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Recent
Stories
June
19, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
June
18, 2003
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
June
17, 2003
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation
The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
Lies Marathon, Day 3
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
The G8 and Africa
Dr.
Gerry Lower
Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
Ted Dace
A Review of Kovel's The Enemy of Nature
Adam
Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
Poverty
June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Counting Bush's
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Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
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June
22, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
My Life as a
Rabbi
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Inviting me to a recent wedding in Virginia, the
proud parents of the bride asked if I would officiate. It would
be my second turn in this role, having acted as priest/judge
at a rural splicing here in the North California backwoods some
years ago. On that occasion I wrote up a laicized version of
the wedding ritual in the sixteenth century Book of Common Prayer,
shorn , naturally, of the bit about her obeying him. Then the
couple nipped into a back room where there was a real judge
on hand to make it legal.
This time, beside a pond in a green field
in rural Virginia, there was no judge, but none was necessary
because the couple had already eloped back in January, getting
married on the bus the bridegroom's film collective uses on its
cinematic ventures.
Why, you ask, would anyone ask a raffish
antinomian of Sixties vintage to preside at any ceremony beyond
the increasingly familiar occupation of helping throw the ashes
of some deceased lefty comrade over the back of a boat or off
the top of a mountain? Maybe it's all those years on the road,
giving booster talks to radical groups, raising money for all
the good causes. I've learned how to look a crowd in the eye,
speak as though I mean it, and not mumble.
The male guests at the affair in rural
Virginia beside the pond were all in black tie and dinner jacket.
It had been years since I put on a tuxedo but I found one in
an old trunk, given to me by the daughter of a British diplomat.
I'd kept it for possible use at Halloween. Taking it to the cleaners
I noticed that the poor fellow, an ambassador, had spent so many
years resting his wrists on the dinner table at a thousand dreary
official dinners, mumbling "fascinating" at the anecdotes
of his neighbors, that the cloth on the buttons of his jacket
cuffs had entirely worn away.
As officiator I reckoned I ought to distinguish
myself from the common herd of tux wearers and so I threw around
my neck a white silk scarf with a Japanese motif picked out on
it in crimson thread. Later my old friend Seymour Hersh came
up to me and said he'd arrived a bit late, hurried down to the
pond and said to his wife Liz as they craned to observe the ceremony,
"Now I've seen everything. Alex has become a rabbi."
My officiation went smoothly. I kept
my remarks brief, imparting to the crowd the news that the couple
were already married and had demonstrated their progressive commitment
by accomplishing that on an instrument of mass transit, which
was also a temple of the arts. I stuck in words like "witness",
"solemnize" and "celebration" to lend a tinge
of formality to the event. Then I yielded the floor, or rather
the pond-side, to the couple who spoke to each other, and the
crowd, with glorious feeling and eloquence about their love for
each other.
No stumblings here! Their professions
had the grace of a Mozart aeia. If the younger crowd can talk
like that, I'll stop wailing about the grossness of hip-hop.
I kept the scarf on amid the drinking
and eating that followed, and was amazed at how many people concluded
that I must, against all the odds, in a manner as yet undivulged
to them, be a man of the cloth. It shows that people feel no
formal event is complete without a shaman on the premises, and
thus were prepared to regard me as a priest or a rabbi , all
other evidence and prior knowledge of my character notwithstanding.
So take this as a formal flaunting of
my shingle as Officiator. Have scarf, will travel. I even have
an Airstream as changing room, if my rig becomes more elaborate.
I also offer my services as elegist at
funerals or wakes too, though unlike many leftists I dislike
cremations. Radicals tend to favor incineration of the deceased
and subsequent dispersal of ashes in romantic surroundings because
it's good resource management, with the Phoenix motif as a bonus.
Being Anglo-Irish I regard cremations
as pagan beastliness and believe in coffins lowered with dignity
into the dirt. Crypts are okay too. One Anglo-Irish old neighbor
from West Waterford left directions that he was to be buried
in the family crypt, with a key to the crypt in his pocket and
a bottle of brandy (cork loosened) by the coffin (lid not nailed
down). He hailed from an earlier generation brought up at the
knee of Victorians who lived in terror of premature burial. My
Aunt Joan was like that too. "When you deem me to have expired,"
she would say to Dr Galvin in her deep voice at the age of 87,
"Cut deep into my wrists, to be completely sure."
Flushed with satisfaction at the proceedings
in Virginia I repaired a few days later to a green hillside above
Santa Cruz, California, where a friend was graduating from Kresge
college, UCSC. Now, UCSC's founding moment came back in the 1960s
amid high professions of hope that this could be a sanctuary,
amid the redwood groves of the old Cowell ranch, of medium-to-higher
learning designedly athwart convention. Kresge in particular
was designed to be communal, antinomian even.
Nearly half a century later one would
have to say that convention appears to have triumphed utterly.
Up there, on the beautiful green sward, shimmering Pacific to
the west and blue arc of heaven above, there was scarcely a black
face in the crowd and, most definitely, there wasn't a shaman
in the house.
Another old friend, Conn Hallinan, now provost of Kresge, did
not permit his radical lineage to intrude in any way on a torrent
of benign platitudes. The keynote speaker, Carolyn Martin Shaw,
a professor of anthropology at Kresge, was deprecating about
Kresge's early years, but not in a way that permitted useful
reflection. Not a tincture of politics, of history, of inspiration
uplifted her humdrum observations. I'm not saying that all graduation
addresses have be plump with homilies about duties incumbent
on graduating youth amid all the corruptions of empire. But one
does expect something, beyond what my father's tutor told him
as he departed Oxford: "Well, Cockburn, hitherto your life
has been criss-crossed with terms, exams and holidays. Now it's
pretty much a straight run to the grave." Surely the pioneers
of UCSC would have wished for more than that.
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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