Jeffery St.Clair wrote:
Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.
Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever
In one of Alex’s last emails to me, he patted himself on the back (and deservedly so) for having only missed one column through his incredibly debilitating and painful last few months. Amid the chemo and blood transfusions and painkillers, Alex turned out not only columns for CounterPunch and The Nation and First Post, but he also wrote a small book called Guillotine and finished his memoirs, A Colossal Wreck, both of which CounterPunch plans to publish over the course of the next year.
Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn’t tolerate it in his own life. Alex was my pal, my mentor, my comrade. We joked, gossiped, argued and worked together nearly every day for the last twenty years. He leaves a huge void in our lives. But he taught at least two generations how to think, how to look at the world, how to live a life of joyful and creative resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
When I was 18 or 19, I started reading The Nation magazine in the university library.I had never heard of it before. I came across it in the periodicals section. I went through all the issues and, at first, read only Cockburn's column. I later expanded on that and read Christopher Hitchens' column as well. Then I started reading movie reviews. And I finally started reading the articles.
His column in The Nation was called Beat the Devil, the same name as his father's novel which was made into the movie John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart.
Well, it's very sad. It's a terrible blow. I noticed that Cockburn had missed one column recently, and I was a bit worried. He had previously mentioned an accident he had with a lawn mower. I had been told that you should never pull a lawn mower backwards. If you trip, you'd pull it onto your foot. Cockburn found this out the hard way.
Back in the '80s, I was driving around in my big giant '64 Imperial. It started to depress me. I'd walk around looking at the fuel efficient, reliable late model cars everywhere and I couldn't figure out how people did it. How could they afford them? I read in the paper that Volvo, trying to promote the durability of their vehicles, was going to offer 20 year financing on their cars. I did some math and even with a 20 year loan I could never afford one.
I felt better after I sat down in the library and read Alexander Cockburn's column. He discussed getting stitches in his buttock. He bought an old Dodge Dart, went to pick it up, climbed in, and suddenly discovered that a piece of the rearview mirror had fallen off and wedged itself into the driver's seat. I felt bad about his injury, of course, but if a man of his stature drove a Dodge Dart, I was doing okay,
I later saw him on CSPAN. They filmed him in his house in northern California. We saw his cars. He seemed to favor old Chryslers. They got bad gas mileage, he said, but the old cars cost less to begin with, so it all evened out. They were less reliable, but that was fine. If it broke down, say on a road trip, it gave you the chance to go to a mechanic, hang around and talk to people.
I didn't know the man. But I read Counterpunch daily. I've read his work religiously for over 30 years. He leaves a huge void in my life as well.
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