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by MacCruiskeen » Sat Dec 17, 2011 2:29 am
by 82_28 » Sat Dec 17, 2011 3:13 am
Fuck's sake. Give the man a break. He's dead. He's been dead for twenty years now, to all real intents and purposes.
by Searcher08 » Sun Dec 18, 2011 12:48 pm
82_28 wrote:Fuck's sake. Give the man a break. He's dead. He's been dead for twenty years now, to all real intents and purposes.
We all gave the man a break by not caring about him any further after he supported the Iraq "war" which was clearly criminal before it even began. He went off my map of anybody I should care about what he thinks right about then. I gave him a break. I don't wish ill on the departed, but truth is truth. He played a part in publicly supporting the death of innocents. So them's the breaks. How one could even remotely be unmoved by and not come out in opposition of this brutal occupation once this photo broke out:
. . .Is now somebody I do not respect -- despite his body of work. You don't make kids cry under any circumstance, I don't give a fuck what the soldiers were thinking and why they slaughtered her parents. They should have never been put in the position of being in Iraq in the first place. Hitchens played a hand in public acceptance of "forever-war". RIP, as I said. But ultimately, fuck him. Turn coat lefty.
I feel the same way about Dan Savage of Seattle's Stranger mag -- who has somewhat apologized and admitted he was wrong. I will never forget how hurt I was when he also came out in support of what has now turned into America's "longest war ever". Every time he even makes a blog post to SLOG and I see he's the author, it immediately courses through my mind that he may not know what the fuck he's talking about on any subject. Anti-war is a no-brainer.
by seemslikeadream » Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:00 pm
For Christopher Hitchens
By Mr. Fish
Another version of this piece ran in the LA Weekly in 2007.
He appeared equally capable of pissing into your grandmother’s fish tank as beating you at chess; the Angus Young of quasi-omniscient political journo-intellectualism, looking as if he had been assembled hastily by sausage makers hoping to fill a suit with all the succulent impropriety of vitriolic meats made sane by delectability. Well aware that the shortest distance between birth and death is a very straight line, his reputation was that of a man prone to the rich experiences offered by staggering. And, contrary to the caricature so lavishly and lovingly rendered by friends and foes alike that painted him as either a reliable guard or attack dog, one with a ferocious mouth that showed no mercy, Christopher Hitchens was not a wild animal, much to both my relief and dismay.
It was like meeting a clown outside of his makeup, away from the hysteria of his profession, who appears lovely and handsome and noble, if only because he isn’t trapped in a spotlight at the center of a ludicrous pie fight.
In fact, having recently won the 2007 National Magazine Award for “Columns and Commentary” for his outstanding work for Vanity Fair, not to mention the surprising popularity of his then-new book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” which reached No. 4 on Amazon’s best-seller list even before its official release date, there was something both cheerful and elegant and, dare I say, sober about Hitchens when I met him at dusk sitting alone on a squat sofa in the posh outside reception area of his Beverly Hills hotel. In his rumpled trademark suit the color of Caucasian neutrality, a camouflage for anything but, he had just arrived in town to do the 2007 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which I would see him do 16 hours after interviewing him and, much to the shock of everybody in attendance and in sharp contradiction to the outstanding premise of his book of there being no deistic magic in the universe, he performed the jaw-dropping miracle of receiving more applause and admiration than anybody else on his panel, the equivalent of walking on whiskey at a venue that typically booed him. One felt that the air he drew through his ever-present Rothmans Blue cigarette while he walked from the crowded ballroom to the signing area afterward was the lightest it had been in quite a long while. It was amazing. Christopher Hitchens, crucified more times by old friends and new enemies than all the velvetized Jesuses in Tijuana combined, had been born again.
“M. Poisson,” he said when we first met, in response to my gregarious hello, using the French version of the name that I attach to the bottom of my cartoons.
“Sir Hitchens,” I said, resisting the temptation to make a joke to myself about what rose-colored version of doomsday he must have been seeing through the rose-colored retinas I was all too happy to notice, his roguish reputation gleefully revealed to be picture perfect.
He stood, we shook hands. “Do you want to get a drink from the bar before you sit down?” he asked, making me feel like the guest and him the host in my own hometown.
