The Nation Magazine Cruise: Puuuke!

By the Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers

It’s that time of year again. They’re packing suitcases, stuffing them with expensive clothing, fancy cameras, and Caribbean cruise tickets costing thousands of dollars. They will head to one of the most economically exploited and ravaged areas in the entire world, pillaged by predatory free-market lending and a racist legacy of slavery and Euro-American violent imperialism, but will experience it from behind the protective confines of their cruise ship and guided Caribbean tours that obscure the reality of exploitation.

Sound like the escapade of some typical wealthy immoral conservative? Nope. Not at all. It’s the 2004 “Seminar Cruise” of The Nation, a favorite (self-described) “left” publication of (in reality) bourgeois liberals who rushed to vote for John Kerry, only to suffer pathetic defeat and long fits of denial that continue to the present.

This is the seventh year of the cruise where Nation gasbags and bores like “Deadline Poet” Calvin Trillin come aboard and deliver canned masturbatory talks at panels to fawning Nation subscribers who cannot possibly think up such banal platitudes themselves. Please die already.

There’s anti-Bushite Molly Ivins, whose main claim to fame is writing predictable tepid liberal columns in a faux-"homegrown Texan style.” Snooze. Your act was novel for one column, Molly.

There’s Christopher Scheer, whose main accomplishment is co-writing “The Five Bigggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq,” which besides ignoring the fact that Democrats pumped up the same lies, has this journalistic non-entity listed as a co-author for one not-so-veiled reason: author two’s a guy named Robert Scheer. Little Scheer also operates the Alternet.org syndication service, known for frequently copying journalists’ articles without permission and then selling them to alternative newsweeklies without compensating the original author. Maybe going on a cruise that exploits the cruise staff and pays them sub-par wages isn’t so out of your league, Chris.

There’s David “Egregious Hairline” Corn, who spent most of 2003 red-baiting the anti-war movement because most of its demonstrations were organized by far-left sectarian groups. Corn, of course, took no part in organizing any of the alternatives that eventually emerged. Corn served as one of the biggest “Kerry is a progressive!” boosters. MoveOn.org chose to enclose his articles in its “Kerry Kits,” propaganda volumes that argued the case for Kerry as progressive. We suppose he was progressive, if that means being pro-war, pro-occupation, and supporting the bulk of the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, no repugnant Nation event wouldn’t be complete without everyone’s favorite smarmy-smug pundit-weasal. Yup, you guessed it: Eric “I know Bruce Springsteen!!!” Alterman. Now that Alterman can no longer orient his talks around blaming Ralph Nader for all the destruction that the Democrats he supports have caused through their complete lack of backbone, cruisers can look forward to straw-man talks blaming working-class “middle Americans” for their stupidity and abandonment of the Democratic Party that offered them so little of distinction from Bush.

In the first year of the cruise, Victor Navasky suggested that cruisers would also “shuffleboard, dancing to Guy Lombardo, whatever else people do on cruise ships.” If you’re looking forward to getting sea sick, don’t even bother eating bad mass-produced cruise seafood. The sight of Victor Navasky dancing to Guy Lombardo should do the trick.

Bon voyage, Nation cruisers! Have a nice trip. Take some ridiculous pictures off on a cruise ship polluting the oceans while real activists are trying to re-build the social movements you abandoned (or, rather, were never really part of) to campaign for John Kerry. Have fun.

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The Glorious Revolutionary Federation of Fortune 500 Killers is a Columbia University-based anti-capitalist, anti-racist student insurgent group. To learn more about the group, e-mail ceodeath99@yahoo.com, or visit its site at www.fortune500killers.org.