[Marxism] A much better obit for John Hess

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005

CounterPunch Diary

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

John L. Hess Gone at 87; A Great American Reporter Misses Chance to Flay
Bush Inaugural

John Hess grew old the way journalists are meant to go old, but almost
never do. He never stopped stamping on the toes of the powers-that-be,
never lost his edge, never got out of harness.

He wrote almost till he dropped, more taken up with the latest outrages of
the Bush administration, of the New York Times, of scoundrelly real estate
tycoons and self aggrandizing liberals than he did about the boring
business of putting food in his mouth. Like many folks who get to be 87 and
enjoy working, he reckoned a cupful of fuel would keep the engine running
all month.

A friend of CounterPunch, one of John's favored and grateful outlets in his
last years, called to tell us last week that John had keeled over in a
faint and was in the Jewish Home on the Upper West side of Manhattan. I
called him from Petrolia, here in California, and at first he sounded, as
the Irish say, pretty shook.

I had some difficulty making out what he was saying but then he gathered
force and soon was pressing me to suggest a publisher for the writings and
commentaries he'd done since his splendid, acrid memoir of his life on the
New York Times. We chatted a while and a few days later, on Jan 15, we got
an email relayed by his children Martha and Peter:

From deepest rehabilitation -- Greetings. I've been too disabled by
reality to spread my usual cheer at a time when there's been so much to spread,
i.e. -- Kerik and Gonzales. As Rummy likes to put it, we have to deal with
the humankind they gave us.

Onward and upward. Till the next time.

John.

I figured he'd soon be back in action, but it turns out John's race was
almost over. We got an email early on Friday from his son Peter saying he
died peacefully in his sleep even earlier that day, at the age of 87. Thus
he was spared the Inauguration, about which he would have filed one of his
inimitably succinct commentaries. At 84, his wife Karen --active
collaborator in those seignant days and nights when the Two Musketeers took
the Food Establishment by storm--survives him.

Whenever I saw John, rare in recent years since we live at opposing edges
of this continent he reminded me of the old, green eyeshade days, when the
best journalists were bohemian in spirit, parlous in financial stability,
knew their way round libraries, back alleys, lobbies, precinct houses,
waiting rooms, morgues, corporate balance sheets, wine lists, the
Eighteenth Brumaire. They mostly didn't go to roundtables at the Council on
Foreign Relations but if they did they could take the striped pant pundits
down in a second with a couple of facts and a knowledgeable anecdote. They
had real politics and the fire of the great populist muckrakers and
hellraisers of an even earlier time.

That was John and in this land of some 250 million souls, there are
others--not too many, to be sure--who resemble him, dissenters to the end,
bloodied but unbowed before the pettiness, ignorance, arrogance and
malevolence of power.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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