“Sure,” I said, looking at the coffee table separating us both and seeing a pack of cigarettes, a cup of espresso and a wine glass the size of an inverted bell jar containing just enough red wine—a dead Jesus, we used to call it—to tease a postage stamp.
“Do get the Coppola,” he insisted, a name that I was unable to recall 90 seconds later while standing at the hotel bar, having not made the connection to the famous film director’s winery. Had the connection been made, it would have most certainly turned me off, as I had lost my taste for any celebrity-named foodstuff in the summer of ’75 when I ate enough Bobby Clarke Peanut Butter to caulk a chimney. Instead, I asked the bartender for a glass of cabernet that had a name I’d have a hard time spelling, that didn’t sound too much like an Italian sports car or a brand of designer jeans or something that a moneyed Napa Valley hippie might find delightfully sardonic—no Barefoot wine, nor Mad Housewife. His choice cost me 18 bucks, whatever the fuck it was.
“Did you get the Coppola?” Hitchens wanted to know when I returned.
“Yes,” I said, setting my gigantic glass of whatthefuck down and turning on my tape recorder.
MR. FISH: Let’s talk about the title of your new book first, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” There’s nothing obtuse about it, is there? In fact, I can’t imagine anybody buying the book and then being offended because they didn’t know what they were getting.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: No, which is the point. A lot of people have been waiting for something like this for a long time, this push back to religious bullying and stupidity. The title came to me in the shower, which is where most of my ideas come to me. That’s why I’m so clean.
Do you care that such a blatant title might limit its readership to mostly those who need no convincing of your argument? Is it really going to change anybody’s mind?
I do think it will change minds, precisely that.
Why do you think so?
Because I think there are a lot of minds that are not so much in a solid form of dogma. The book isn’t just about saying to hell with you and your foolish faith. I think it’s probably useful to have at least some knowledge of the other side, empathy even.
Can a person be spiritual without being religious?
I suppose so. Everybody, whether they’re laying a brick wall with a trowel or shearing a sheep, has experienced the transcendent, that’s one thing. It’s quite another to believe that the universe is directed towards you. The holy texts do actually say what they say and they do mandate a lot of incredible stupidity. I’m rather proud of the chapter [I wrote] about Dr. King. Many people, at least ostensibly, have been motivated to do grand, good things by faith, but why is that necessary? You don’t need the supernatural to be in favor of abolishing the condition of slavery, for instance, whereas you do need the Bible to keep slavery going so long. Subjectively, do I really know whether Dr. King was a believer or not? I don’t. Did he actually think that the story of the Exodus was true? If so, he contradicted it at every turn because he did not promise black Americans that they could kill everyone who disagreed with them.
It could be argued that the threat to humanity posed by religion pales in comparison to the threat posed by science and technology—napalm didn’t come out of the Vatican, it came out of the chemistry department of Harvard University. One could feasibly make the point that at least God doesn’t require 30 billion barrels of oil a year to keep his halo glowing.
No, but then if you look at what could be very frightening you would have scientific knowledge plagiarized by unscientific people who have contempt for both science and reason. That’s now been made possible by our global internationalized civilization. Surely, to most people, that’s the most scary thought; in combination is apocalyptic technique in the hands of messianic forces. Let’s be honest about it, there is an advantage to the rational mind as opposed to the fanatical one—the fanatical one is not very good at science and, so far, this advantage has played out in our favor.
Still, does science bear no responsibility when they create, essentially, a doomsday machine and then say it should only be used for peaceful purposes?
I would think it was a bad thing if the species was destroyed by an apocalyptic weapon, but I can’t see how any religious believer would think it was such a bad thing. To them it’s not a tragedy, it can’t be. They’ve repeatedly said so. And, sure, a secular power with a nuclear weapon could make the mistake [of ending the world] and several times nearly has. Nothing stops that. The idea that we could die as a species is obviously very high. The fact that we’ve survived this very brief time is rather surprising. It would be ironic if it were something that arose from our intelligence that got rid of us.
Maybe intelligence is the wrong word.
