"The Last North American Career Journalist"

Al Giordano of Narconews has posted a brilliant and absolutely heartbreaking tribute to his friend and fellow authentic journalist, Gary Webb, here.

One of the many goddamn shames about this tragedy is that Webb's death could come to overshadow his life and work. It's what happens with our slain heroes. The circumstances of their sudden passing - whether they be lonegunman'd, accident'd or suicide'd - often become our first thoughts about these figures whose lives meant a better world. And that's the legacy of those who took their lives, not the legacy for which they deserve to be best remembered. Death effaces life, mystery obfuscates truth, and the fuckers win again.

Giordano does not question the verdict of suicide. I'm unpersuaded. But while we need to seek the truth about his death - two shotgun blasts to the head? - what I admire about Giordano's piece is that the truth of Webb's life remains paramount.

An excerpt, but it deserves to be read as a whole:

Gary never wrote with mere ink or pixels. Gary opened up a vein every time he sat down to tell us a new truth and he signed his byline, always, in blood. If you think that his suicide did not send as powerful a message as the stories he investigated and penned in life, think again: Gary was The Last North American Career Journalist. He presided over a transitional era and his death marks the end of that era. Fellow and sister journalists: The canary has died in the coal mine. Run out of that mine now, and seek alternate routes to truth-telling. There is no longer room for us inside the corporate machine.

All over the world he is mourned today. The compañeros here in Chiapas came to me last night. “You knew him. He worked for you. Did he ever come here? Did he know about us?” As they peppered me with questions I retreated far into myself. Time and space stopped, as it has before in this deep green tropical jungle. I could see it – the bullet (two bullets say the coroner: Gary was nothing if not thorough and persistent; imagine for a moment what strength it took to get off the second round) off in the distance somewhere over California, those bullets, the first one fired by that traitor-to-journalism-and-truth Jerry Ceppos in San Jose, those bullets that came out the other side of Gary’s cranium in Sacramento last week and took a southern turn toward me. And when they are done with me they will come for you. I could see and hear them heading my way last night and so today I type these words in a hurry so as to shoot back before my brains, too, are splattered on the page of history.

To be an Authentic Journalist in 2004 is to be a soldier at war. When a hero dies in battle first we must drape the coffin, sound the slow, sad bugle song of Taps, and remember this great man who died fighting for all of us. Among the soldiers I have known in my foxhole, there were none finer, more effective in a firefight, than Gary. He was a god among insects, and a particularly important god among gods (shortly before his death, Gary told our colleague Bill Conroy that he had applied for a reporter’s job at the San Antonio Express-News and that the newspaper never even acknowledged his application: In the immortal words of Jonathan Swift, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”)

...

I ask the compañeros here in Chiapas – they loved Gary, too - what I should do now: What can be done? I can’t bring Gary back and neither can you. Not even the compañeros, with all the revolutionary magic and ancient knowledge they can muster, can bring back Gary Webb: although they could have, as they brought me back seven years ago, if only we and I had cared enough about Gary to drag him by the hand to them, to have been alert that when he lost his job he was at risk, to have paid enough attention to have seen him sinking toward the grave, to have supported anybody who still loved him intimately to be able to stick with him, to have raised him the money so that he would not have lost his sense of place.

The compañeros gave me the answer to my question. What to do about the early death of Gary Webb? Their answer was so simple, so clear, that I kick myself for not having realized it immediately.

The answer: “Do what he did. Do what Gary would have done today if he were still alive.”

Mike Ruppert writes that "I myself might have committed suicide in 1996 - broke, divorced and having given up all hope of making people listen - had it not been for Gary Webb." Wisely, he adds, "For some years now it has been the farthest thing from my mind." Perhaps it would be prudent for the few authentic journalists left standing in America to follow Ruppert's example, and go on record regarding their disinclination to taking their own lives.

Ruppert concludes:

I am going to the funeral and I will be asking questions in Sacramento. Given the disproportionate number of "suicides" of authors and journalists who have covered such stories, and the mainstream's horrendously dishonest coverage of such events, it is right to see if there are grounds to be cautiously suspicious of these accounts. But it is also right to avoid hysteria and unsupported conclusions until there are solid reasons to suspect foul play.

Gary would have wanted us all to do this by the numbers, patiently and thoroughly. That was his style. That was why he was so good.

When funeral arrangements are announced FTW will publish them and we encourage all of our subscribers to send flowers, write letters and show their thanks to this man who changed all of our lives forever.

It wouldn't hurt if you wanted to let the L.A. Times know what you think of their obituary.

Sleep well, Gary. Wherever men and women of honor gather together from now on, your name will be spoken with reverence, respect and gratitude.