Free A Colossal Wreck by Alexander Cockburn Page B

and it was a great source of comfort to verify my intuition through scripture, although I am now deeply enmeshed in debt, having listened to my peers and not the word of God.”
    Lusby then supplied a succinct history of the origins of the very word “capitalism”:
The word “capitalism” comes from “caput tally” or head-count of the slaves. I followed the line of word discovery further, after reading the New English Bible , for it referred to Nebuchadnezzar “investing” Jerusalem with his troops. “Vestment” means clothing that one puts on, but “investment” implies that one has been cloaked-in. It was the Roman word for a military operation for the taking of slaves. Clearly, such a military operation called for a minimum physical injury to a salable commodity and what we now call siege tactics were deployed.
The military word “captain” refers to the one who counts the heads of slaves. It is used in both the land and marine branches of military. Out of starvation, the defenders “capitulated” (Latin, caput , head). On the long march back to Rome, the captain carved the daily head-count into a horizontal component of the scaffolding of the tent in which the captives were housed at night. Even today, such a piece of scaffolding is still known as a “ledger.” To prevent the slaves breaking away, they were tied with a piece of leather called a “bond” to a long pole termed a “bank.” That word survives to this day in the expression “a bank of oars,” coming, as it does, from the galleys which were powered by slaves.
    Lusby should have added that the word also survives as “the bank,” to which we are held captive by the long thong of debt.
    May 8
    On April 18 Israeli shells crashed into a United Nations compound, manned by Fijian soldiers, at Qana in southern Lebanon. They were 155mm shells with M-732 proximity fuses which detonated each round seven meters above the ground, causing maximum casualties and what the military calls “amputation wounds.” They were fired from new American-made M109A1 howitzers, which need a forward “spotter” for precise targeting.
    Inside the compound—itself the approximate area of a city block—there were two buildings crammed with Lebanese villagers fleeing Israeli bombardment. Only these two structures, a chapel and a meeting hall, were destroyed. Nothing else in the compound was seriously damaged. No UN people were hurt. Estimates of the dead have edged up to around 105, but no one really knows. Did the Israelis know that refugees were in the compound? Yes. Some forty-eight hours before the massacre a senior member of the UN staff in southern Lebanon had told an Israeli general that the UN was protecting 5,000 refugees in all its compounds, including Qana.
    May 9
    The Nation magazine held a meeting on “The Fifties” last week, at Town Hall in New York. A decent number of people, many of them of mature vintage, showed up. The last time I visited Town Hall was back in 1983, and that was another Nation event about the 1950s, in the form of an evening about the Rosenbergs. By the third millennium maybe we’ll hit the ’60s?
    The big news about the recent evening was a strong attack on rock ’n’ roll. The onslaught was made by Fred Hellerman of the Weavers, a group temporarily put out of business by the 1950s blacklist. Hellerman, advanced in years but spry, denounced rock ’n’ roll as “mindless and devoid of content,” and held it no accident that it coincided with the worst years of the cultural blacklist. He singled out Bill Haley and “Rock Around the Clock” for specific abuse, and even essayed a kind of “shabbadooba” cry. In response, Allen Ginsberg, also on the platform, cried out in apparent solidarity with Little Richard, “a-wap-bam-boom.”
    I was at school when the film of Rock Around the Clock was banned in Britain as being liable to madden youth and cause attrition of moral fiber. In 1975 my brother Andrew was working in