Well, we’ve been used to that ever since nuclear physics was discovered. This kind of thing seems to be common sense, our tenure on this planet is very fragile—goddamn. By the way, in my view, in case I didn’t make this clear enough in the book—which, actually, I think I didn’t—outgrowing the supernatural and the superstitious is not sufficient for emancipating the human race. It’s only the beginning. All our big discoveries and big arguments are ahead of us, but the one that has to be subtracted is the fanatical one that prays for the end of time.
Most of the religious people I know are not religious because they’re adhering to some ancient, antiquated text or because they’re afraid of spending eternity burning in hell if they misbehave. Do you think that religion, for some people, simply fulfills the same purpose that fiction and literature might for you or I, [as a way to quantify] ideas of right and wrong?
That’s why I say, in many ways, that [the question of religious inquiry] is a literary question; it’s about ethics and the origin of ethics and the best way in which they’re expressed is a dilemma—ethical dilemmas are in literature and myth, yeah, sure. The difference is that I can step outside of it and as soon as you can see it from the outside you can see that it’s man-made. Being man-made isn’t the worst thing. It’s just you can’t then make it into a transcendent law that everyone must obey. And that’s what I object to and that’s what has to stop.
There’s a basic question that I seldom see included in this discussion and that is the question of the viability of human consciousness itself, and whether or not it perceives reality or just perceives itself perceiving reality. In other words, can consciousness even perceive the truth or does it only interpret a version of the truth relative to a person’s mood, opinion, ideology, [et cetera]?
No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis. Here’s what I do know, those who claim that they do know this are bound to be wrong. The argument is not equal between us and the supernaturalists. They don’t just claim to know there is a supernatural that can be miraculous as a designer, they don’t just claim to know that, which is more than they can know. No one can know that. I admit that I can’t. They say, ‘No, no you can! Not only that, you can know God’s mind. Not only that, you can know what he wants you to do about food and sex.’ If we start by excluding those who say there’s no point in the argument, who say they already know the truth, if we drop them then we may get some progress. Then we’re left with an argument among grown-ups.
Do you find that an argument against the existence of God is not unlike an argument against the existence of obscenity? Or, how about this—this is the equation: There’s a difference between a cent and a penny. The cent is the imaginary value of the penny, it isn’t real, yet when we see the penny we see the cent because we’ve made them interchangeable. The cent is what we react to, but [we] have to believe it exists first.
I think I know what you’re saying—go on.
We’ve developed this habit of using the incontrovertibility of physical reality to give incontrovertibility to our imaginations, therefore, we’re capable of making our imaginations seem real, so God can seem real. You can see it when you look at the words “cunt” and “vagina.” Both words refer to the same exact thing, yet one is considered obscene. The difference between the words cunt and vagina is imaginary.
I know what you mean. However, cunt is a hate word.
But it was invented to be such.
It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder. The real objection to obscenity, in my opinion, is the result of our makeup, specifically that the urinary/genitry/excretory is mixed up. That’s what makes children laugh and whistle and grin. If that were not the case, we’d be a lot better off, perhaps. Obscenity comes from grime. “Free education is a gift to the poor, it raises them out of the gutter. It teaches the girls to write cock on the door and the boys to write cunt on the shutter.” It’s the relationship between the spiritual and urinary, that’s where obscenity comes from.
That’s my point, is obscenity—or God—something we can even have a rational conversation about if we’ve only been conditioned to react to it? Is consciousness an evolutionary flaw?
That’s what I say in my first quotation in the book.
“Oh, wearisome condition of humanity
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vanity begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”
—Fulke Greville, “Mustapha”
The situation is we’re mammals, we leak and we excrete and then we’re told to forget about that or to deny it. Religion is totalitarian because it demands the impossible. [Like religion], obscenity shuts you down. The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to, as much as possible, remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion. I’m old now—I remember when D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley” was banned because the government thought that once you ban the book you can get people to stop thinking about these things. And I remember thinking that’s a mistake, a very obvious mistake. You probably increase the chances of [people] thinking about these things.
Which reminds me of my favorite Lenny Bruce quote.
What’s that?
Knowledge of syphilis is not instruction to get it.
