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The “left” should get off its high horse and re-examine the real-life grass-roots’ resourcefulness in America; to acknowledge that abandoned constituencies have fallen back on the Bill of Rights, and that this turns out to be a pretty good compass; and to think about joining in the defense of the jury.
    July 12
    The “shadowy one-world government” the militias worry about is the Fed and the big banks both here and abroad, plus the IMF and the World Bank and other multinational financial institutions reaching broad agreement on tight money and “favorable business conditions,” meaning enough unemployment to ensure that employers have the upper hand.
    These days banker-bashing or Fed-bashing, which used to be adecent national sport, is taken to be uncouth in respectable circles—as though one was somehow ranting about the Freemasons. Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, recently suggested that such attacks were tantamount to anti-Semitism. So now it’s anti-Semitic to attack banks and bond houses?
    When I lived in England back in the 1960s one could hear Prime Minister Harold Wilson denounce the “gnomes of Zurich” on an almost daily basis. He was talking about the international bankers who made life difficult for his Labour government. No one accused Wilson of being anti-Semitic. People knew he was talking about the behavior of bankers, not the behavior of Jews.
    July 14
    Dear Bruce,
    Remember that fellow I warned you about from the San Francisco Chronicle ? I think his name was Jerry Carroll (not Jon). Back at the end of the 1980s this Carroll invited me to have lunch at what he described as a “good place to eat.” This turned out to be one of the most expensive restaurants—The Campton Grill—in San Francisco. When the bill came he asked me to put up $50, on the grounds that he didn’t have enough money and the newspaper would never stand for it. Then, when he wrote up the interview, he derided me for eating in costly places.
    I swore never to eat another lunch with an interviewer. Of course I forgot and agreed on a rendezvous with Jack Shafer, the new editor of the San Francisco Weekly . We had what I thought was a perfectly amiable lunch at a place of his choosing—pleasant and by no means pretentious—called George’s Global Kitchen, somewhere south of Market in San Francisco.
    I knew almost from the moment I sat down that Shafer had already written most of the story in his head, that he’d figured out his angle and it didn’t much matter what I said. But everything passed off calmly enough and he even faxed me a friendly note a few days later saying he’d enjoyed it.
    Then the actual piece comes through the fax machine from theAVA [ Anderson Valley Advertiser ]. Here’s how it began: “If you’ve ever handled a venomous snake you already know what it’s like to chat with Alexander Cockburn.” (The piece, by the way, was headed “The Tale of an Asp.”) “Not just your average poisonous Marxist reptile, Cockburn is all grins and hisses and eye contact and bared Irish fangs as he chomps his soft-shell-crab sandwich at George’s Global Kitchen. It’s a giddy thrill to be inside the kill zone of the greatest living exponent of bilious journalism and in my reverie I ponder the original Irish diaspora in which St. Patrick chased the serpents from the island and for a moment fantasize that Cockburn himself is descended from a race of socialistic bogtrotting snake people who escaped Ireland to sting and paralyze capitalists such as myself …”
    How can you win? I smile at the man and this becomes “all grins and hisses and eye contact.” Suppose I’d given him a more somber greeting. Then we’d have had “all sullen stares and shifty glances and pursed lips as he self-righteously declined all nourishment.”
    July 19
    The marketing director of Verso, my publisher, calls. It is Wednesday. He has in his hand the New York Times Book Review for the following