The Golden Age Is in Us

This volume is both a diary of a radical’s working life and a public chronicle of the recent political past. His own reflections are interspersed with letters from Graham Greene, personal friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, and pieces on criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners and hate mail. Cockburn subverts some left totems along the way—satanic abuse, a JFK conspiracy, a Democratic White House—and demonstrates that there are few uncomplicated victims, the Bad Wolf lurks with Red Riding Hood. In his writing on the environment, the three-hour day and other topics, Cockburn also suggests that an age of uncertainty invites new ideas and new allegiances. The left must be utopian or it is nothing. From the Los Angeles riots to Ireland, from Gorbachev to Clinton—this is a history of an age of uncertainty.