The Babylon System of Vampires
by John Kendall Hawkins
"Building church and university, wooh, yeah! / Deceiving the people continually, yeah / Me say them graduating thieves and murderers / Look out now: they suckin the blood of the sufferers, yeah!"
- Bob Marley, "Babylon System," Survival (1979)
An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair is a new collection of brief essays garnered and re-edited from the archives of CounterPunch magazine. In his Preface, St. Clair tells the reader that the idea for the book originated in discussions the authors were having back in 2010, and that the working title for the present volume was A Book of Monsters. St. Clair relates how Cockburn felt that the current title wasn't enough: "Neoliberalism is too soft of a word for a system that grinds so many people down." There are 44 long and short essays included in the volume, plus the Preface. Cockburn had done the original culling of the archives and placed them under five sections: Dogpatch, Jackboot State, Cutthroats, Swindlers, and a Touch of Nature. That's pure Cockburn at work. I've decided to go with a review that examines the volume's critiques of American Economics, the Environment, Global Hegemony, and the Decline of American Culture.
Alexander Cockburn died on July 21, 2012. The Scotsman who grew up in Ireland had been living in America since 1972, from the Nixon administration to Obama's, discharging his outsider's observations of the culture's seeming slowburn disintegration for the Village Voice, The Nation, and CounterPunch, which he co-founded with St. Clair in 1996. Astute readers have noted that Cockburn was regarded as a leading radical journalist in his 40 year stint as a critic of the American Way. He wrote a column for Nation, Beat the Devil, which was named after a novel written by his father, Claud, a diehard Communist journalist. Beat the Devil was sassy and trenchant enough to convince me to be a subscriber of the magazine during my undergraduate career when his words were a sobering tonic in the Reagan piss-down years of raider profligacy.
In the Preface: Mornings with Cockburn, St. Clair briefly describes the cozy relationship he had with Cockburn, beginning with how they came to join forces in the muckraking industry. St. Clair tells us that he was an environmental writer and editor of Wild Forest Review. He had just published a piece on Bill Clinton's nasty environmental record in Arkansas, and received a call from the devil beater. "That was a helluva piece you wrote," Cockburn told him on the phone, "You know, we may be the only two people in the country to the left of David Broder who see Bill for the corporate whore that he is." They had a natural affinity. In fact, I've viewed them as a pair akin to John D. McDonald's Travis McGee and his old wise economist pal Meyer. You can imagine Travis and Meyer having the following exchange issued forth in Orgy:
Two months later Alex was writing for me. After his first column appeared in Wild Forest Review, Alex rang me up. "Jeffrey, nice looking issue. But didn't you forget something?"
"What's that?" I said, fearing that I'd mangled one of his paragraphs.
"My payment. I'm a professional writer, you know. Just a little something to make me feel I'm not giving it away."
We weren't paying writers then. We could barely pay the rent. I scrambled for a plan.
"Can I send you a bottle of Scotch?"
"I hate Scotch. Make it Irish whiskey. Jameson's."
Compare this to just about any exchange between Meyer and Travis aboard The Busted Flush.
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