainly she wasn't the only guilty party. It might have been interesting to analyze why some American feminists made an alliance with censors and witch-hunters in the 1980s - though Pollitt wasn't a member of that school, and their numbers have dwindled severely in the 1990s. But that would have been a different piece from the kinds of ad hominem flames that Cockburn seems to specialize in these days. What was the point in devoting thousands of words to her and no one else? Does he really think her influence is that awesome? If he thought so, then his ten-year failure to urge her to write on the topic is a pretty serious lapse.
Why does Cockburn find it so easy to say kind things about right-wing lunatics like his new friend Larry Pratt - the fundamentalist gun nut who thinks Charlton Heston is a chardonnay-swilling sellout, who thinks that arming teachers is a nifty solution to school violence, and who was fired by the Buchanan campaign in '96 for being too racist - while reserving all his acid for people on the left? What's next, a column on how the Klan is really just an affinity group for misunderstood working class tax rebels?