[Chuckles] It was easy to argue this kind of thing in the ’60s, against censorship, against bans on homosexuality, et cetera. Now you do run into people who say, then why would you forbid pedophilia? Would the same standards hold for this? Or snuff movies? Or third trimester abortions? This argument takes place among rationalists and humanists and sociologists. We don’t say that if you allow [these things] we would be comfortable with obscenity. I do think there are lots of things you don’t have to be taught. Most people don’t have to be taught not to eat dead human beings, let alone to kill them in order to eat them. You don’t have to drill this into children. You don’t have to drill it into children that if one of their parents wants to go to bed with them that they should go and stay at the neighbor’s for the night, you don’t have to. You could say that that’s an argument for a creator with a benevolent view but then you’d have a huge rational argument about why we are programmed to kill and torture and so on. It does show that morality precedes religion, that ethics precedes religion, not the other way around.
Still, I wonder if our survival as a species is something we can will given a consciousness that is able to make its imagination seem real?
We can’t stand far enough outside of our dilemma to think it completely through. It’s like the mind/body distinction. There may not be a distinction. The mind is clever enough to consider the distinction, but it’s not clever enough to get far enough outside the body to arbitrate it.
And that’s the rub.
We don’t know that we’re not dreaming. Look, we can’t resolve these things today. Here’s what I insist on: Those who say they know are out of the argument and should be treated with less respect. We are having, even here in this lobby with the traffic, here in L.A., we’re already having quite a high-level discussion, about things that are fairly imponderable to combat, up against a phalanx of people who say what’s the point in having this discussion? We already know the answer. What’s the point of struggling and arguing and researching? This is what I find hateful.
Some people might accuse you of asking everybody to be comfortable living in a godless universe that is completely indifferent to them. How do you imagine people will go about satisfying their own sense of purpose?
Obviously, it’s not possible for people to do that all of the time, but it is possible for them not to draw any conclusions from their belief that the universe is all about them. If a huge rusted fridge fell through the ceiling and obliterated you without warning, I would think well, that was lucky. Presuming that the fridge was directed at neither of us, it’s not lucky at all. But I would not be human if I didn’t think it was a bit of luck. This is why religion can’t be beaten, because it does derive from all these forms of selfishness, self-centeredness, fantasy and so on. Fine, I concede to that, but then why do people keep saying that I have to respect it? I don’t have to respect any belief, nor do you, that a rusted fridge that killed you and didn’t kill me was a piece of luck. You do not have to respect that. You can recognize it and see where it comes from. You can analyze it, you can even sympathize with it. You can’t really say that I insist also that you respect it.
There is in religion, however, some practical application. Take, for instance, the very radical notion that the meek have some intrinsic value. African-Americans, just to take an obvious example, were told for centuries that they were something much less than human, so for them to have access to a Bible that tells them that they are significant, that white society doesn’t determine their worth, is, well, significant. For them it was a belief system that acknowledged, and still does in large part, that they were human beings that were being mistreated. Respecting that aspect of religion doesn’t demand that you also kowtow to superstition.
Of course, of course, I see what you’re saying. Since there’s no justice in this world, there better be some justice on offer in the next. Again, you can see where it comes from, fine. It’s the same when Karen Armstrong [author of “The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions”] writes about Islam. Arabs were being teased by Jews and Christians, “You haven’t had a prophet yet.” Well, they were going to get one, weren’t they? Then you have the Archangel Gabriel appear to some fucking peasant merchant who can’t read, exactly borrowed from the [Judeo-Christian] faith. Yes, of course I understand that, but it’s too much to ask me to believe it. It’s too much to ask me to respect it. It’s too much like I would be, too much like myself. I can’t respect something that follows my own wish fulfillment. I don’t. The last time I prayed was for an erection. Don’t ask me if I got it or not—who cares?
* * *
Having had just enough Sunday school to know the story of Lot’s wife and how to recognize an unhealthy temptation when I heard one, I struggled hard to keep my eyes above c-level and asked Hitchens a final question about whose existence was easier to disprove, Henry Kissinger’s or God’s. He laughed and said that it was the same process for eviscerating each high-profile Jew in print and that, essentially, the quantitative differences between nonexistent entities was not measurable, being the difference between the hole in a very old bagel and the hole in a relatively recent one.
When he stood to say goodbye three hours after we began our conversation, I did not stand to shake his hand, not because I was trying to be disrespectful, but rather because I figured a greater disrespect might have been expressed had I fallen down on him. I was drunk. Waiting until I was sure he was a safe distance away, I stood slowly, stacking my vertebrae like hermit crabs beneath a bowling bowl, and zigzagged outside and took a moment to look up at the stars and to recall something that Mark Twain had said: “Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.” “And back and forth,” I thought to myself, amending the sentiment, “if you have any interest in learning anything about anything.”
Four years later, on the morning of Dec. 16, 2011, I poured myself a glass of red wine and went to the window and toasted the same stars that, although I couldn’t see them, I knew were still there.
by 82_28 » Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:05 pm
One of the most intensely propagandistic weeks in the last several decades began on June 5, 2004, the day Ronald Reagan died at the age of 93 in Bel Air, California. For the next six days, his body was transported to, and his casket displayed in, multiple venues around the nation — first to a funeral home in Santa Monica; then to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, where it remained for two full days as over 100,000 people paid their respects; then onto the U.S. Capitol, where his casket was taken by horse-drawn caisson along Constitution Avenue, and then lay in state under the dome for the next day-and-a-half; then to a state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral presided over by President Bush and attended by dozens of past and present world leaders; and then back to the Presidential Library in California, where another service was held and his body finally interred. Few U.S. Presidents in history, if any, have received anything comparable upon their death; as CNN anchor Judy Woodruff observed the day Reagan’s body arrived in the capital: “Washington has not seen the likes of this for more than 30 years.”
Each one of those mournful events was nationally televised and drenched in somber, intense pageantry. At the center of it all was the prominently displayed grief of his second wife, Nancy, to whom he was married for 52 years. The iconic moment of the week-long national funeral occurred on the last day, at the internment, when she broke down for the first time and famously hugged and kissed her husband’s casket, while holding a folded American flag, seemingly unwilling to let him go immediately before his body was lowered into the ground.
But the most notable aspect of that intense public ritual was the full-scale canonization of this deeply controversial, divisive and consequential political figure. Americans — including millions too young to remember his presidency — were bombarded with a full week of media discussions which completely whitewashed Reagan’s actions in office: that which made him an important enough historical figure to render his death worthy of such worldwide attention in the first place. There was a virtual media prohibition on expressing a single critical utterance about what he did as President and any harm that he caused. That’s not because the elegies to Reagan were apolitical — they were aggressively political — but because nothing undercutting his deification was permitted. Typifying the unbroken,week-long media tone of reverence was this from Woodruff at the start of CNN’s broadcast on the day Reagan’s casket arrived in Washington:
We are witnessing a moment in history, a moment when this city, which is hustle-bustle personified, a city where people fiercely protect their interests and lobby for the issues that matter most to them, all that is put aside, politics is put aside, while we pay respects and deep honor to this president, who literally changed a generation, if not more, of American students of politics.
I have talked to so many young people over the last few days who came up to me and said, I started paying attention to politics because of Ronald Reagan.
Just a little while ago, I was talking with Tom DeLay, the majority leader of the House. He, I got into politics. He said, I ran to be chairman of the my precinct. He said, I was a businessman. I was running an insects — he called it a bug business. It was insect removal. And he said, Ronald Reagan inspired me to get into politics. I’d been sitting around griping, and he was the one. He gave me reason to get involved and to think that we could make a difference.”
So he changed, he inspired, and we now have a chance today and through this whole week to take note of him.
The key claim there was that “politics is put aside.” That’s precisely what did not happen. The entire spectacle was political to its core. Following Woodruff’s proclamation were funeral speeches, all broadcast by CNN, by then-House Speaker Denny Hastert and Vice President Dick Cheney hailing the former President for gifting the nation with peace and prosperity, rejuvenating national greatness, and winning the Cold War. This scene repeated itself over and over during that week: extremely politicized tributes to the greatness of Ronald Reagan continuously broadcast to the nation without challenge and endorsed by its “neutral” media — all shielded from refutation or balance by the grief of a widow and social mores that bar one from speaking ill of the dead.
