Today's Stories

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

Weekened Edition
September 18-20, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The Seventies are back, or so claims People magazine. I can see why. It’s nostalgia for the last sane decade in American political life, when people assayed the state of the nation amid the embers of the Sixties and of the Vietnam War and elected politicians who passed some admirable laws. It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F for fantasy.

One benchmark in the shift in that decade towards our present tacky state was the rebirth of gossip, and the relentless Hollywoodification of more or less everything. By the summer of 1976 the trend was clear enough.

For a decade the dark clouds of the Vietnam war, of Watergate, of the recession, seemed to obscure the landscape. Then, with a "recovery," with the placid realities of structural unemployment and the prospect of a more or less steady run to the grave under either a Republican or a Democratic president, it is plain that what a large section of the citizenry was after was plenty of rousing chatter about other people.

“Gossip?" said Richard Stolley, managing editor of People, to me as I quizzed gossipers about their business in the spring of 1976. "We have expunged that word from our vocabulary. The term has held connotations of untruthfulness. If we're asked to describe what we are doing we prefer to call it 'personality journalism' or 'intimate reporting.'"

Stolley was right, of course, in saying that the word "gossip" does have louche undertones. It is one stage nastier than "chatter," one stage seedier than "investigation." It's poised between rumor and the real, between the stab in the back and the handshake, between tastelessness and the libel lawyer's office. True gossip is only barely fit to print, is the rank underbelly of journalism. In the words of James Brady, then vice-chairman of the Star, gossip is difficult if not impossible to confirm, but contains the elements of an accurate story. Gossip, in short, is nasty.

In the mid-70s pecking order, People magazine was right at the top of the ladder between decency and outrage, alongside the sedate chatter in the New York Times's "Notes on People" section. A little below, we had "People" in the Washington Post "Style" section. Then down we went , past Suzy, Maxine Cheshire, Liz Smith, Herb Caen, Sid Skolsky, Earl Wilson, WWD, Interview, "The Ear" in the Washington Post, Sally Quinn, Ben Bradlee's memoirs, Rona Barrett, Cindy Adams, down, down into the caverns of the Star and the National Enquirer where spectral images of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Princess Margaret shrieked for release from their eternal torment—a torment, incidentally, from which the entirely fictional French gossip sheet France Dimanche had just liberated Princess Margaret, with the headline LE SUICIDE DE LA PRINCESSE MARGARET.

In the pantheon of gossip it became clear that a certain shift in personnel was occurring. Jostling in among film stars, royalty, and international refuse of every description were"media stars" and, increasingly, politicians. A certain widening of gossip's focus was in fact taking place.The most optimistic assessment of this new situation came from a man who is in fact one of the true pioneers of a whole style of gossip—even though he resented the term. Lloyd Shearer started "Walter Scott's Personality Parade" in Parade magazine in 1958. By the mid-1970s about 20 million copies of Parade were being inserted into 111 newspapers across the country, giving "Walter Scott" a readership of around 50 million people. And each week, addressed to "Walter Scott," came about 6,000 letters, mostly to get the facts straight about whatever piece of gossip happens to be on the writers' minds: "Is it true that Henry Kissinger is a secret massage-parlor freak?" "Who is the French blonde whose name has been linked with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands?" Each week "Walter Scott" gave them the facts.

I asked Shearer if he detected a new trend.

"I don't think gossip is on the increase at all," he retorted. "We don't traffic in gossip. Rumors and gossip originate somewhere else, and people write to us and ask if in fact something is true, and we spend a large amount of money and time checking it out among various sources. I think what has happened is that there has been a great growth of skepticism about people, which is understandable after the Kennedy; Johnson, and Nixon administrations. So there's mounting interest in politicians."

