[Peace-discuss] Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012

[C. G. Estabrook]

Farewell, Alex, My Friend
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

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 resistance. So, the struggle continues and we’re going to remain engaged. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/21/farewell-alex-my-friend/

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What terrible news, for all of us. It was just over two years ago that he was here in Champaign-Urbana, to give a talk for an Illinois peace group. We interviewed him on News from Neptune and ate at various odd places around town.

As it happens, I was thinking and writing about my introduction to him this week. I was answering a half-mad attack on his recent Occupy piece by a local, and I was recalling first reading him in the Village Voice 40 years ago: his name caught my eye because I'd been introduced to his father's biography ("I, Claud") by friends in England, who said the elder Cockburn was "the British I. F. Stone."

Alex wrote about my firing from Notre Dame, long ago, and punctured appropriately some liberal windbags then much praised. He instructed two generations, and wrote like an angel.

Given my predilections, I'll add one note that would have brought a smile and a jibe from him: as Thomas More wrote to his daughter the night before he was executed by the forces of order, "Farewell ... and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven."

Requiescat in pace.

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