no supper tonight

See also: Greg Palast’s investigative reporting, Dave Zirin for sports analysis, Mark Morford for cultural critiques …and Lester Bang’s dated yet timeless rock-crit.

Joe Bageant enjoys going Deer Hunting With Jesus. And putting up his world-class essays on the striking ColdType web site. And entertaining the hell out of me with iconoclastic rants like “A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard,” the first piece of his I read and which from the get-go gave me that same spike-in-the-arm strain of exhilaration I felt when I first read Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. Bageant’s southern-populist rhetoric is no shtick, and never, once, feels either false or forced. There’s a good introductory interview at EnergyGrid (an indication he’ll sit down with most anyone) and plenty more print and audio on his web site.

Filmmaker, reporter, lecturer, writer, and media critic Danny Schecter is known to many of us by way of his daily newsletter, the e-mail version of his News Dissector weblog. Subscribe to this one–you’ll not only get the day’s most significant news (on every imaginable subject of significance) from a variety of global sources, but Danny’s invaluable take on how the day’s stories are being covered. Throw your donations his way—this man is doing God’s work.  His very impressive biography at GlobalVision doesn’t even include his latest works, notably the films  “Weapons of Mass Deception: Media Complicity and the Iraq War” and “In Debt We Trust, the latter on a subject–US debt–upon which Schecter was painfully ahead of the curve and upon which his daily blog/newsletter remains about the most comprehensive and honest source around.

Naomi Klein’s specialty: the pernicious effects of that most subtle postmodern horseman of the apocalypse, “globalization,” along with his minions corporations, international banking schemes, the WTO, mass marketing, mainstream politicians, etc. Klein, as much anyone publishing these days, substantiates my latest heresy: that the most interesting history is being written by journalists. E.g.: her wholly engrossing No Logo begins with the best 100 page introduction to the history of “branding” I’ve seen yet, a chapter that should be required reading in every high school; meanwhile, the bestselling Disaster Capitalism provides a splendid account of the development of the “Chicago School” of economics over the course of the past half-century, and while both are obviously richly researched, there’s not a whiff of the academic stench around either. These are minor masterpieces of the craft, but her regular output for journals various is just as rewarding—for example, her 2002 take on selling neoliberalism to the Arab world, “America is Not a Hamburger.”
When she completed Disaster Capitalism, Klein sent a copy to Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón hoping for a blurb, since “I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones … instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists — including Jonás Cuarón who directed and edited — to make The Shock Doctrine short film,” linked to here because you’d probably rather watch a four minute intro than go gettin’ all bogged down in a 500 page book that’s only going to depress you. Interview, and a critique of TSD by Alexander Cockburn, whom we’ll meet below.

Australian John Pilger has been writing and filing from the world’s war zones since 1958, and his disgust with the noxious practices and myths of imperialism has only deepened. Zmag hosts a nice set of articles; so does The New Statesman. His address to the Columbia School of Journalism in April 2006 sums up the sad condition of the contemporary media as just another arm in the state apparatus.

Michael Pollan is becoming the go-to guy when it comes to the national feedbag, thanks to the phenomenal applause rendered his recent The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an exuberant tour de force that leads from the MacDonald’s counter to the corn conveyor to the stockyard to the organic farm to the woods, through family grocery bags, whole-foods markets and the national consciousness–and lower digestive tract– itself. Pollan is thoroughly engaging, and TOD is a first person account of buying, growing, foraging for, and hunting food by a witty, self-deprecating eater and writer who will teach you more about food than the nutritionists among you know already. His previous bestseller, the Botany of Desire, is a small gem in itself–there’s a must-read chapter on apples that turns into a quest for the lunatic Johnny Appleseed as well as a lovely, lingering paean to the kindly herb. In addition to descriptions of his writing and other activities, Pollan’s own elegant little web site provides a first-rate set of links to food and food-related issues. Pollan talks to PBS about meat and corn, and “debates” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey (webcast) following a dust-up on their web sites (critiqued here).

James Carroll is arguably—very, arguably, I know–Boston’s pre-eminent writer, no small claim in a verb-soaked swamp trod by dinosaurs such as Chomsky and Zinn, reeking with the effluvia of cretins like Dershowitz, and aswarm with laptop-tapping café creatures. Carroll earns this distinction because he’s not only a first rate researcher and thinker, but because he writes with an elegance that comes less easily to the academic types, as evidenced by his work for the Boston Globe. The son of a ranking Pentagon figure, and an ex-seminarian to boot, Carroll has struggled for years, and over the course of a few books, to come to terms with his father’s legacy (An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, 1996), his Christian sensibilities (Toward A New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform, 2002) and what both of them mean for the world, perhaps nowhere better than in House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2005).

