Word: cockburn
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IDLE PASSION by ALEXANDER COCKBURN 248 pages. Village Voice/Simon & Schuster...
...Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive -for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space...
...Cockburn has also written recently about the CIA and about the assassination of Martin Luther King, both of which, he says, are more complex than they seem at first. He also writes two regular columns for the Village Voice--a witty, acerbic one on the press and a general political one called Surplus Value. Surplus Value gets more conspiracy-oriented every week; this week it speculates about a possible CIA-led coup in Venezuela, designed to protect Rockefeller oil holdings there against nationalization, and about a big-business coal pipeline that will pollute the West and put Appalachian miners...
...Surplus Value, Cockburn works more in the traditional conspiracy-writing vein than he does in Harper's, which after all is only just entering the conspiracy field. He talks about "freshly sinister aspects," "business interests," "billion-dollar schemes" and someone "setting faction against faction, lubricating his maneuvers with cash." He deals a lot in interlocking directorates and the like, and doesn't cite many sources, instead either simply stating things as fact or using substantiating phrases like "it is known" or "we are told." Cockburn prefers complex explanations for things where, at first glance, simple ones would just as easily...
...destructive possibilities for the world. The last--and worst--is called "steady-state anarchy," in which all institutions would do battle to the point of simultaneous total collapse, thus ending it all. It doesn't exactly have the ring of eternal truth; but in printing things like Cockburn's column and "Previews of Coming Disasters," the Voice has arrived at the kind of coherent editorial tone, consistent with the flow of daily news, that Harper's and Esquire are still only groping toward...