Alexander Cockburn, RIP

The writer who made a career of being a contrarian, though he stopped short of courting the title, has died of cancer:

Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done. Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.

Jesse Walker remembers discovering the author as a fourteen year-old:

I pick up a copy of The Nation, which I've heard of but never read before. Inside I find a two-page spread labeled "Beat the Devil," written by someone named Alexander Cockburn. The feature fascinates me: First it's talking about Jesse Jackson, but then suddenly the subject is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who had to give up her crown when an old nude photo shoot turned up in Penthouse. "And she was not just posing with anyone," wrote Cockburn. "She was posing with another woman. I doubt even a full repudiation of Louis Farrakhan and all he stands for would have gotten Williams off the hook at that point." [...] I had never read anything like this before. It wasn't that the article was stylish and erudite; it's that it was a stylish and erudite response to a porn shoot, a column that casually mixed culture and politics, serious analysis and jokes. The op-ed page in the daily paper wasn't like this at all. I was hooked, and I got in the habit of picking up more free copies of The Nation at the bookstore.