Comments on: Hitchensian nastiness

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 23:13:43 +0000

“Kennedy certainly was unlucky….” Luck is the residue of design— Branch Rickey

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 10:25:32 +0000

Kennedy certainly was unlucky….

By: Eve

Eve — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 10:03:50 +0000

I suppose what’s operative here is moral luck – for some risks, taking them is justified if they come off, not if they don’t. I take it that Hitchens thinks that Kennedy’s risk-taking really didn’t come off. Churchill, on the other hand – we all have reason to be glad he took the risk.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 07:40:55 +0000

But if Hitchens’s point is that Kennedy was in a state where he shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to succeed or fail at being President in the first place, it is hard to see why he wouldn’t also have to concede that Churchill was in a state where he shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to succeed or fail at being PM.

By: Eve

Eve — Fri, 29 Aug 2003 07:19:20 +0000

But Churchill succeeded, spectacularly, and that’s why his drinking doesn’t matter. If he’d failed, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to mention his depression and alcohol problems in criticism. Kennedy’s record isn’t as impressive as Churchill’s, so questioning his judgement with respect to his drug intake is similarly legitimate. As for Hitchens relishing the physical debilities, I don’t see it myself. But admittedly this kind of thing is common – look at the way in which those who are hostile to Bush relish the claims that he’s stupid, which if true is no more his fault than Kennedy’s physical ailments.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 21:04:54 +0000

Yes, Hitchens does make that criticism, though it isn’t clear to me that the facts support that judgement. Was Kennedy more irresponsible than a serious depressive who regularly self-medicated with large quantities of booze was for leading Britain in WW2? But I’m afraid that the Hitchens writes with the aim of making Kennedy a figure of disgust for us on account of his physical symptoms and seems to relish doing so in a way that strikes me as sadistic. That Hitchens indulges his impulse so to do is not to his credit.

By: Eve

Eve — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 18:11:07 +0000

Well, maybe I wouldn’t go to the stake for that linguistic intuition. But still, isn’t the sting of Chris’s criticism of Hitchens drawn by understanding him as blaming Kennedy, not for his illnesses, but for his decision to hold the presidency while hopped up to the eyebrows with the drugs used to treat those illnesses?

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:55:33 +0000

I’m with Chris. ‘Relatively blameless’ is logically compatible with blame free, but if that’s what you mean it’s a very odd, and rather inappropriate, way to put it. Compare bq. There were many mistakes by world leaders that led to World War I. Alongside their mistakes, I’m relatively blameless for that disaster. The important point here is that words matter. If you mean blameless, say ‘blameless’. If you add an extra word in, that sends a message that the simple word wouldn’t have been good enough for what you wanted to convey. What work could ‘relative’ do in Hitchens’s prose except qualify somewhat the position that the back brace was, simply, blameless? Presumably nothing, so we read it as a qualifier, even if that’s not literally what it means.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:17:04 +0000

I’m afraid my linguistic intuitions are unshaken, Eve, though I’d probably defer to Brian (our resident CT linguistics person) if he disagreed. If I said of persons X and Y that they were guilty as hell and then of Z that she was “relatively blameless”, I think the conversational implicature would be that Z could be largely, though not completely, exonerated.

By: Eve Garrard

Eve Garrard — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:40:01 +0000

Sorry about the premature posting above. I don’t understand Chris’s construal of ‘relative blamelessness’. I take it to mean ‘blameless in comparison to the other complaints’, and hence to be silent about whether the backbrace condition was blameworthy at all – ie relatively blameless is compatible with not blameworthy at all. (The desired comparison couldn’t have been effected by just saying ‘blameless’.)If Hitchens is comparing wearing the backbrace with the other conditions, then presumably he’s thinking of the VD etc., and since allocating blame for illnesses is a tricky business, then he’s open to some criticism. But it seems much more likely that Hitchens is assessing Kennedy for blameworthiness in choosing to occupy the presidency while suffering from, and being treated for, these various medical conditions. The backbrace might seem fairly low on that list, and hence relatively blameless, compared to the conditions for which he took uppers and downers etc etc. On this construal, Hitchens is saying that there’s no (or little) blame to Kennedy for occupying the presidency while needing a backbrace, since that couldn’t be expected to impair his competence, but there is blame in occupying the presidency while undergoing other treatments which he must have known would affect his ability to run the country competently. I don’t know enough about Kennedy and his ailments to assess this claim, but it doens’t seem inherently objectionable, does it?

By: Eve

Eve — Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:20:07 +0000

I don’t understand Chris’s construal of ‘relative blamelessness’. I take it to mean ‘blameless relative to the other complaints’, and hence to be silent on

By: gek

gek — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 23:16:28 +0000

“Relative blamelessness”. Perhaps he means its blamelessness relative to the bullet and to Oswald. That’s how I read it, anyway.

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 21:11:10 +0000

No, I think Hitchens is just being a consistent dickhead. He previously speculated Reagan had full-blown Alzheimer’s by 1982, appropriately enough, in an article that calls on George W. Bush’s critics to go for the cheap shots instead of avoiding them.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:49:52 +0000

What I really want to know is: if JFK was that sick and that drugged up how did he get the reputation of stud-puppet and horn-dog? I mean if I were that sick and that high, I wouldn’t be chasing 19 year old girls. As for Hitchens, I thought he let ‘em off easy. This is a more realistic view of that clan.

By: nameless

nameless — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 19:47:31 +0000

“and I presume that it is its relative blamelessness which allows the concession.” Yeah, Kennedy has only a small amount of blame for being assassinated. Apparently most of the blame belongs to the assassin. I guess Reagan’s age was likewise “relatively blameless” for being shot by John Hinckley Jr. Hitchens is such a jerk. In any case, Hitchens misses Dallek’s point about the possible role of the back brace: “The first bullet that found its mark passed through his neck and it would have toppled him over … it would have knocked him over if it weren’t for the back brace,” Dallek explains. “But it held him upright. And so the second bullet that found the back of his head killed him. So it’s ironic that the brace, which was there to help his back, contributed to his death.” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/14/earlyshow/leisure/books/main553860.shtml Dallek doesn’t say that Kennedy was “unable to duck” – for goodness sakes, the man had already been shot through the neck. Hitchens really is nasty. Why does he spend so much time attacking people like Mother Theresa, Princess Diana, JFK? There is some pathology in that guy.