“Revolution” was the term used to characterize Ronald Reagan's election victory in 1980, and in that singular corruption of an honest word, Reaganism beheld its triumph. For American politics in the years since have experienced no sweeping, fundamental transformation; what has changed dramatically is the way in which those politics are seen and discussed, beginning with an official vocabulary that equates criminals with patriots, rapists with freedom fighters, condiments with vegetables, that inflates the desperate violence of the powerless and names it terrorism, straight through to the sanctioned opinion that equivocates in the face of this mush and calls itself journalism.

Alexander Cockburn, whose writing collected here marks a period from the first glimmerings of the Reagan era, in 1976, to the present, commands attention for the integrity of his language and the insistence of his arguments. But it is primarily a way of seeing that sets him apart from any journalist writing in America today. It is a way of looking at things critically, in defiance of the exploiter, the despoiler, the brute, but without cynicism-indeed, with a touch of the romantic and a passionate faith in the forces of justice. It blends the personal, the comical and the political, never shortchanges the dialectical and is entirely without pretensions to objectivity.

At one level an account of a journalist's education, at another a memoir of the Reagan era, examining cultural developments from fashions in food to the “demonization” of Qaddafi and political developments from the economy of greed to the vicious campaign to subdue Central America, Corruptions of Empire is also a counter to that earliest triumph of Reaganism, for it enlists the honest word in the service of enlightenment.

Alexander Cockburn was born in Scotland and grew up in County Cork, Ireland, of which country he is a citizen. After studying at Oxford, he worked in London as a journalist before becoming a resident of the US in 1973. He soon established himself as a radical reporter and commentator, writing for the Village Voice, New York Review of Books, and Harper's. He now writes a column for the Nation, “Beat the Devil,” and, with Jeffrey St. Clair, the newsletter CounterPunch, and is a member of the editorial board of New Left Review.

“Never more dangerous than when most polite, Alexander Cockburn is thedeftest opponent we have of power and its habits of loose and mindless expression. His work stands in the best tradition of Mark Twain, Hazlitt and Paine.” — Ben Sonnenberg, Editor of Grand Street

“Cockburn's weekly pieces ... have set a new standard of gutter journalism in this country.” — Norman Podhoretz, Commentary

 Publication
September 1998

128 pages

Paper
ISBN-13: 978-0-86091-940-2
£11 / US$19 / CAN$23.99





Other Verso books by Alexander Cockburn:

Five Days That Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond

The Golden Age Is in Us

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press


Forthcoming:
The Death of Liberal America