Doug Ireland

From Philosopedia

Doug Ireland (31 March 1946 - )

Ireland is an American journalist, one known for his radical political views and for being a practitioner of "investigative opinion."

An auto-didact, he schooled himself by being involved in the intellectual left and the social and political movements from the early 1960s on.

In Direland, a website which he edits, Ireland supplies details about himself:

Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic, who considers himself a purveyor of what the great I. F. Stone (at whose feet Doug sat as a lad) called "investigative opinion." Even those with whom Doug has profound disagreements respect him - like Christopher Hitchens, who wrote (in the May, 2004 Vanity Fair) that Doug "is one of the country’s toughest and brightest radical columnists."

Doug got his start in journalism as a lad on the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days, when the paper was still owned by Dolly Schiff and was the most liberal daily in the country), and as a young man worked for a wire service. He's been a columnist for the Village Voice (serving for seven years as its chief media critic), the New York Observer, New York magazine, and the Parisian daily Liberation, among other publications (and for the late, lamented SoHo Weekly News).

He lived for a decade in France, writing on European politics and culture for a wide variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, visits France whenever he can, and often writes about French and European politics for a Stateside audience. He also currently writes a column for the French political/investigative weekly Bakchich.

During the Clinton presidency, for three years he wrote a syndicated column called "The Clinton Watch," which appeared in alternative weeklies around the country. A longtime contributor to The Nation magazine, he's a contributing editor of POZ magazine and of In These Times, and the former media critic for TomPaine.com.

His articles have appeared in many U.S. and French publications. Among those he writes for regularly these days is the L.A. Weekly, where his articles on politics frequently appear. He writes weekly on international LGBT issues for Gay City News, the largest lesbian and gay weekly in New York City.

Prior to consecrating himself full time to journalism in 1977, before he reached the age of 30 Doug had worked on the staff of four presidential campaigns for liberal Democrats, and successfully managed the campaigns that elected progressives like Bella Abzug and Allard Lowenstein to Congress and Paul O'Dwyer New York City Council President. He managed Bella's campaign for U.S. Senate in New York, which she tragically lost, by less than 10,000 votes out of 1 million cast, to Pat Moynihan. He also served stints in New York City and New York State government, and on the staff of the United Auto Workers and the N.J. Industrial Union Council AFL-CIO.

In Edmund White's City Boy, Ireland is described:

Doug Ireland was the most outspoken Leftist in our [New Left] midst. He was a big, lumbering man with a broken voice whose body was constantly racked with pain. His parents, Christian Scientists, had not allowed him to be inoculated against polio, and he was one of the last kids to contract the disease in the 1950s. Perhaps not coincidentally, Doug became a militant atheist. He wrote regularly for the Village Voice, which back then was still a genuine alternative newspaper of some interest. Doug lived in France for a decade and befriended the charismatic French novelist and gay liberationist Guy Hocquenghem, who wrote the first book ever anywhere of queer theory, Homosexual Desire (1972), and codirected with his lover Lionel Soukaz an early film about the history of homosexuality, Race d'Ep. I used to sit around in rooms in Paris full of hashish smoke and talk to Doug and Guy with his strange beauty, pale and precise as if carved out of ivory, and the philosopher René Schérer (with whom Guy wrote a last book, The Atomic Heart).

Back in the days of the institute Doug was living in his office. He'd hang up underthings to dry in the small room and had a hot plate for cooking eggs. Dick Sennett was always in a bit of a rage against Doug for breaking the rules and posing a fire hazard, but he respected Doug's militancy and was intimidated by his mocking self-assurance. At that time, just at the end of the 1970, the whole country, and New York along with it, was shifting to the right. In the 1960s and the early 1970s anyone who held the most extreme Leftist views automatically won the argument, but now middle-class intellectuals, with their tenure and co-op apartments, were beginning to rebel against this tyranny of firebrand rhetoric. In a sense the potential battle between Doug Ireland and Dick Sennett (a battle that was never openly expressedP was an emblem of this troubled and troubling shift. But don't get me wrong - we all liked Doug, who was generous in a sort of reckless, almost indifferent way, and who laughed at all our sacred cows. [See emendation, below.]

In 1973 made no secret of his homosexuality. Ireland's partner of a dozen years, Hervé Couergou, died of AIDS in 1996.

He was one of over 1,300 who signed a petition to President Barack Obama for the U.S. to end its wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ireland lives and writes in New York City but considers Paris his second home.

Correspendence

In December 2009, when Ireland was shown the above, he e-mailed some emendations:

During the decade I lived in France, I became enamored of the writing of the prolific Michel Onfray, France's best-known contemporary philosopher, a self-described left-Hegelian and an anarchist who resigned from teaching in the national education system after 20 years to establish the Université populaire at Caen, which teaches philosophy and other intellectual subjects to the children of the working class and the economically disadvantaged for free (there are today 7 Universités populaires in France and Belgium modeled on the original). Onfray and I eventually became friends some years later.

When I finally returned to the States, I was outraged that not one of Michel's 32 books (that was then, it's more like 40 books now) had ever been translated into English. So, I arranged for the publication of Michel Onfray's scintillating essay on the 17th century atheist priest Jean Meslier (it's part of Michel's groundbreaking 6-volume Contre-histoire de la philosophie) to be published in English in the socialist review New Politics (in its Winter 2006 issue, with an accompanying introduction to Onfray by me), a serious review with which I've long been associated.

And I helped arrange the publication of an English translation of his Traité d'athéologie, which had been the number one non-fiction best-seller in France, Italy, and several other countries. Unfortunately, its U.S. publishers, Richard and Jeanette Seaver, gave the book a silly title ("Atheist Manifesto") that made it seem like a tract from Madalyn Murray O'Hair instead of a serious philosophical work and eliminated some 20 important pages of Michel's footnotes (which infuriated Michel), as well as doing nothing to promote the book, which got little noticed Stateside as a result. I've written numerous articles about Onfray.

I was much amused by the portrait of me quoted from my old friend Ed White's latest book of memoirs. There are several inaccuracies in it (for example, I never did any washing at the Institute or hang my undergarments out to dry there, nor did I have a hotplate, although I did sleep there on occasion). However, in most other respects Ed's portrait of me is fairly close to the mark.

(See Ireland's website: http://direland.typepad.com/direland/).

{WASM}