I believe I’m on record as not particularly liking roses. I offer as evidence of this a column of mine from the Contra Costa Times, which Jeffrey StClair kindly republished in Counterpunch some time before his co-editor Alexander Cockburn went completely off the deep end. (That second link is rather breathtakingly idiotic, doncha think? At least Hitchens is always drunk. What’s Alex’s excuse?)
So it means something when I say I’m really taken with this rose, now blooming in shade in my garden. None of this effusive double-flowered rococosity. None of the Camille-like hypochondria common to hybrid teas. It’s a sturdy source of fodder for the leaf-cutter bees, with healthy, waxy, non-fungally mottled, deep green foliage, and oh yeah! Little apple tree type blooms, sweetly fragrant.
I am given to understand that the rose, a cultivar named “Lyda Rose,” was originated from the garden of Kleine Lettunich, a SanDiego-area rosarian and habitat gardener. Yes, there is an intersection between those two sets: not all rosarians aspire to a monocultural, fungicide-drenched landscape. She found the original Lyda Rose growing as a seedling, deducing that it was an offspring of a rambler rose name of “Francis E. Lester,” itself a probable hybrid of Rosa moschata and something else.
It’s nice to catch a trace of the fragrance in the evening as I walk the yard, watering or emptying compost or chasing the rabbit.
Doesn’t it? If it wasn’t for that fifth petal, that’s what I would have guessed if I’d seen a photo.
Orange, that’s not really shorter Cockburn. He writes that “There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend.” He doesn’t think we’re doomed, he thinks that AGW is all a fake.
I had always felt a bit guilty reflexively believing Berube in his dispute with Cockburn, in a “what if it was mainly a personality clash” and “what if Berube is more sympathetic because he’s more interesting” kind of way. So in a sense I’m relieved to find out, in the context of an issue that I understand fairly well, that Cockburn really is super-stupid.
You know, the glory of our age for reflexively contrarian types like Alexander Cockburn is that there’s so much damn stuff to be against these days.
For one born and bred like Cockburn, there’s a strong fellow feeling shared with all people who are against stuff, shared even at times with the kind of people who’s opposition is based on something that they’ve got basically wrong.
A natural born contrarian will so often fall in with that kind, particularly when lacking special knowledge of the field in question that would shine some light on the utter balderdash being adopted.
Maybe Cockburn would have gone after the Flouride Cabal in another time.
Lyda Rose: “not fancy or fine.”
Cockburn has zero credibility. And for fuck’s sake, he’s plain wrong about climate change. Rationality has never been his strong suit, though.
Cockburn has zero credibility.
That may be the case.
Still, I find myself against a lot of the same stuff he’s against for my own incredible reasons, though I admit I do tend to tiptoe away when he starts going on about the Balkans or the global warming.
spyder—While you have the approximate region correct, Alex’s house is in fact down by a river, not “high in the hills.”
And not to discount the fragrant source of much of the region’s outside-the-windowbox thinking, but in Cockburn’s case I rather think the applicable nexus to intoxicants is much more likely to be the one Chris invokes. Hitch isn’t the only drunken expat Brit mucking about on the fringes of American politics.
Generally, though, what I’ve seen with A.C. is the marriage of rhetorical gifts and a hostility to facts, especially those presented by the targets of A.C.‘s venom. Sad, given that we need wordslingers more than ever, but he has become self-refuting.