The Left Adrift

by David Corn

A few days prior to departure, a media reporter rang to ask for the inside dope on the cruise. The curiosity was natural: Many of the stars of this eight-day, sun-and-seminars holiday have recently been at each other's throats. Brit-wits Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens were feuding over how to characterize and judge George Orwell's tattling on Popular Front intellectuals 50 years ago. Katha Pollitt and Eric Alterman were feuding with each other in the nonexistent pages of Slate.

Cockburn and Pollitt were also feuding over a column he wrote in NYPress. The week before the cruise, Nation publisher Victor Navasky chuckled heartily when I advised him to ditch the seminars on the left media and labor in an era of global capitalism and instead offer a face-off between Cockburn and Hitchens; another between Pollitt and Alterman; and a group attack waged by all columnists upon editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. In fact Pollitt, who turned down an offer to do a Slate diary on the trip, had suggested a nonaggression pact. And more than a few non-voyagers made pretrip cracks about how they were glad they would not be prisoners on what would be a ship of ill will.

The Hitchens position was validated somewhat when I was eating barbecued chicken on Orient Beach in St. Martin, escaping a temporary deluge, and ended up sharing a picnic table with a late-40s couple from Lincoln, NE. They were cruising on another ship; both worked on the floor at a Goodyear parts plant. The conversation quickly turned to Goodyear's plans to relocate jobs from that facility to Mexico. The pair cursed out NAFTA and Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, for having voted for the trade accord. They had never heard of The Nation but said they would be delighted to listen to what its writers had to say about NAFTA and the consequences of global corporatism. Then the husband asked where they could find a nude beach on St. John. You never know where you'll run into the working class.

By cantankerous Nation standards, the cruise, as of the sixth day, had been a journey of peaceful coexistence, one of drinks, not daggers. A formal nonaggression pact was not needed, since the Nation scribblers by and large played well with one another. The highlights had not been fierce and bloody intellectual jousts but, say, Molly Ivins' parasailing adventure above Half Moon Cay in the Bahamas. Several Nationites bonded on a snorkeling jaunt at the reefs of Trunk Bay at St. John, the island large chunks of which were bought by Rockefellers, turned over to the U.S. and now are overseen by the U.S. National Parks service (chasing after electric bluefish, I never felt better to be a taxpayer). My advice to vanden Heuvel and Navasky: Yes, the trip raises money for the magazine and will no doubt spawn future Nation outings, but perhaps there will be less tsouris if once a year you put the Nation family feuders in pleasant environs and keep the rum flowing.

But being stuck on a boat with 400 Nation readers? Surely, stereotypers might wonder, wouldn't the presence of all those lefties spark a crank-fest? There were the predictable moments: After a seminar was canceled when author Barbara Ehrenreich failed to make her flight, an unmerry band organized a protest, declaring they'd rather hear from other Nation contributors than have an afternoon at the beach.

Overall, though, I was impressed by and enjoyed the company of those who had dished out much money to spend time with us. The roster included a trial judge from a middle-America state who files as a Republican in his one-party county; a public environmental lawyer who recently won a $20 million case against an oil company; a honeymooning couple (he's a wallpaper-hanger, she's a librarian); a retired juice manufacturer who was a codebreaker during WWII; a farming couple who were on their first vacation in 25 years; a neurosurgeon who has fought the proliferation of unnecessary neurosurgical procedures; one of the first female engineering students at CUNY; a Microsoft veteran who now funds environmental and social justice outfits; a Japanese-American woman who after being interned as a child during WWII went on to become a linguist. This was a fine bunch of goodhearted -- and often, damn interesting -- liberals and leftists, many, but far from all, retired.

An environmental activist from New Orleans told me about the time in 1986 when she confronted her congressman, once- Speaker- to- be Bob Livingston. She demanded that Livingston, then a Contra cheerleader, respond to an article in The Nation reporting links between Contras and drug dealers. Livingston, she recalled, sputtered that he had been briefed by the CIA, the agency had not mentioned anything untoward and, thus, there was nothing to the story. This reader related her pleasure when weeks ago she read in the magazine about a CIA inspector general's report that grudgingly acknowledged the agency had worked with Contras suspected of being drug dealers. At one seminar, a young fellow was strolling about in a t-shirt proclaiming, "This Life is for Suckers." On the back it read, "Satan Rules." But I never spotted him again and assumed he was a gate-crasher.

The first seminars were not seminal events for the floating left, but they had the occasional entertaining and enlightening moment. At a session titled "Come Together: Building a Progressive Majority," Alterman argued that now that President Clinton had sacrificed the left's position on welfare and crime -- defensible positions indeed, Alterman asserted, but hard to defend in a soundbite culture -- he had more running room for his "progressive" agenda. Furthermore, Alterman went on, it was Clinton's "progressive" proposals that had frightened Republicans and Kenneth Starr, causing them to resort to scandalmongering extremes to stop him. In polite and swift fashion, Hitchens chopped Alterman's argument into chum. No, he replied, "What [Clinton] gave away was not his to give." The crowd signaled its approval, though many did squirm when Hitchens in his tongue- in- and- out- of- cheek fashion called for more hatred, contempt and partisanship in politics: "Politics is division by definition."

The next seminar, "Ten Years After the Fall of the Wall: The Post Cold War World," held the potential for what the clucking pre-cruise handicappers had anticipated. Both Hitchens and Cockburn were panelists, and one could expect, or hope, that their in-print catfight over Orwell would spill out onto the stage of the disco-ish Rubens lounge of the Veendam. But no: After Cockburn eloquently assailed "neo-liberal triumphalism" and called for grander thinking on the left in response to the pressures of global capitalism, the conversation concentrated largely upon the remaining nuclear threat (leaking Russian nuclear subs, future Chernobyls, loose nukes, the destabilizing consequences of enlarging NATO). Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers and an arms control expert, made the case that the United States has done little to oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons. (Only the previous week, he noted, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared that the United States still reserves the right to strike first with nuclear weapons -- a position that makes it hard for Washington to demand that other nations refrain from developing their own nuclear armaments.)

Russian expert Stephen Cohen pounded Clinton for his "mindless" commitment to Yeltsinism, maintaining that Russia is "on the verge of total political, social, economic and military collapse." He noted that there could be five or six Chernobyls and that the United States, which spends billions of dollars preparing to fight a nuclear war, needs to spend a few billion to prevent nuclear catastrophe. That makes sense, but currently Washington devotes a measly couple hundred million to the cause.

This was, like it or not, the left at its best: attacking powerful common enemies, questioning the conventions of the day and gazing at what is most real and pressing. (As the post-Cold War panelists cogitated upon these dramatic, globe-threatening and depressing matters, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, was telling former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman that there "should be no difference" between a presidential lie about bombing a country and one regarding an act of sexual misconduct.) Yes, in one late-night conversation at the bar, Cockburn and Hitchens did spar long and tendentiously over Orwell, with neither yielding ground. And not all the feuds faded into peace and harmony. Good manners dictate that I leave it to others to detail the current status of their tiffs, but this has not been a boat of internecine bickering. Nor has it been a parody of oceanliner liberalism. The cruise did not live up to the pre-departure hullabaloo and gleeful predictions of lefty civil war on the high seas. Sorry if that disappoints you. Wish you were here.