Over the years, Shearer said, Parade received fewer and fewer letters about film stars, once the staple of the column. Then thisd perceptive man delivered a judgement which reads very strangely now. "What has happened is that motion pictures are no longer the mass medium in America. Motion-picture stars were once the most colorful people in the world'. Now that television has surpassed and supplanted motion pictures as the prime medium throughout the world, the stars of television are very circumspect, because the people who sponsor them won't put up with any nonsense. So you have in the mass-entertainment medium people who are not particularly colorful, not particularly maverick. I mean, what do you particularly want to know about Paul Newman? People know all about Barbra Streisand already, or they don't care anymore. As a matter of fact there's been a tremendous decline in the Walter Winchell type of gossip column. One of the reasons why the Los Angeles Times dropped Joyce Haber was there just wasn't enough material. She had to use names that were fairly esoteric in Peoria, Illinois. So, as you get a more educated electorate and because of circumstances, the readers are more interested in politicians and publishers. People are not so much interested in gossip as they are in truth."

How wrong he was! Shearer was still honoring the Sixties and the early 1970s.

Gossip got a huge leg up with the Watergate scandal . People would print anything about the beleagured president and then claim pompously that outrageous allegations were essential to the understanding of the political personality of the president. The fallout was pure gossip—as was plainly revealed by the cover on the Star in the early summer of ‘76, which bore the headline PAT NIXON DRINK AND SEX CHARGES: FRIENDS TELL INSIDE STORY.

Some of the more seasoned practitioners, well aware that gossip can cause pain, emphasized that they try to keep clear of inflicting such damage. Suzy (Aileen Mehle), for example, was appearing in 89 newspapers going out to between 15 million and 20 million readers. Right at the start of her career she decided that the one thing she did not wish to confront for the rest of her working life was a roomful of people recoiling from her as at the sight of a viper. She also wished to keep her sources. "I knew about Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn right from the start. Was I going to print it? No way!" So the nearest she'’d get to conceding any aggressive edge to her enter prise—which she defined as "sending it all up"—is to say that "I give them the needle, but in a way that they don't feel till three days later." Nor did she particularly feel that anything much new in the way of gossip was happening. "Gossip is the juice of life, but we've always had it."

Herb Caen similarly thought that nothing new was going on. Caen, for those who did not have a chance to sample the unique pleasures of his column in the San Francisco Chronicle, was one of the best as well as longest-practicing gossips in the United States. "Gossip has never gone out. It's another media hype. I started writing gossip in high school in 1930 and it hasn't changed since then. That was 45 years ago. I told who was holding hands with whom in the parking lot and everyone wanted to read it. It's still the same business. I don't see any change. I think there were better gossips in the old days than there are now. The Los Angeles Times is trying to get by without Joyce Haber, but people are screaming bloody murder. Even though she was one of the worst, and very heavy-handed, people still wanted to read it. People look for something light. They don't want to read the Time essay, they want to know what Princess Margaret was saying to Nureyev, which is why People was started."

But at least Caen is prepared to accept the nastier side of gossip. "There's gossip and chitchat. Chitchat is lighter in vein. Gossip should have some scandal to it. It's got to be a little nasty. A little bit of going for the jugular. Otherwise, what the hell's the point of it? I try to make it as nasty as possible, within the realms of good taste and the libel laws. There's a little bit of the cobra in all of us. People is just a bore, no knife edge to it at all."
And then Caen started talking about the British gossip columns. "They're marvelous," he shouted enthusiastically. "They're tougher . . . my idea of what a gossip column should be."

The art of the British gossip column was at its height in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1961 Penelope Gilliatt—the novelist, screenwriter, and New Yorker film critic—concluding a drive from London to Sussex in the company of the playwright John Osborne, climbed from the car to view their secret trysting place in the quiet village of Hellingly. Her pleasure was marred by the sight of a Fleet Street gossip columnist climbing out of the trunk of the same car, where he had—at great personal danger—secreted himself during the drive from London. The columnist forthwith proceeded to take photographs. From the hedgerows sprang other columnists also in pursuit of evidence of the Gilliatt/Osborne liaison. Osborne was married; so was Gilliatt, to Tony Armstrong-Jones's best man. The couple retired—for the duration of their stay—to the sanctuary of the cottage, later to be informed by the neighbors that these same neighbors had been offered large sums for news of "quarrels" and other domestic commotion.

