"dangling a cigarette"

[Peter K.]

Can't we retire Alterman, Hitchens, & Cockburn from _The Nation_ and
replace them by less tired voices?  Like Seth Ackerman?  Tim
Shorrock?  Naomi Klein?  JoAnn Wypijewski?  Robin DG Kelley?  Also,
retire Calvin Trillin and hire Suheir Hammad (luscious in personal
appearance as well as poetic performance,
<http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/bios.php?name=shammad>) instead?
--
Yoshie


Okay, policeman of the list, I'll agree with you on Alterman, but Cockburn
still entertains. Why not the more, the merrier? I thought the left's motto
was "all of the above"? Salim Muwakkil is great in this current piece:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/15/feature1.shtml
"Historically, conspiracist thinking has been more central to the narrative of the far right, says
Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates. Such conspiracism “assigns tiny cabals of evildoers a
superhuman power to control events, frames social conflict as part of a transcendent struggle
between  Good and Evil, and makes leaps of logic, such as guilt by association, in analyzing
evidence.”

Ms. Hammad does seem fabulous, but no
subaltern compares with the feisty Arudhati Roy .
When asked to comment on the possibility of
the Booker Prize contest accepting American
applicants, the 1997 winner with "The God of Small Things,"
declared, "I'm certainly not intimidated by American writers."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/international/europe/25BOOK.html

This should have been entered at Cannes:
http://www.hrw.org/iff/2002/ny/trials.html

Directed by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki
Produced in US/UK/Chile , 2002
Running Time: 80m
Format: 35mm
Genre: Documentary
Distributor: Think Tank

Part contemporary investigation and part historical inquiry, The Trials of Henry Kissinger follows
the quest of one journalist in search of justice. The film focuses on Christopher Hitchens' charges
against Henry Kissinger as a war criminal - allegations documented in Hitchens' book of the same
title - based on his role in countries such as Cambodia, Chile, and Indonesia. Kissinger's story
raises profound questions about American foreign policy and highlights a new era of human rights.
Increasing evidence about one man's role in a long history of human rights abuses leads to a
critical examination of American diplomacy through the lens of international standards of justice.
Gibney and Jarecki use extensive interviews and archival footage to remind us of Kissinger's
powerful role in global affairs, while reconstructing the cases that Hitchens so adamantly argues in
his book.