Not sufficiently attractive? Apparently it wasn’t always the case. Roz Kaveny posted in her LiveJournal two years back (http://www.livejournal.com/users/rozk/23897.html) her recollections of Hitchens when they were both students at Oxford, circa 1970.

“In 1968, when I arrived at Oxford as a gangling skinny Northerner with serious sexual identity problems, I went to a lot of political meetings. You could hardly not notice Hitchens – he was charismatic, and beautiful, and passionate in his denunciations of the Americans in Vietnam. …

“[Bill Clinton’s asssociates] They just were not as likable, or as attractive, as Christopher Hitchens. On at least one occasion, I cried on Hitchens’ shoulder over an unhappy love affair of mine; on several others, his then girlfriend, and his then boyfriend, with whom I had been at school, severally cried on mine over him.”

The point is not “Hitchens is gay [or bi], nyah nyah nyah!” but that his non-denial denial is disingenuous.

For my own part, I was taken by Hitchens’ writing in the Nation, twenty-odd years ago, and made the “best essayist since Orwell” comparison in my own head. But as time wore on, Hitchens’ vicious streak grew plainer and plainer. He’s a brilliant writer, but there are better uses of brilliance than cruelty.

The comparison of Hitchens to Orwell is not without irony. Orwell in his later years paid a lot of attention to James Burnham (author of The Managerial Revolution, among others), a Trotskyist who, like Hitchens, followed the main chance and moved dramatically to the right. As such, Burnham was the spiritual grandfather of the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Orwell’s response to Burnham informed his writing of 1984 significantly.

An overstuffed cockatoo.

Ralph

http://www.zmag.org/replyhitch.htm

Another thing about old Hitch—I heard him debate Tariq Ali on the radio a year or two ago and as old lefties, they both defended the records of the FLN in Algeria and the NLF in Vietnam in their anticolonial struggles. Their difference was over whether the Iraqi insurgents were in the same tradition. Not to Hitch—the insurgents were islamofascists, which makes all the difference. What was interesting, though, was that Hitch talked as though the Algerian and Vietnamese “freedom fighters” had conducted their struggle in some sort of pure atrocity-free way. Which is totally absurd, but Hitch isn’t really bothered by atrocities as such—he’s bothered by atrocities committed in the name of fascism or religion. It might be hard to make a serious distinction in the human rights records of actual insurgents in various wars, but to Hitch all you have to do is decide that one group is fascist and the other isn’t and you don’t have to do any more thinking about it. Orwell spent his life writing about idiots like Hitchens—it’s weird that the post 9/11 Hitch idolizes the man who would have regarded him with contempt.

GOVERNOR DEATH

George W. Bush has presided over an execution in Texas almost every two weeks since his election. Why isn’t that a campaign issue?
SALON August 7, 1999
By Christopher Hitchens

In rather the same way as new movies are now “reviewed” in terms of their first weekend gross, new candidates have become subject to evaluation by the dimensions of their “war chest.” This silly archaic expression defines other equally vapid terms like “credibility” and “electability” and “name recognition,” which become subliminally attached to it.

[...]
The hidden costs, alas, include a complete erosion of the critical faculties. I am as enthralled as the next person by the sheaves of money assembled for George Walker Bush. …But I’m even more fascinated by the fact that, as I write, he is about to sign his 93rd death warrant. There was an execution on the day of his inauguration as governor of Texas, which I don’t count, and there has been one every two and a half weeks or so ever since.

Part of a governor’s job is to review capital cases. The staggering pace of executions in Texas means that Bush has either a) been doing little else but reviewing death sentences or b) been signing death warrants as fast as they can be put in front of him.

This may also be helping him gain some of that much needed “foreign policy experience” about which the pundits have made the occasional frown. State officials from the Philippines and Guatemala have been touring lethal chambers in the United States as part of their research into improved methods, and according to Amnesty International a Filipino official was allowed to watch a killing in Texas in 1997.

The thorny question of race—always such a minefield for the aspiring Republican candidate—also gets a workout by this means. Many people remember the case of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again pickax-murderess who showed—at least by the standard of Christian fundamentalism—signs of having been rehabilitated. Gov. Bush snuffed her in February of last year, over the protests of Pat Robertson and others.

But had he commuted her sentence, he would have been faced with executing a black woman, Erica Sheppard, who was next in line on the female death row and had foregone her appeal. Spare a photogenic white girl and then kill a defiant black one? Better to do away with both and avoid the row altogether. (Sheppard has since recovered her determination to appeal, and recently took part in a protest against the strip-searching of female inmates in front of male guards, another distinguishing feature of the Texas criminal justice system.)

Then there’s the aspect that touches “communities of faith,” or whatever you choose to call them. Gov. Bush has proposed that the social safety net be maintained by religious charities….It’s the battiest soup-kitchen scheme since Theodore Roosevelt discussed handing over American social welfare to the Salvation Army.

But it runs up against a potentially interesting conflict: at least 28 major religious groups in this country have declared against capital punishment. Might not now be the time to ask them if they will agree to ladle charity on behalf of a man who conducts photo-op and opinion-poll executions?

Some Lone Star State cases for your perusal: An openly homosexual named Calvin Burdine was sentenced to death after being given a court-appointed lawyer who referred to gay men as “queers” and “fairies,” and who fell asleep during the trial. In 1998, two Texas defendants were executed for crimes committed when they were 17. (That same year, of the 70 juveniles on death row in the United States, Texas was holding 26.)

Then there’s the case of Joseph Cannon and Robert Carter, who suffered head injuries in infancy, had been subject to lurid physical abuse later, and tested at an abysmal level for mental retardation. Texas killed them anyway, violating the accepted international standard that prohibits the death penalty for the underage, as well as the presumption that it is wrong to slay the mentally ill or incompetent.

[...]

Perhaps you wonder if capital punishment is unevenly applied, as respects race and class, in the state of Texas. Wonder no longer: Just read the Amnesty International report “Killing With Prejudice” ….Finally, the man who is awaiting execution as I write—Larry Robison—is a paranoid schizophrenic who, along with his family, asked repeatedly for treatment of his unstable condition before cracking up. The state which failed him in the first instance is now stepping in, at vast expense, to warehouse him on death row and to snuff him on the taxpayers’ dime.

Yet most people can still mention only two things about George Walker Bush—his extreme opulence and his commitment to “compassionate conservatism.” This is the story, and the media are sticking to it. Every time I get on the radio or TV, I mention his assembly-line execution policy, and every time I do so I get treated as if I had developed Tourette’s syndrome in church. Let that go, and on to the next question.

Yet Bush’s addiction to the death cult actually touches every important aspect of what could be described as his “politics.” Unfortunately, the commitment of President Clinton, Al Gore and Bill Bradley to the same pro-death penalty politics prevents it from surfacing as the issue it deserves to be.

Accessed at

http://www.truthinjustice.org/govdeath.htm

This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with mare spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.
—Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit’

Enough about Hitchens – what about the Greatest Living Englishman? I didn’t know that Humphrey Lyttelton was at Hay this year.

Real apologies for quoting myself, but more of the like here, a counter-dummyspit to Hitchens’ fatuous attack on Michael Moore of last year.

could you elaborate?

Not being testy—genuinely not clear to me whether you think my wondering is an instance of intellectual corruption (I will defend it if so) or Hitchens’s support of Bush.

Here, in a nutshell, we see the intellectual corruption which partisanship causes.