Gilliatt had made the mistake of writing a fierce expose of gossip columnists in Queen magazine in 1960. This was around the time that three journalists from the William Hickey column in the Daily Express had striven, in a couple of cunning ways, to enter a private party thrown by J. Paul Getty. One had disguised himself as a member of the band; the other two had hidden in the shrubbery and at an appropriate moment had emerged in full evening dress, clutching champagne glasses filled from a quarter-bottle brought along for the purpose.

It was also around the time—as related by Gilliatt—that the gossip writers had become angered by the refusal of the wife of one cabinet minister to reveal her private country address. A reporter telephoned her townhouse, pretending to be her child's godfather, told the housekeeper that he had a present that he wanted to get to the child, and on hearing that the nurse was going down to the country the next day and would take it, waited outside the house and followed her to earth.

Gilliatt discussed such practices; the elaborate stringer and payoff system maintained by the columnists; their innumerable cruelties, inaccuracies, and snobberies; above all, their insane hypocrisy as they detailed the socio-sexual activities of the upper classes. Her article provoked bellows of remorse and surprise from press lords such as Beaverbrook and Rothermere. Some of the columnists were sacked, others directed to mend their ways.

Shortly thereafter, amid the final spasm of the Profumo scandal, the art of British gossip-writing fell into a long decline. In its place came the jocular muckraking of Private Eye, the biweekly satirico-investigative sheet. Rather along the lines of Lloyd Shearer's present emphasis on people's lust for the truth as opposed to mere gossip, Private Eye detailed the activities of politicians, newspaper people, publishers, and the like. The order of the day was investigative journalism, or at least satirically investigative snippets.

At the start of the 1970s it became clear that the most readable stuff in Private Eye was, as signed by "Grovel," nothing other than our old friend Gossip in a fresh and somewhat tougher guise. "Grovel" was the work of the late Nigel Dempster, the man singlehandedly responsible for resurrecting British gossip-writing. At the age of 34 Dempster was at the peak of his profession. He was, as he hastened to inform me, the first person to reveal the full details of Princess Margaret's affair with Roddy Llewellyn. He gained much notoriety at the time Lady Antonia Fraser joined forces with Harold Pinter, by listing her alleged previous lovers. On December 15, 1975, he predicted to the day the moment when Harold Wilson would resign. Unscrupulous, devoid you might say of all decency, he best expresses what gossip-writing is all about.

"I think American gossip is tedious in the extreme. It's bad, it's boring, and it's about boring people. It's not revelatory. It's in no way intrusive. There's nothing there that causes any distress, that causes any harm and dissension—which is what we should be all about. We are here to write about things that are not welcomed by the subject of our inquiries. American columns are nothing but puff P.R. jobs."

Dempster, announcing that he had just been soundly thrashed by a member of the British equestrian team resentful of his activities, warmed to his theme. "Gossip must be nasty, because it is per se what you would not wish to be heard and spread abroad about your good self. The targets are surely those people who sell themselves to the public, those people who wish to parlay and trade with the public. I feel that the public has a right to find out any aspect whatsoever of these people's private lives. I go after privilege and I define privilege as existing for anyone with safeguards against the awful humdrum existence we are forced to lead, anyone who is elected to office, anyone who is in receipt of a title and uses it, anyone who uses the media to further his own ends, anyone who puts himself in the public eye for gain.

"The one thing you've got to have in the gossip business is a target. In America there seems to be no taste, no instinct, no smell for it. There's no inquisitiveness there. Watergate got out through people gossiping. Gossip is the color of life, the fine, bold strokes. By which I mean that you and I—the purchasers of gossip—find out what color socks Nixon wears or whether he sleeps with his wife.

"Our sort of journalism is grudge journalism. You only get tip-offs from someone who has a grievance of some sort. It's all swordsmanship, in my view. I regularly get beaten up and things thrown at me. Two nights ago Harvey Smith [the horseman] hammered me into the ground. Last year I put myself up in a charity dance in front of all those idiots and they were able to throw pies at me. Ten pies at $50 each, and a dozen eggs at $20 each. I was in terrible shape for a while, but if you can't take it, then don't give it."

