A Colossal Wreck by Alexander Cockburn Read Free Book Online Page A

Kissinger for example—in the Op-Ed columns. Bombing one’s way onto the front pages is usually the last recourse of a president heading down in the polls. At all events it’s not a practice to be encouraged.
    September 23
    Most of the time people don’t really read things, particularly opinion pieces by politicians. They see a couple of predictable phrases bowing and scraping at them, register a small blip on the brainscan and move on. I doubt whether anyone has ever read a piece by Henry Kissinger from start to finish. You see words like “resolve,” “statesmanship” and so forth and avert your eyes. The same is true of most TV punditry too.
    When my father was working in the Berlin office of the London Times , back in the late 1920s, he became irritated by the complacent obtuseness of the bureau chief and put a satiric report from “Our Correspondent in Jerusalem” on his desk. “Small disposition here,” cabled the correspondent, “attach undue importance raised certain quarters result recent arrest and trial leading revolutionary agitator followed by what is known locally as ‘the Calvary incident.’ ” The piece was obviously based on an off-the-record interview with Pontius Pilate. The bureau chief glanced through the dispatch, saw all the usual phrases and passed it on to London, where only the vigilance of a telex operator prevented it from appearing in the Times the following morning.
    September 27
    When Bosnian Muslims are shelled, driven from their homes or murdered, the world weeps. When Serbs are driven from their homes or are discovered with their throats cut, eyes stay dry. When Serbs do the cleansing, it’s “genocide.” When Serbs are cleansed, it’s either silence, or an exultant cry that they had it coming to them.
    The largest ethnic cleansing of the entire war—the expulsion of the Serbs from the Krajina region now overrun by the Croats—is a topic virtually unmentioned in any news forum in the United States.
    At least 150,000 Serbs have now fled the Krajina, abandoning the homes in which they and their ancestors have lived since the seventeenth century. President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia bellowed coarsely from this “freedom train” that the refugees left so fast they didn’t have time to take “their dirty hard currency and their dirty underwear”—language somewhat similar in timbre to Tudjman’s diatribes about the Jews in his professorial writings.
    October 4
    OJ innocent! We the jury, to judge by most of the people I spoke to at the Petrolia store, at the post office and on the phone after the verdict, thought OJ was guilty. Of course they, the real jury, found otherwise. The word “nullification” is now being wrongly thrown around for what the jury did.
    Don Doig of the Fully Informed Jury Association—which campaigns for the constitutional right of jurors to “nullify,” that is, to disregard law and the instructions of the judge, and to be told in advance of that right—put it thus: “I believe that this verdict does not represent a nullification of the law against murder, but it may reflect the jury’s distrust of the testimony of police and other prosecution witnesses. If the police are demonstrably racist, or if they routinely violate the rights of defendants, particularly if they’re black, then there could well be legitimate doubts that the guilt of the defendant had been established beyond a reasonable doubt.”
    So the guilty verdict went, not against Simpson, but against the Los Angeles Police Department, which has been on more or less continual trial since the beating of Rodney King. No juror has yetsaid so publically, but I suspect that this decision against the police would include counts ranging from sloppiness, careless handling of evidence and botched procedures, to racism, as symbolized by Detective Mark Fuhrman’s vicious reminiscences overshadowing all. Given Fuhrman, but much else besides, the evidence against the cops was at least