Free A Colossal Wreck by Alexander Cockburn Page A

face, leaned forward and addressed the prisoner: “Hamish McTavish, you have been found guilty of the crime of shoplifting. It is my duty to inform you that on a set day you shall be taken from this place to another place and there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
    McTavish fainted dead away and the clerk whispered incredulously to the magistrate-of-the-day that he had no right to impose such a sentence.
    “I know, I know,” he said, “but I’ve always wanted to say that.”
    March 27
    Ralph Nader put up a good performance on Meet the Press last Sunday.
    TIM RUSSERT: But people are going to say, Ralph Nader, in the end this is a real world. Would you prefer to have Bill Clinton or Bob Dole sitting in the Oval Office, because one of those two men are going to be the President?
    NADER: I would prefer neither in the real world.
    RUSSERT: It wouldn’t bother you if you woke up in November and said, “Bill Clinton was not re-elected today because he lost the state of California to Bob Dole and the reason was that Ralph Nader siphoned off 6 percent of the voters who would have voted for Bill Clinton”?
    NADER: If that happens to Clinton because he refuses to adopt a very important campaign finance reform, he deserves it …
    RUSSERT: And if he embraced some of your issues that you’re talking about this morning, you would be, then, reluctant to challenge him all the way through to November?
    NADER: Not at all. Politicians always need an opposition that stays to its convictions and holds them to their promises …
    March 28
    Just because the Nazis were keen on animal rights, this doesn’t mean that all animals rights activists are Nazis. The Nazis were keen on alternative medicine too, but this doesn’t mean that the homeopathy and alternative medicine crowd are Nazis. See Robert Jay Lifton’s interesting paragraphs in The Nazi Doctors :
Perhaps the most severe conflict between the Nazi bio-medical vision and the traditional medical profession was in relation to nonmedical healers, known as “healing practitioners” ( heilpraktikers ) and “healers” ( heilkundiger ). These groups generally stress the outdoor life, natural foods, and overall re-orientation in living; they often flouted established medical practice and sometimes treated serious diseases with dubious therapies. Long active in Germany, these healers appealed to the regime’s biological romanticism and mysticism and found their strongest supporter in deputy party leader Rudolf Hess, the most intense biological mystic in the Nazi inner circle.
In 1939, as a lasting expression of its relationship to the “nature movement,” the Nazis opened a new hospital outside Munich that was to epitomize many of the principles of the “new German Medicine”: for example, common dining halls, outdoor bathing pools, special indoor physical-therapy centers, and recreation centers. These features would aid physical and mental rehabilitation, prevent “diseases of civilization,” and strengthen “natural forces of resistance” to disease that were both physical and psychological. Not a “hospital,” it was a “house of health” ( Gesundungshaus ).
    May 2
    “A loan-at-interest is the only known thing in the entire universe that does not suffer entropy. It grows with time. All other things, ourselves included, fade and die.” Those of you maxed out on your credit cards but still making those monthly payments at some outrageous rate know this as well as I (who have learned by dint of bitter experience not to have credit cards at all).
    Those first three sentences came from an informative letter that Stan Lusby of Otago, New Zealand, sent to one of my favorite newspapers, Catholic Worker , a while back. Lusby commenced his discussion of capitalism with some personal disclosures. He had, Lusby confided, known all his life that lending money at interest was intrinsically wrong. “I came late in life to Christianity,