William Grieder considers matters economic and political for The Nation. He can be a beautiful writer, an unlooked for blessing in the sort who write magisterial tomes on subjects as decidedly unsexy as the Federal Reserve Bank (Secrets of the Temple). Who Will Tell the People?, a thoroughly disillusioned, non-partisan analysis of “the betrayal of American Democracy,” is wholly informed and often enough wise. Greider’s own web site has links to his ongoing columns for The Nation, along with enough other direction that it’s the only link I’ll supply.

Amy Goodman’s been around. Beaten badly by (U.S. supplied) Indonesian troops while witnessing a massacre in East Timor, Goodman has also covered human rights abuses perpetrated by oil companies in Niger. Her books, co-written by her brother David, include The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, and Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back (2006). She’s best known, though, for her daily radio program Democracy Now! — highly recommended (archived broadcasts and transcripts available). She sums up her work in this interview.

Erstwhile Trotskyite, sometime socialist, lifelong antitheist, and currently serving as propagandist for the Vulcans, throwback Christopher Hitchens, the famously boozy, smoky British gadfly, has made a reputation of demolishing sacred cows–who else would devote such energy to debunking the “myths” of Mother Theresa?–and in adopting contradictarian positions. Occupying himself these days infuriating his former colleagues on the Left in defending US/British military actions abroad, he’s still found time to write books on Orwell and Thomas Paine, and to join Dawkins, Dennet and Harris, the scourges of god, in delivering a bestselling polemic against religion.
Hitchens has always made an inviting target, never more so than since continuing to press for crusades against “Islamic Fascism,” which allows him to cuddle with Somali refugee and poster person for “anti-islamofacism” Aayan Hirsi Ali, the darling of the American Enterprise Institute and FreedomWatch. But he’s stayed, after his fashion, true to his convictions: he’s a Painite through and through, a firm believer in The Age of Reason and the Rights of Man.
Wikipeida provides a solid bio, hitchensweb a repository of links, but to get the full flavor of the man, you need to hear him speak—for example, on why it is, exactly, that god is not great.

Hitchens’ old and decidedly ex-friend Alexander Cockburn is another temperamental contrarian; unlike Hitchens, he hasn’t wavered in his lifelong commitment to anti imperialist movements, a tendency inherited from his father Claude–to the extent that he should be put into the Smithsonian Museum as “the last Stalinist,” according to columnist George Will, for whom everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan is at least some shade of pink. Today Cockburn’s unreconstructed socialist sensibility is on display in at least 25 books and in the newsletter and website CounterPunch, which he and fellow radical Jeffrey St. Clair have co-edited since 1996 and which archives an extensive catalog of his own pieces. He’s also a regular in The Nation, churning out the column “Beat the Devil” monthly.
Cockburn may come off as a bit acidic and sometimes dour for some tastes, but take any opportunity you might ever have the chance to see him speak; he’s among the most engaging lecturer/haranguer/orators I’ve seen up here, certainly the only one who had me in tears due to laughing so hard. Here’s an impromptu sidewalk lecture.

I first saw Robert Fisk the day the UN Security Council listened to an impassioned George W. Bush spew a series of blatantly obvious lies about Iraq. Fiske was in the Council chamber that morning, then flew up to Boston and MIT and rambled on for over two hours about Iraq, the middle east in general, and, not least of all, Robert Fisk–hours that flew by like minutes. The combination of Fisk’s natural gifts for narrative along with his stunning resume results in the the jaw-dropping yarns that are recounted at length in his 1100-page closely-printed tome, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, a stunning piece of journalism and history. Oh, he also wrote the story (at similar length) of the Lebanese civil war. Fisk is often in Counterpunch; he writes regularly for The Independent. You’ll find him here, and here. Oh, and about that resume–here’s an except from a talk he gave at Carleton University that makes up the introduction to TGWfC:

In Afghanistan, I watched the Russians fighting for their ‘international duty’ in a conflict against ‘international terror’; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting against ‘communist aggression’ and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as the Iranians struggled through what they called the ‘Imposed War’ against Saddam Hussein — who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the ‘Whirlwind War’. I’ve seen the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then re-invading the Palestinian West Bank in order, so they claimed, to “purge the land of terrorism”. I was present as the Algerian paramilitary police went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a ‘New World Order’. In the desert, I always wrote down the words ‘new world order’ in my notebook followed by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called ‘Serb civilization’ while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading multicultural dream and to save their own lives.

On a mountaintop in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama bin Laden in his tent as he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I scribbled his words into my notebook by paraffin lamp. ‘God’ and ‘evil’ were what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on September 11th — my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States — and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a year later when George Bush talked about ‘God’ and ‘evil’ and weapons of mass destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion swept over my head in Baghdad. Thus was President Bush’s calamitous ‘war on terror’ given in advance its own supposedly moral foundations.