Dempster, reaching his finale, delivered what was to my mind a fairly accurate version of what a lot of journalism and all true gossip is about. "I think human beings are unpleasant and they should be shown as such. In my view we live in a banana-peel society, where people who are having a rotten, miserable life—as 99.9 percent of the world is—can only gain enjoyment by seeing the decline and fall of others. They only enjoy people's sordidness, their divorces, whether their wives have relieved them of $5 million, how their children turned round and beat the crap out of them. Then they suddenly realize that everything is well in the state of Denmark, that everyone else is leading a miserable, filthy life which—but for me and other journalists around—they would not know about. They see that those who obtain riches or fame or high position are no happier than they are. It helps them get along, and frankly that is what I give them."

This sort of talk was , needless to say, a far cry from the encouraging noises made by purveyors of "personality journalism" such as Stolley. Dempster, a public-school boy in the twilight of Great Britain, is franker than many of his American counterparts about the realities of the trade: that almost all journalism in the end is gossip, and that the handmaidens of gossip are treachery, envy, and spite; that while many journalists may prattle on about the public's right to know, they are in their bones talking about their own need to tell.

Maybe it is premature to set such a parallel between the terminal spasms of the British way of life and actual and impending ailments on this side of the Atlantic. The British, after all, have long had an obsession with the realities and intricacies of class and with the presumed drama inherent in the sex lives of public figures. "Intimate reporting," as Richard Stolley termed it, need mean little more than a democratization of polite chatter, spreading out from Hollywood to encompass every profession in the country. As Stolley put it, "so-called superstars are now being produced in practically every field."

"Gossip?" Gore Vidal said to me. "Gossip is conversation about people. In the United States there has never been actual discussion of issues whenever a personality could take its place. We do that because we can never examine the sort of society we live in. Therefore candidates are rated according to their weight, color of eyes, sexual proclivities, and so forth. It avoids having to face, let us say, unemployment—which is a very embarrassing thing to have to talk about. Anything substantive is out. Otherwise somebody might say this is a very bad society and ought to be changed."

Defenders of gossip will doubtless controvert Vidal's gloomy assessment, point to crusading gossips in the tradition of Drew Pearson—who fulfilled the gossip's first function of simply daring to print the previously unprintable. The example of Pearson, the reporter-gossip, is a noble one and the sort of thing Lloyd Shearer evidently had in mind when he talked about people's desire for truth. But the times were shifting. The general trend of gossip had much to do with snobbery, envy, cruelty, the fostering of antagonism, knowingness rather than knowledge, the creation of coteries and a perversely heightened sense of the trivial – which sums up a lot of what passes before our eyes today.

The Wal-Mart Model of Education

In our latest newsletter, hot off the press, you csn Danny Weil on the latest big chapter in the smash and grab saga of neo-liberalism: privatizing Public Schools. Goodbye unions; hello “private contractors”. Now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. But, yes, we can fight back. Weil tells how. Also in this exciting issue, Eamonn Fingleton on how the SEC helped Madoff steal $50 billion and has now covered its tracks. First the Swindle, Now the Whitewash. And P. Sainath reports from India. “All I ask is that the poor family I give the cow to promises never to send it to the abattoir.” Meet Lachchu, the man who saves cows. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683

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And yes, I’m on the Road Again

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 7.30 pm
The CUNY Grad Center in Manhattan
The Future of Capitalism: Time to talk Alternatives

At CUNY’s Proshansky Auditorium, join Counterpunch co-editor and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn and CUNY professor and author David Harvey. Moderated by bestselling author and host of GRITtv Laura Flanders.Proshansky Auditorium CUNY Grad Center 365 Fifth Ave., at 34th St. New York, NY 10001
Open to all.
Book-signing reception to follow.

Wednesday, September 23 at 6pm
Raritan Valley Community College, State Route 28 & Lamington Rd North Branch, NJ 08876
“America in Decline”

The 6 pm event is free and open to all. Go to the Grand Conference Rooms.

Then it will be westward ever westward, probably along I-40. All suggestions on great BBQ and kindred allurements between South Carolina and Califorrnia, drop me a line.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

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Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

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The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

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Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont