Edward Said

Readers of American writing have been struck by the prevalence of what Dwight Macdonald once called ‘how-to-ism’. This is not simply a matter of guides to gadgetry, or to cooking, or to doing things like marrying wealth and achieving peace of mind, although writing on all these subjects is more plentiful in America than anywhere else. What I have in mind is the practical, instructional attitude which is to be found in a great many canonical works of high literature: Moby Dick, for instance, can be seen as a manual of what to do if you want to go whaling, as well as an encyclopedia of everything pertaining to ships and the sea. Cooper’s novels are full of practical hints about forest and Indian life, Twain is stuffed with South-Western and Mississippi River lore, as is Walden of New England nature and Faulkner of the South; in Henry James the tendency takes the form of connoisseurship. In all these cases the implication is that reality cannot stand on its own, but requires the services of an expert to convey or unlock its meaning. The converse of this is no less true, that Americans seem interested not so much in reality as in how to approach and master it, and for this expert guidance is necessary.

In the extracts from David Stockman’s memoirs published on Monday 14 April by Newsweek, Reagan’s former Budget Director spoke of the mediocrities, charlatans and power-hungry politicos who cluster around the disturbingly vague and incompetent Great Communicator. For them, Stockman said, ‘reality-time’ was the seven o’clock evening news on television. How did we look and sound? they ask themselves, as if public policy were some sort of show designed to entertain and please ‘the American people’ once a day, five nights a week. On 14 April reality-time began on each of the three networks with the same first indications of an American strike against Libya.

The ostensible reason for the enormous concern in America over the Irangate affair has been the question of whether the President and his National Security Council, together with the CIA and others, have been trading weapons for the release of the hostages held in Lebanon. The argument given in defence of what was done has been, from the start, that sending Robert McFarlane to Teheran was an attempt to exploit a ‘geopolitical opening’. Both versions of the same series of events have been criticised as an affront to the stated US policy of not dealing with terrorists or terrorist states. According to the categories devised by the State Department, Iran is a terrorist state.

Despite the media’s unending stream of patriotic talk about ‘America’, one occasionally has a sense of the country’s disunity, its unmanageable extremes, the foreignness of some of its parts to other parts. Riding the Broadway bus recently, I was struck by the driver’s almost beatific reaction to a passenger’s rudeness to him. Instead of screaming back at the offending person, he smiled gently, saying with an air of contentment: ‘Scream all you like. That’s OK. In California they don’t just argue – they shoot each other.’ He was referring to the spate of freeway incidents near Los Angeles, in which impatient or stalled commuters picked each other off with rifles and handguns in the midst of the vast traffic jams.’

Much the best way to convey appreciation of Alexander Cockburn’s rousing and combative prose is to quote him at length. The protocols of reviewing, however, preclude such a practice, so one has to resort to the altogether drearier method of describing what he is about. Recently I mentioned to him that I was reading his book in order to review it. He was calling from Eugene, Oregon (the week before he had been in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and just before that we had had breakfast in London, to which he had just come from Moscow). ‘Noting with pleasure and admiration the superb prose, the witty observation, the admirable structure,’ he immediately volunteered. Why, in the desert of today’s journalistic mediocrity and cowardly trimming, anyone with Cockburn’s gifts and courage should be modest, or mock-modest, I shall leave to others to discuss. Certainly the darting, cruel and unsparing wit displayed by this oldest son of Claud Cockburn stands out brilliantly in the pages of the Nation, the Wall Street Journal, In These Times, week after week. Few people have the courage to accumulate enemies the way Cockburn has. Starting with Ronald Reagan, whom he twits remorselessly, he has been on the wrong side of the entire US Government, of the New Republic, of Norman Podhoretz, of nearly every journalist of note, left, right and centre, of the New York Times, of the McNeil-Lehrer Report (see in particular his devastating replication of that TV programme’s famous ‘balance’, with the ponderously sober ‘Robin’ McNeil, ‘Jim’ Lehrer and ‘Charlene’ Hunter-Gault studiously examining both sides of the slavery question, Hitler and the Crucifixion), of most academics and of all TV networks, of the rich and the famous, of the military, of Israel, of Thatcher, Kissinger, and many others. He has, it should be added, his softer side, which emerges occasionally in gay or commendatory remarks about family, good cooking (excluding Chinese), figures of stoic calm and moral truthfulness (Israel Shahak, Chairman of the Israeli League of Human Rights), socialism, P.G. Wodehouse.