Fascinating Hitchens

Hitch has betrayed everybody; his current ‘allies’ hate his guts, and tolerate him while he’s useful. And he probably despises them – Bush, Cheney, the corporatists, the alleged intellectuals who provide their propaganda and the so-called ‘christians’ are exactly the people he despised before.

So he’s in an uncomfortable position, and expressing it. If he doesn’t win, then he’s a washed up dreg, in the lowest ranks of the servants of evil.

“…and find myself wondering how he squares his support for Bush with many of his other apparent beliefs”
He’s articulated this on several occasions: to cut a long story short, he shares Bush’s position on Islamic terrorism. And as he sees this as the overriding problem of the age, support for Bush makes sense for Hitchens so long as Bush maintains that stance. Plenty of relevant links here: http://www.hitchensweb.com/
I find it interesting how few people find someone a good writer AND disagree with what they’re writing about. I wonder how many people who dislike Hitchens’ style and also his political position realise that they are falling into step with the Martin Amis bad-politics-withers-prose stance from “Koba the Dread” and how pleased, or not, they’d be about that?

It’s ridiculous, Hitchens is a crip who once in a blue moon stumbles into brilliance; a monkey typing Shakespeare.

What a waste of time!

James Hamilton,

I have considered the possibility you mention. Certainly I disagree with Hitchens on some things. It’s not easy to be in harmony with someone who applauds both the Viet Cong and George W. Bush. That may affect my enjoyment of the writing. The best way I can test this is by looking at an essay which echoes my views pretty closely. In Why I’m Rooting Against the Religious Right he writes of “shallow, demagogic and above all sectarian religiosity”, tells us that “the clericalist bigots have been probing and finding only mush” and warns against the “creeping and creepy movement to impose orthodoxy on a free and pluralist and secular Republic.”

After that, it wouldn’t surprise me to encounter the infamous fascist octopus. The sentiments are fine, but the writing? It is usually adequate, sometimes pretty bad, rarely inspired. I wouldn’t argue with someone who says he writes better than Paul Krugman – though in fact I don’t think he writes as well – but George Orwell? Sorry, wrong league.

A fair sample of Vidal’s essays is United States, essays 1925-1992. It also comes in handy for weight training.

Like Hitchens, the quality is wildly variable, but the ration of gold to dross is in Vidal’s favour by a huge amount.

The sight of Hitchens view-hallooing across the fields in pursuit of some particularly dislikable quarry has been among the most exhilarating experiences of literary journalism during the last two decades. He’s courageous, fast, tireless and certainly not squeamish about being in at the kill. But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness – to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other ‘I told you so’s. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let’s-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn’t go on one hunt too many and find himself, as twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down in his own bullshit.

full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n02/coll01_.html

On Vidal, personally recently read Creation, and if that’s pedestrian I’ll never get in a car again. Easily the best historical novel I’ve ever read – features Buddha, Socrates and Confucius as main characters, while the narrator is Zoroaster’s grandson Hitch has admitted he doesn’t write novels because he thinks he can’t (sorry, can’t find the link), but even though I have to say his shorter articles can often be rather enjoyable, even though I rarely agree with him. But let’s not pander to his already sizeable ego by even comparing him to his own hero, Orwell.

That’s some pretty damning evidence against Benson provided by des von Bladet.

Hitchen’s has been an excellent essayist, though read in bulk you end up finding a pretty high twitches/thought ratio. But the stuff in Slate really has been awful — poorly argued, degenerate prose. Something has gone wrong over the past few years beyond his idiot love of Bush and Chalabi. And yes I appreciated his prose when I didn’t agree with him in the past.

…he shares Bush’s position on Islamic terrorism…

Is the IRA an example of a ‘Roman Catholic terrorism’?

Why would one have a special view on ‘Islamic terrorism’?

One would have a special view on “Islamic terrorism” if one viewed Islam as a backward, degenerate culture and if one thought that secular Western liberals therefore had a right to destroy it, which Hitchens in fact does.

Should we wait for you to provide evidence demonstrating that Hitchens wants secular western liberals to destroy Islam, or should we just accept your assertion as fact, dsquared?

Is the IRA an example of a ‘Roman Catholic terrorism’?

No, because the IRA did / does not want to establish a theocracy. Islamic Supremicist terrorism does.

I think the Conor Cruise O’Brien analogy is the best one. Hitchens had a very good review of a book by O’Brien in the LRB a few years ago, chronicling his intellectual degeneration – a degeneration that he’s recapitulated. But I always was of two minds about him – when he wants to write, he has a very fine prose style indeed, but there’s always been something a little shallow about him, a persistent tendency to reduce politics to the striking of a series of poses. And, as Des says, many of the hallmarks of the bully. And now he seems quite deliberately to have made himself into a sort of caricature. If Orwell was tragedy, Hitchens is the farce.

Maybe a better way to pose my appeal, for a link to a particularly good piece of writing by Hitchens, is to link to an Orwell essay that I like and ask, when has Hitchens ever done anything as good? Take a look at Shooting an Elephant. Certainly part of the reason why I like it, as James Hamilton would predict, is that I sympathise with the political message. How Hitchens can read it without wondering whether he was wrong about Iraq is a mystery to me. That’s partly why I pick it. But if you can, ignore Orwell’s political point and just watch the way he makes it, building up to the key paragraph, where he realizes he has no real choice here: the elephant, although it is now harmless, must be shot. The man in the pith helmet cannot afford to appear weak in the presence of the natives.

I don’t think this is an exceptional piece by Orwell. It is the standard he maintained year-in, year-out. So surely anyone who believes Hitchens to be a better writer can produce something that bears comparison with it.

In another essay, Catastrophic Gradualism (not available online), Orwell disposes of people like Hitchens with masterly economy. I’ve quoted it before but it bears repeating, although I am quoting from memory. He writes about the response you get when you ask a revolutionary how he can justify the carnage he causes: “First he says you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs; when you ask where’s the omelette he tells you Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

A scrapper like Hitchens would skewer his adversaries like that if only he could. Has he ever done so?

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Hitchens, even when I agreed with him most of the time. His writing is very uneven–sometimes it really is brilliant and other times he’s obviously straining to be witty and not succeeding.

Hitchens “won” the debate with Chomsky in the sense that at that point in time anyone who didn’t join in with the prevailing jingoistic mania was thought to be soft on terror. Chomsky’s warnings about famine in Afghanistan were overblown but were based on what some NGO’s said about the situation –if you bomb a country on the brink of famine then there’s a good chance you may cause large numbers of people to die. Probably thousands did die for that reason, but fortunately the Taliban lines crumbled before winter set in and the worst predictions didn’t come to pass. So the war in Afghanistan wasn’t the human rights catastrophe Chomsky warned about, but it also hasn’t been this showcase of nation-building we were all told about either. Golly, what a surprise. As for the rest of the debate, Chomsky’s opinions hold up pretty well. The Bush Administration did use 9/11 as an excuse for American imperial adventures and Chomsky also pointed out that American policies contribute to a world in which some people end up sympathizing with terrorists. Right after 9/11 even liberals turned into jingoistic buffoons who went into hysterics if you made that point. I remember how shocked I felt, because I expected conservative and middle-of-the-road people to react that way, but had naively expected something a little better from the so-called progressives. Did they actually think the US government (under George Bush?) was going to live up to its idealistic posturing? Within a year or so most of Chomsky’s observations became truisms (which is what they always were). You could say that America’s support for dictatorships had contributed to the terrorist threat (even rightwingers started saying it to justify the Iraq invasion) and you could also say that American governments use the threat of terror as an excuse to do all sorts of bad things. But not in late 2001. If you said it then it had to be because you were soft on terror.

Hitch really got a career boost out of his Chomsky-bashing though. A few months later the Atlantic Monthly was calling him an honest honorable man of the left, which is a technical term for someone who knifes his former leftist allies in the back and joins the mainstream in mischaracterizing their views.