That week forever changed how Ronald Reagan — and his conservative ideology — were perceived. As Gallup put it in 2004: Reagan had, at best, “routinely average ratings . . . while he served in office between 1981 and 1989.” Indeed, “the two presidents who followed Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, each had higher average ratings than Reagan, as did three earlier presidents — Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower.”
Though he became more popular after leaving office (like most Presidents), it was that week-long bombardment of hagiography that sealed Reagan’s status as Great and Cherished Leader. As media and political figures lavished him with politicized praise, there was virtually no mention of the brutal, civilian-extinguishing covert wars he waged in Central America, his funding of terrorists in Nicaragua, the pervasive illegality of the Iran-contra scandal perpetrated by his top aides and possibly himself, the explosion of wealth and income inequality ushered in by “Reagonmics” which persists today, his escalation of the racially disparate Drug War, his slashing of domestic programs for the poor accompanied by a deficit-causing build-up in the military budget, the racially-tinged (at least) attacks on welfare-queens-in-Cadillacs, the Savings & Loan crisis resulting from deregulation, his refusal even to acknowledge AIDS as tens of thousands of the Wrong People died, the training of Muslim radicals in Afghanistan and arming of the Iranian regime, the attempt to appoint the radical Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, or virtually anything else that would undermine the canonization. The country was drowned by a full, uninterrupted week of pure, leader-reverent propaganda.
This happened because of an unhealthy conflation of appropriate post-death etiquette for private persons and the etiquette governing deaths of public figures. They are not and should not be the same. We are all taught that it is impolite to speak ill of the dead, particularly in the immediate aftermath of someone’s death. For a private person, in a private setting, that makes perfect sense. Most human beings are complex and shaped by conflicting drives, defined by both good and bad acts. That’s more or less what it means to be human. And — when it comes to private individuals — it’s entirely appropriate to emphasize the positives of someone’s life and avoid criticisms upon their death: it comforts their grieving loved ones and honors their memory. In that context, there’s just no reason, no benefit, to highlight their flaws.
But that is completely inapplicable to the death of a public person, especially one who is political. When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.
* * * * *
All of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.
But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.
Corey Robin wrote that “on the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most: speak for himself,” and then assembled two representative passages from Hitchens’ post-9/11 writings. In the first, Hitchens celebrated the ability of cluster bombs to penetrate through a Koran that a Muslim may be carrying in his coat pocket (“those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words”), and in the second, Hitchens explained that his reaction to the 9/11 attack was “exhilaration” because it would unleash an exciting, sustained war against what he came addictively to call “Islamofascism”: “I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”
Hitchens, of course, never “prosecuted” the “exhilarating” war by actually fighting in it, but confined his “prosecution” to cheering for it and persuading others to support it. As one of Hitchens’ heroes, George Orwell, put it perfectly in Homage to Catalonia about the anti-fascist, tough-guy war writers of his time:
As late as October 1937 the New Statesman was treating us to tales of Fascist barricades made of the bodies of living children (a most unhandy thing to make barricades with), and Mr Arthur Bryant was declaring that ‘the sawing-off of a Conservative tradesman’s legs’ was ‘a commonplace’ in Loyalist Spain.
The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.
I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them. As Robin put it:
Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.
Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”
Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda:
I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war.
In several pieces, including an incredibly condescending blast against Nelson Mandela, Hitch went on and on about WMD, chided readers with “Just you wait!” and other taunts, fully confident that once the U.S. took control of Iraq, tons of bio/chem weapons and labs would be all over the cable news nets–with him dancing a victory jig in the foreground. Now he says WMD were never a real concern, and that he’d always said so. It’s amazing that he’d dare state this while his earlier pieces can be read at his website. But then, when you side with massive state power and the cynical fucks who serve it, you can say pretty much anything and the People Who Matter won’t care.
Currently, Hitch is pushing the line, in language that echoes the reactionary Paul Johnson, that the U.S. can be a “superpower for democracy,” and that Toms Jefferson [sic] and Paine would approve. He’s also slammed the “slut” Dixie Chicks as “fucking fat slags” for their rather mild critique of our Dear Leader. He favors Bush over Kerry, and doesn’t like it that Kerry ”exploits” his Vietnam combat experience (as opposed to, say, re-election campaign stunts on aircraft carriers).
