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Alexander Cockburn succumbed to a battle with cancer on the early morning of July 21, 2012.  The news came to me in an anonymous tweet posted to a listserv.   I imagined Alex stomping about the fluffy clouds inside the pearly gates and cursing that a life dedicated to the written word was, at death, announced by a 160 character electronic blip.

Alex was The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” columnist for 28 years and co-edited the internationally popular political journal CounterPunch with his cherished friend, Jeffrey St. Clair.  I never met or even spoke with Alex Cockburn but for five years we exchanged emails about the articles I was writing for CounterPunch.  Alex may have been radical in his writing, but as an editor of the work of others, he was thoughtful, respectful, and appeared to view each written word as a jewel to be polished and protected from the evil doings of knaves.  Alex graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language and he was wedded to those roots; perhaps more than easily recognized from his sassy writing.

Once, Jeffrey St. Clair asked me to check over two previous articles I had written on President Obama (about his ties to Wall Street bundlers and lobbyists) for an upcoming book anthology.  I emailed Jeffrey with a copy to Alex to inquire about the punctuation style – since Alex was notorious for moving periods outside quotation marks as done in Britain.  I received a response from Alex the purist: “Chicago Manual of Style – murderer of so much.”

Perhaps I saw a different Alex Cockburn because I viewed him only through the lens of the written word that arrived in my email box.  And more frequently than not, what arrived was about words.  Not politics or radical thoughts – just the proper use of words.