“it is not possible to have an Islamic state which is also secular and democratic”

This is a tautology, isn’t it? I’ve never read Hitchens’ opining that a country with an Islamic majority can’t be also essentially secular and democratic. He argues that democratic revolution is more or less universally possible, given its positional advantage geo-politically. With some caveats regarding nation state formation, I’d go with that. Whether the war was the best way to progress things is quite another matter, and on this Hitchens has had nothing constructive to say since the fall of Baghdad.

There was a perfect example of the distance between Orwell and Hitchens in a recent Slate piece about “insurgents.” Hitchens begins the piece by confessing that insurgency has seemed to him a romantic thing. Orwell, given that opening, would then widen it to incorporate the distance and comfort that makes possible the romantic connotation and the moralistic fervor of creating the insurgent fantasy, as opposed to the inevitable pain and suffering of really killing people – so that even if you are persuaded of the ultimate justice of the killing for a larger goal, the spite and narrow mindedness of the spectators presents a morally dismal spectacle in itself. Orwell loves to display the disparity between the concept (and its easy translation into rhetoric) and the reality (and its contingency, nastiness, boredom and humor).

What does Hitchens do? He turns this into a rant about the NYT – instead of calling the insurgents terrorists, they are calling them insurgents, etc., etc. Sounding exactly like the Colonel Blimps Orwell made fun of during WWII.

Have you read much of his journalism as opposed to the longer essays? He did plenty of that kind of thing. Plenty.

I can’t speak for Roger but I trust it isn’t out of order to answer for myself. I’m pretty sure I have read every essay Orwell ever wrote and all of the journalism in the 4-volume collection which Penguin published decades ago. If Hitchens has written anything at all that stands comparison with Orwell’s workaday writing, never mind the serious stuff, I would like to see it. Any suggestions?

So have I. I used to be somewhat addicted to that 4 volume collection. I still think it’s intensely interesting, politically, morally, historically, in many ways; but I also think as a writer, as a stylist, Orwell was often quite pedestrian. That’s okay; it may have been all he was aiming for; but people often talk about him as if he were a minor deity.

Suggestions: try the essays in Unacknowledged Legislation.

Roger – Yeah, I’ll give you Down and Out. And parts of Wigan Pier, too. Ah yes, but what about those other parts? Hmm? A tad Hitchensish, one might say. Not all that self-reflective, perhaps?

“Unlike Orwell, there is no self-reflection—no holding himself up as a possible sample of the very vices he is railing against.”

Yes there is. Not in every piece, but then the same could be said of Orwell.

There are whole great stretches of Orwell that are as philistine and commonplace as any Blimpish writing you’d care to meet.

D2:

“One would have a special view on “Islamic terrorism” if one viewed Islam as a backward, degenerate culture and if one thought that secular Western liberals therefore had a right to destroy it, which Hitchens in fact does.”

Where does Hitchens say this? You may not be wrong in saying that “Hitchens doesn’t want sharia law to be practised anywhere and he is in favour of the use of force to achieve this end.” But there are legitimate forms of Islam which do not require the imposition of sharia law anywhere.

“and find myself wondering how he squares his support for Bush with many of his other apparent beliefs”

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

Reading this post and the comments section is the best example of the bankruptcy of current “progressive” thought I’ve ever read. Why is Hitch so scorned by the avant guarde? Because he dares to betray the party line when the party line does not comport with the facts. I defy anyone to prove that he has converted to a dastardly right winger on any issue other than saving the people of Iraq from the Pol Pot of our generation.

I liked Hitchens back when he was an unrepentant leftist. Now that he’s repented, I positively adore him.

Christopher Hitchens is the new Bernard Levin. Discuss.

I think this is a well written polemic which has withstood the test of time.

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

Below is a link to a page on Znet which provides links to arguments back and forth between Hitchens on the one hand and Chomsky, Albert, Edward Herman, Tariq Ali, and Jeffrey Sommers on the other. They all were written soon after 9/11, and I believe the Hitchens articles are among his initial polemics written from the POV he has taken subsequently. The exchange is very interesting, certainly in retrospect.

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

Andrew Edwards: “One of my favourite Hitch lines was when a letter-writer asked him whether he was gay. His response was something along the lines of how he was confined to heterosexuality by virtue of his not being sufficiently attractive to seduce men.”

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.