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"Alexander Cockburn, Ross’ friend and frequent publisher, *has no room<http://nplusonemag.com/an-exchange-on-john-ross> * for such nuance. Accusing Enzinna of “auditioning for a column in *Slate*,” he writes, “we have here the utterly conventional reduction of a left writer, who brilliantly, unconventionally pulled off the tricky, demanding shot of highly informative reports from Mexico and elsewhere, to a walk-on role in the history of literary picaresque.” And what *we *have here is a species of Cockburn that has become too familiar lately. The washed-up hack who would’ve had kinder words for Enzinna if he was a right-wing militia member crawling around the Ozarks using a picture of Janet Reno for target practice. Not surprisingly, Cockburn misses the point entirely. For one, despite his claims to the contrary, John Ross was indeed a marginal figure and his frequent *CounterPunch <http://counterpunch.org/>* articles didn’t do anything to change that. And, for Ross, his politics did more than inform his analysis, they informed the way he lived his life. Rocking an eye-patch, that red beret, and invoking the spirit of “rebel journalists” like Jack Reed, he himself cultivated this “literary picaresque” image."