Sweet Jesus. What next? I’m afraid my old mentor is not the truth-telling Orwell he fancies himself to be. He’s becoming a coarser version of Norman Podhoretz.
One of the last political essays he wrote in his life, for Slate, celebrated the virtues of Endless War.
* * * * *
Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.
Nor should anyone be deterred by the manipulative, somewhat tyrannical use of sympathy: designed to render any post-death criticisms gauche and forbidden. Those hailing Hitchens’ greatness are engaged in a very public, affirmative, politically consequential effort to depict him as someone worthy of homage. That’s fine: Hitchens, like most people, did have admirable traits, impressive accomplishments, genuine talents and a periodic willingness to expose himself to danger to report on issues about which he was writing. But demanding in the name of politeness or civility that none of that be balanced or refuted by other facts is to demand a monopoly on how a consequential figure is remembered, to demand a license to propagandize — exactly what was done when the awful, power-worshipping TV host, Tim Russert, died, and we were all supposed to pretend that we had lost some Great Journalist, a pretense that had the distorting effect of equating Russert’s attributes of mindless subservience to the powerful with Good Journalism (ironically, Hitchens was the last person who would honor the etiquette rules being invoked on his behalf: he savaged (perfectly appropriately) Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, among others, upon their death, even as millions mourned them).
There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do. As Aaron Bady put it to me by email yesterday:
I go back to something Judith Butler’s been saying for years; some lives are grievable and some are not. And in that context, publicly mourning someone like Hitchens in the way we are supposed to do — holding him up as someone who was “one of us,” even if we disagree with him — is also a way of quietly reinforcing the “we” that never seems to extend to the un-grievable Arab casualties of Hitch’s favorite wars. It’s also a “we” that has everything to do with being clever and literate and British (and nothing to do with a human universalism that stretches across the usual “us” and “them” categories). And when it is impolitic to mention that he was politically atrocious (in exactly the way of Kissinger, if not to the extent), we enshrine the same standard of human value as when the deaths of Iraqi children from cluster bombs are rendered politically meaningless by our lack of attention.
That’s precisely true. The blood on his hands — and on the hands of those who played an even greater, more direct role, in all of this totally unjustified killing of innocents — is supposed to be ignored because he was an accomplished member in good standing of our media and political class. It’s a way the political and media class protects and celebrates itself: our elite members are to be heralded and their victims forgotten. One is, of course, free to believe that. But what should not be tolerated are prohibitions on these types of discussions when highly misleading elegies are being publicly implanted, all in order to consecrate someone’s reputation for noble greatness even when their acts are squarely at odds with that effort.
Glenn Greenwald
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by slomo » Sun Dec 18, 2011 3:11 pm
Only in his steadfast ineligibility... I fell in love82_28 wrote:Is there anything on any topic in which Greenwald is ever wrong? I certainly have yet to see it.
when I he casually came out a few years ago, but was immediately crushed when he mentioned the existence of his partner 
by Jeff » Sun Dec 18, 2011 6:29 pm
I found him, when he was on the left, a bully. I didn't like the way he would frame debates. It always became personal, and we saw that when he switched sides and he began to tear into figures he once revered.... There was a viciousness that was very much part of his public persona on the left and the right that made me uncomfortable.
I don't want to take away from...his immense talents. For me, the tragedy of his life is that deep down inside there was a kind of amoral core, and much of those talents were put in the service of his own advancement, rather than to where I think they should have gone, which is against agents and systems of injustice.
by Jeff » Sun Dec 18, 2011 7:12 pm
What I really admire so much about him was he had a very principled outlook on life and on politics.... He was a defender of civilization, that might be a way to remember him.
by MacCruiskeen » Sun Dec 18, 2011 7:38 pm
Jeff wrote:Unsure if this will be available outside of Canada, but a strong interview yesterday with Hedges remembering Hitchens:
http://www.cbc.ca/day6/2011/12/16/chris ... -hitchens/I found him, when he was on the left, a bully. I didn't like the way he would frame debates. It always became personal, and we saw that when he switched sides and he began to tear into figures he once revered.... There was a viciousness that was very much part of his public persona on the left and the right that made me uncomfortable.
