I just stumbled across an old letter I wrote to Alex Cockburn back in the height of my conspiracy days...
And the early days of me reading DKos.
I used to contribute to Counterpunch, pretty regularly. I've always been been a love him or hate him Cockburn fan.
I say and repeat, this is not a conspiracy diary, this is just something really funny to look back on historically in my life. I will stand by most of the sentiments here.
But to give you a glimpse of who I was in 2003 - in many ways, it's not far from who I am now, but this is funny as hell to read, at least to me.
An open letter to Alexander Cockburn:
Ever since reading Alexander’s ‘New Year 2004’column, I’ve been disturbed and off-kilter. As I’ve not seen a formal reply or criticism on Counterpunch, I’d like to formulate one. Let me first say, that I love Alexander as a journalist, whose writing is incisive and nothing short of brilliant. Though a young’un of 31 myself, I have followed him through the Voice, the Nation, the NY Press, and most importantly on Counterpunch since before I had to feed myself. As far as journalism goes, I don’t see very many in the same league – particularly when it comes to the blending of the sheer joy of language with the ugliness of truth. Even when I disagree, the beauty of his prose humbles my stubbornness and opens me to perspectivalism. Regardless of whether one is a fan of Nietzsche, being opened to new perspectives is the essence of not only art, but science and knowledge – it is what we call reason in the highest sense. This is why the only articles I’ve ever tried to publish I send to Counterpunch. It is a zenith of contemporary journalism. Alexander – you always have been and will be an inspiration to me [even though I’m just a musician and not a journalist].
This said, I have an underlying criticism of your ‘hopes’, as I guess I should call them. You lamented at the beginning of the ‘New Year’ column, that the left is too full of doom and gloom – they can’t seem to get their heads around the little shreds of progress made. The left, in a sense, has lost the capacity for both pragmatism and celebration. I fundamentally agree with your continual support of local, pragmatic politics and recognition of the need for joy and celebration in the work that we do as humanists, or should I just say our work as people who like PEOPLE [in the most emphatic sense] above all else. However, I worry that, at least in the mainstream left, there is in fact an utter lack of doom and gloom. Sure, there are dire predictions about tax cuts and social security and medicare and war and imperialism... fill in the blank. But no one among the ‘accepted’ left are talking about the real problems. They pay lip-service to issue of corporatism with their litanies about ‘special interests’, but they never develop the story for the viewers. They can’t, and I reluctantly include you among them, because the picture is far too perverse – it breaks taboos as sacred as cannibalism. It is a ‘civilized’ cannibalism of a shadowed and more insipid breed.
Alexander, you write about this all the time. From all I know of you, which is basically your words, you have made a brilliant career of exposing seemingly diffuse matters as the CIA drug trade and the hypocrisy and dishonesty of ‘journalists’ held in high repute. You, in much more elegant ways than Chomsky, have shown us how the information industry has duped us into a state of short-term memory loss. You have countless times called the US government, and their corporate masters, on their fascist conquests. You know the game. What you fail to acknowledge is both the collateral damage and, what Aristotle would call, ‘the final cause’.
I share with you a world outlook, one that elevates human beings to freedom, to their highest potential. I think we both believe in some deluded sense that Marx’s comment on freedom should be realized: we should look toward a world in which we are able to do whatever we feel we should as human beings without the fear of abject poverty or the distraction a job that feeds us with the consequence of spiritual impoverishment. I think we also share his observation that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. What I am getting to is this: you have toiled to illuminate the malfeasances and bring the ugliness to light, but you have failed to recognize the patterns and historical currents.
You say the left is full of doom and gloom. Yet the left still fails to recognize the assassinations of some of its most important leaders. Even if we speak these words behind closed doors, no one within the journalism of the mainstream left will touch the issue of conspiracy. They write about it all the time, but in ways that distract from and in fact discourage a deeper investigation. Sure, they will acknowledge “conspiracies” amongst energy providers to fix prices and etc., but they won’t touch the deeper ones. It is a dirty little secret. If the left were full of doom and gloom, they’d be writing about peak oil, the drug war, the fact that there is a mountain of evidence that 9-11 was an inside job. They’d be trying to find who really killed the Kennedy’s, Martin Luther King, and the countless Black Panthers who ended up on the wrong side of the barrel of a gun.
We are in a crisis time. I’ve always been suspect of the politics of crisis because it is historically the province of the right. But I do believe that we as a species are on the brink of disaster. I also believe that it is time for all responsible journalists to take off the blinders and piece together the bigger puzzle. Our world is now controlled by a miniscule cabal of financial interests who don’t give a hoot about our growth and survival as a species. They are much more interested in who controls the dwindling resources in order to increase their power. Leaders on the left were assassinated in the sixties because they were actually winning the war against these anti-humanist forces. 9-11 was either allowed to happen, or planned to further these interests. The evidence is clear, well documented and profound.
I ask you Alexander, as an admirer, to please stop implying that those who investigate ‘conspiracies’ are wackos to be avoided. You should know better from the body of your own work.