Is this article really the work of Alexander Cockburn?

April 26, 2007 11:03 PM

Alexander Cockburn wrote this. Is it tongue-in-cheek?
posted by Kwantsar to Law & Government (12 answers total)

I would guess no, he's serious.

Aside: Like much of what's written about Virginia Tech by pundits, it's completely irritating. (One example: Cho was not "actually institutionalised as a psychotic." He was hospitalized for maybe 48 hours for risk of suicide two years ago. This changing of facts is done to bring support to suggested changes in MH treatment laws. In fact, even the most aggressive involuntary treatment "Kenda's law"-type law would not have picked up Cho. He had no criminal record, no arrest record, no disruptive psychotic symptoms. At most there was evidence to support a student disciplinary hearing re Cho's treatment of fellow students. But this is America so we assert that this could have been prevented, if only we'd done X or Y, and then we embark on a poorly considered public policy initiative.)

end rant
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 12:47 AM on April 27, 2007

i don't think it's tongue in cheek. but i don't think he's "serious" in a slightly different sense than that used by claudiacenter. that is, while he apparently takes himself seriously, his purported advice and solutions are so silly as not to be worthy of serious consideration. what he is, is a pundit, who makes a living by punditry, which means he has to have an opinion on everything, and maybe the more paradoxical or controversial the better, readership-wise.
posted by londongeezer at 3:33 AM on April 27, 2007

I fear this will degenerate into chatfilter, buy anyhow: He's about as tounge-in-cheek as Ann Coulter.
posted by Robert Angelo at 6:29 AM on April 27, 2007

I don't know anything about the author, so I can't place it in the context of his writing, but this bit struck me as over the top, even for extreme gun advocates: "Perhaps there should be guns in wall cases, behind glass, at strategic points around campuses, like those fire axes, usually with menacing signs about improper use."

The rest of it (or as much as I read of it) looks like something that some folks would say in earnest though.
posted by adamrice at 6:46 AM on April 27, 2007

Response by poster: I don't know anything about the author, so I can't place it in the context of his writing

He's sort of a left type, and both his position and his argumentative style in this article seem unlike him. And the passage you highlighted struck me as unusual, indeed.
posted by Kwantsar at 9:50 AM on April 27, 2007

no shit
posted by matteo at 10:26 AM on April 27, 2007

I have seldom if ever found him to have a sense of humor. He is wrong when he says ROTC students carry guns around. Carry? yes. Ammo? NO. In fact the military does not issue live ammo for soldiers on American soil for their rifles unless for special assignments, ie, guard duty etc.

Would you want to be on campus when some students, with 6 packs of beer, some pot, and a gun or two with ammo went to a frat party?
posted by Postroad at 10:35 AM on April 27, 2007

The piece seemed a little out of character to me too, but you have to remember that Cockburn often self-consciously assumes provocative positions – he very much enjoys the role of gadfly and likes to offend soft liberals by taking an ostensibly unpopular but tough-minded stance. While the piece is definitely not intended as pure satire or an our-and-out joke, I'd still say there is a certain amount of self-conscious put-on in its assumption of the role of devil's advocate. And he very definitely does have a functioning sense of humor, even about himself, which is one of the things that differentiates him from Christopher Hitchens.

(How is this not chatfilter?)
posted by RogerB at 11:32 AM on April 27, 2007

Response by poster: (How is this not chatfilter?)

Because I asked a legitimate question that has a "right answer." It's true that (probably) no one here can answer my question with complete certainty, but people have put forth intelligent hypotheses explaining Cockburn, his phiolsophies, and his motivations, leading me to what is very likely the "right answer."
posted by Kwantsar at 11:41 AM on April 27, 2007

I have seldom if ever found him to have a sense of humor.

Huh? You must not have read him much. He can be one of the funniest political writers around, though obviously that's not in evidence here. He's a chip off the old block: his dad's I, Claud ... : the autobiography of Claud Cockburn is one of the funniest books I ever read, and old Claud is also an irritating leftie (he was unrepentant about reporting "news" he knew to be false in order to help the anti-Franco side during the Spanish Civil War).

That said, this is pure chatfilter.
posted by languagehat at 11:46 AM on April 27, 2007

Would you want to be on campus when some students, with 6 packs of beer, some pot, and a gun or two with ammo went to a frat party?

Actually if they had some pot I'd feel a lot safer.

As Saint Hicks put it:

"Hey, you!"
"What!"
"Uhhh...."
posted by oats at 9:20 PM on April 27, 2007

Cockburn calls himself a radical Irish journalist. You could also say he's a satirist working in a venerable tradition. His intention is serious, but his method is satirical--he's making a point by way of exaggeration (see Swift's A Modest Proposal, in which he "recommends" that the poor in Ireland boil and eat their own children so as not to have to support them).

(Just fyi, Cockburn is pronunced CO-burn...)
posted by frosty_hut at 10:59 AM on April 28, 2007