IN CHARACTER
Blowing up the system
Leftist critic Jeffrey St. Clair is working to turn politics
upside down from his quiet little subdivision in Oregon City.
By Oakley Brooks
In the fall of 2000, with George W. Bush and Al Gore headed
toward the nail-biting presidential election, Oregon
City’s leftist agitator Jeffrey St. Clair launched a
Molotov cocktail of a book onto the political scene. Al Gore: A User’s
Manual, written by St. Clair and colleague Alexander
Cockburn, depicted the vice president as a vicious, vain
political creature who had consistently betrayed the left. The
book was tame, however, compared to what St. Clair asked
progressives to do. Two weeks before the election, St. Clair
told Portland’s Willamette Week that given the
choice between Bush and Gore, “My inclination would be to
vote for Bush, for this reason: It would energize the
opposition. You look at what it means to be a liberal or a
progressive and I think you’ll find very few areas where
Gore is on your side.”
Six years, nearly 3,000 American war dead, two lawlessly
violent Middle Eastern countries, one recession, $3 trillion in
new national debt, one botched hurricane response and a
Plamegate later, St. Clair says he underestimated Bush’s
incompetence and couldn’t foresee the loss of life, but
he’s far from ready to retract his statement of 2000. In
fact, he’s feeling somewhat redeemed.
“As an anti-imperialist, I would say Bush has done more
to destroy the empire from within and without than any
president in American history,” St. Clair says.
“He’s shattered American credibility across the
globe. And under Bush you’ve seen progressive groups get
off the mat and begin fighting politically again.”
Such is the view from St. Clair’s world of chaos
politics. It’s a perspective with some following: St.
Clair has published 11 edgy books and co-edits Counterpunch, a website of daily
leftist commentary and Bush critiques with 2.5 million hits a
day. (Undoubtedly some of the audience derives from the same
shock-value draw afforded right-wing radio’s Lars
Larson.) To St. Clair, everybody in Salem and Washington, D.C.,
holding hands and making nice won’t solve the current
political malaise. He’d like to see a Political Big Bang
and something new created out of that primordial ooze. Bush is
just the beginning. Third-party candidates, taking to the
streets and even avoiding the ballot box in disgust are all
viable instruments, as is the regular sardonic quip.
“It’s like the spinal cord has been ripped out of
the national body politic,” St. Clair says. “Take
Katrina. I mean, the death of an American city doesn’t
generate a million people on the streets calling for a regime
change? It’s just shocking. Maybe it’s the sign of
the empire in a state of slippage.”
St. Clair’s only officemate — his Australian
shepherd, Boomer — begins to bark sharply when he hears
these lines wafting recently from the family living room. (Has
he heard this all before?) The 47-year-old St. Clair, in bare
feet, a black shirt and jeans, his dark hair tousled, sets
after Boomer. “It’s off to Gitmo for you,” he
says, before the dog slips away.
Outside, in a humdrum, 1980s vintage subdivision, a teenager
is fixing his motorbike along an otherwise quiet street.
It’s hard to picture an influencer self-described as a
cross between Che Guevara and the anarchist monkey-wrencher
Edward Abbey at work in this neighborhood, diving as he does
into a file-stacked basement office to edit the website each
morning, before concocting his own screeds. But St. Clair is
much gentler in person than his writing suggests. He helped
coach the local soccer team when his two grown kids were
younger. And don’t forget how the Unabomber, Ted
Kaczynski, survived for a while in small-town anonymity,
too.
St. Clair was an environmental activist in Washington, D.C.,
and his native Indiana, before moving with wife Kimberly and
the kids to Oregon in 1990, first to take over a small
environmentalist magazine, the Forest Watch, before founding his
own ‘zine, Wild Forest
Review. In the Review, he offered a scathing
critique of Clinton administration environmental policies in
the early 1990s and attacked Oregon environmental groups for
signing on to the landmark Northwest Forest Plan, which reduced
federal timber harvests but allowed logging to continue. That
earned St. Clair his first round of enemies —
conservationists who didn’t take kindly to the suggestion
that they’d been co-opted by big business.
“Jeffrey is a fundamentalist,” says
conservationist Andy Kerr, who headed the Oregon Natural
Resources Council in the early 1990s. “Fundamentalist
enviromentalists are no different from fundamentlist
Christians, or Muslims or Jews. They have a world view
that’s pure and they tend not to tolerate anybody who
doesn’t think like them.”
St. Clair’s Clinton writings caught the eye
of Cockburn, who’d already made a name at the lefty
’zine The
Nation.
The two teamed up to found the newsletter Counterpunch in 1993, the
precursor to the website (the bi-weekly newsletter still goes
out to 4,000 subscribers). They also co-wrote Whiteout, published in 1999, which
examined the CIA’s link to the cocaine trade, first
exposed by reporter Gary Webb and later repudiated by the
mainstream press.
They began dabbling with web postings during the Kosovo
war and the election of 2000. Then, within hours of the Sept.
11 attacks, Cockburn and St. Clair posted a cautious
explanation. Could it be that the U.S. backing of Israel, or
sanctions against Iraq that led to the deaths of Iraqi
children, or Clinton’s cruise missile attacks following
the 1998 African embassy bombings might be to blame? Web hits
rose to 5,000 that day and grew exponentially in the following
weeks and months as writers as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Paul
Craig Roberts, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of the
treasury, responded to the Bush Administration’s foreign
policy adventures. St. Clair notes that Bush has been excellent
for growing the Counterpunch audience, especially
foreign readers, who now comprise 40% the total.
“If we can’t have George for another four years,
we’ll take Jeb,” he says.
In the Northwest, St. Clair has found plenty of issues to
engage. He excitedly covered the anti-globalization protests in
Seattle in 1999 and he lambasted the Oregon Democratic party
for keeping Ralph Nader off the presidential ballot in 2004. He
was thrown out of Nike’s annual meeting in 2000 and wrote
an unflattering 1995 retrospective of timber baron Harry
Merlo.
But, true to form, St. Clair can’t find any group he
identifies with here. The Libertarians are too obsessed with
the tax code. Liberal Portland is so holier-than-thou that St.
Clair says dissent is not welcome. Hope, in his eyes, lies in
places with mixed identities such as John Day and Wallowa and
Corvallis, the Benton County seat. Two years ago, with the
state threatening to sue Benton County after commissioners
there announced intentions to issue gay marriage licenses, they
stopped giving out any marriage licenses to anybody, gay or
straight. “I thought it was the perfect response,”
he says. A true, pure act of chaos politics.
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