Free A Colossal Wreck by Alexander Cockburn

on the trade issue among the opinion-forming classes.
    Free trade is a class issue. The better-off like it. Their stocks go up as the out-sourcing company heading south lays off its work force. The worse-off see the jobs disappear. You don’t have to be an economist with a Ph.D. to figure out what is happening. At the start of this year Walmart reported its first loss in ninety-nine quarterly earningsreports. It seems Walmart’s customers were unable to afford the “luxury” items on which the store makes its best margins. As long as people can’t afford to shop at Walmart for anything more than the bare essentials of existence, Pat Buchanan will find people ready to vote for him.
    March 6
    In 1922, in the wake of the 1921 treaty by which the British ceded the bulk of Ireland, assassins killed General Sir Henry Wilson, one of Britain’s top military commanders, as he was entering his house in Belgravia, London. My mother, walking to school at the age of eight, was an eyewitness.
    The British took the assassination as a Hamas-type attempt by Irish Republicans to undermine the treaty. They conveyed their view to the infant Irish Free State government, which then unleashed an artillery barrage upon Republicans holed up in the Four Courts, destroying the building which housed the national archive, including every Irish certificate of birth and death.
    Coincidence (Long Arm of): My mother having watched General Sir Henry fall to Fenian bullets, went home and reported the episode to her parents. It turned out well for her. She had been in London against her will, removed from Myrtle Grove, formerly Walter Raleigh’s house, in the town of Youghal in Ireland. Here she was enjoying a happy childhood under the supervision of her grandmother, Edith Blake, a woman with nationalist sympathies. But her parents wanted her to come to London and go to school. With Wilson’s murder they were now terrified that as a witness she might attract unwholesome attentions, of the police, Republicans and so on. She was sent back to Myrtle Grove.
    Fifty years later she was telling the story to a new friend, Veronica Anderson, mother of Perry, who grew up in Waterford, forty-five miles to the east. Veronica listened and then said, “Did you see a milkman?” “No,” replied my mother, very surprised. “Neither did I,” Veronica agreed. Newspaper accounts of Wilson’s shooting had featured a plucky, but imaginary, milkman who chased the assassins.As a little girl Veronica had also been walking to school in Belgravia that day, at that time. I suppose the vulgar Marxists would merely murmur, Class is destiny.
    March 21
    Plain English: At Bodmin Assizes, in the 1930s, Mr. Justice Wright had to pass sentence upon an elderly agricultural laborer who had been found guilty of deplorable bestiality. In somewhat indistinct tones his Lordship announced: “Prisoner at the Bar, the jury have convicted you, on the clearest evidence, of disgusting and degrading offenses. Your conduct is viewed by all right-minded men with abhorrence. The sentence of the court is that you be kept in penal servitude for seven years.”
    It was obvious that this diatribe had not been audible to the prisoner, who had stood with his hand cupping his ear, straining to learn his fate. Therefore, the judge said: “Warder, repeat to the prisoner the sentence of the court.”
    The task was beyond the warder’s powers, but he did his best, shouting at the condemned felon: “His lordship says you are a dirty old bastard, and he’s put you away for seventeen years.”
    Whereupon His Lordship observed, “Warder, I have no objection to your paraphrasing my sentence, but you have no power to increase it.”
    Michael Gilbert tells this story in his Legal Anecdotes .
    A Scotch friend tells me of a man in Dumfries who somehow became a magistrate for a day in the local court. A shoplifter was brought before him and the evidence of guilt was clear. The magistrate-for-a-day assumed a grave