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

strong as the evidence against Simpson.
    November 29
    Here comes the “Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995,” otherwise known as HR-1710. Under its provisions, many of them sought for years by the FBI, the state will accumulate further vast powers abusive of privacy and due process.
    HR-1710 defines terrorism in terms so broad that offenses now treated as vandalism under state law would in federal law become “terrorism.” The use of a .22 caliber rifle to inflict “substantial damage” on a stop sign would become “terrorism.” Planning with one’s friends—i.e., partaking in a “conspiracy”—to shoot at the aforementioned stop sign would become “terrorism.” Shooting at the stop sign and missing would similarly be “terrorism,” with all the fearsome sanctions attaching to any offense burdened with that description.
    Privacy, already severely eroded by predations upon the Fourth Amendment, would take another beating. Sections 302–304 and 310 of the bill would give the FBI access to an individual’s bank accounts, credit cards, employment and travel records, without a court order and without evidence of criminal activity. The target of such secret enquiries might never know of the FBI’s scrutiny, or of the reasons that prompted it. The FBI could get data on an individual from a credit bureau merely by telling a judge that the target individual may “be in contact with” an agent of a foreign power.
    December 20
    People are getting loonier all the time. Robin Cembalist, a columnist from Jewish Forward in New York, called me a couple of weeks ago to ask what I thought about the attack on me in the Voice Literary Supplement . The VLS isn’t big in Humboldt County. Maybe nowhereelse either west of the Hudson, since no one from anywhere in the country has called to exult or commiserate or even say they’d seen it.
    Soon a very, very long article by Michael Tolkin, the fellow who wrote Altman’s The Player , came churning through the fax, courtesy of Cembalist. It was mostly about The Turner Diaries , with lunges at yours truly when the mood took him. Among my achievements: I’d driven him back to Judaism. Among my deficits: by quoting Bruce Cockburn’s line, “If I had a rocket launcher …” I’d expressed the unspoken impotence and hypocrisy of the left. I apparently hate liberalism because of its Judaism. Mostly Tolkin was ruminating sourly on the fact that if the Jews hadn’t rejected the concubine Timna, she wouldn’t have ended up with Esau’s son Eliphaz “who had grown up with his father’s resentment” and given birth to Amalek. You’ll recall the Amalekites whom the Lord God enjoined the children of Israel (as relayed by the prophet Samuel to Saul) to smite and “utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and sucking ox and sheep, camel and ass.” The divinely mandated genocide was duly performed, with Samuel himself finally hewing King Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.
    Apparently Tolkin feels all this could have been avoided if the Timna crisis had been better handled. As things are, “The Book is the Book of the Order of Amalek. We cast them off, set them in motion, and wherever we’re weak, there they are.”
    So like the hound of heaven which pursued Francis Thompson to the Catholic Church, I have pursued Tolkin back into the synagogue he had abandoned. (“I came back to Judaism because of a few columns by Alexander Cockburn.”)
    Most of what Tolkin wrote was either mad or incomprehensible but he got furious when Cembalist told him she’d faxed me his ravings. “I think a Jew sending it is a betrayal,” she reported him in the Forward as saying. “It’s theoretically wrong for a Jewish paper to send it.” He went on, “If I’m trying to say something to fellow Jews—saying it in a language that may be difficult for non-Jews to understand—to bring it to the attention of non-Jews may be dangerous to