Alan Garner wrote:"I didn't want to spend all my days being witty and cruel."
by MacCruiskeen » Sun Dec 18, 2011 8:06 pm
by kenoma » Sun Dec 18, 2011 9:37 pm
MacCruiskeen wrote:I do respect him for having chosen to undergo that waterboarding experiment, not least because it obliged him to exhibit his aged face and bloated body in the process. He didn't have to do it, but he did it, and then he said what had to be said about it. No longer brilliantly, but honestly, which is better.
by jam.fuse » Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:14 am
Christopher --
I hoped it wouldn't come to this. Writing to you after you've died. As you know, I've reached out to you since a mutual friend told me of your illness. Ceased my attacks and critiques. Not that I changed my mind about your pro-war position, but my feelings ran deeper than partisan rifts.
We never met again. Friends said it was because you were in treatment. Weak. Unable to talk. I know that's true. But maybe you simply didn't want to see me. I understand. All I desired was to look you in the eyes one last time and say thanks. So this will have to suffice.
I have more memories of you than you did of me, the proper balance, given our relationship. When you read my initial attempts to write political criticism, you were honest but encouraging. Made minor corrections while highlighting lines you liked. I can't tell you what that meant to me. When young writers seek my advice or input, I remember your generosity and offer them my own. I still hew to your belief that first thoughts are not best thoughts. That the best stuff must be dug out. You were right.
My favorite memories stem from those long nights and weekends in your and Carol's apartment. If I seemed star struck, I was. I couldn't believe you took me as seriously as you did. The two of us sitting at that long dining room table next to the kitchen. Me trying to match you drink for drink. Rookie hubris. You made it seem effortless, wreathed in Rothman smoke, longish hair tousled. We'd talk through the early hours, you more than me. I was happy to listen and learn.
There were the C-SPAN gigs. Twice you took me along, early morning, when neither of us had any sleep. In a DC cab as the sun came up. You'd click on your debate switch and your eyes became electric. Your energy was boundless. When I appeared on C-SPAN, I tried following your example. Disaster. Massive hangover on national TV. It still hurts to watch that tape. I think you kept me up that night to test my endurance. To see if I could hang. I made it. Barely.
You opened doors for me. Recommended me to Jonathan Larsen at the Village Voice when the Press Clips column was vacant. I felt I wasn't ready for that stage, but you did. Larsen went with Doug Ireland instead. No matter. There were other jobs.
You got me into Mother Jones. Your endorsement put me in the New York Perspectives editor's chair. That was vital to my education. It's where I really learned to write. It was through you that Tariq Ali and Colin Robinson read my work. Tariq later published Savage Mules. Belated thanks for that.
So many moments swim through my mind. Our physical feats competition on your building's rooftop. You teaching me how to properly cook salmon in your kitchen. The day we spent together at the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York. You introduced me to Norman Mailer and Norris Church, saying "And of course you know Dennis Perrin." We hung out with Dick Cavett and Ron Reagan, Jr. Made fun of Charles Krauthammer who sat in front of us in Madison Square Garden. We hit the reporters' bar and talked about how awful Bill Clinton was going to be.
We then went to HBO Studios where you were to debate John Podhoretz on Comedy Central. It was a live show. You said "fuck" several times. Moderator Al Franken told you to stop. You replied, "I thought I was allowed to say whatever the fuck I wanted!" The segment ended early. The night was just beginning.
When I pissed off Noam Chomsky, sharing with you something he wrote to me privately, you spoke to Noam and straightened it out. I was thoughtless. You were selfless. You helped me many times like that. When I asked for a blurb for Mr. Mike, you didn't hesitate. When we saw each other at readings or signings, you always hugged and kissed me, cigarette ash falling on my shoulder. "So good to see you, dear boy! Care for a drink?" I never refused.
I'm sorry we fell out. That was never my intention. I simply didn't understand your reasoning. It felt false to me. When I reminded you of forgotten statements that undermined your pro-invasion arguments, you didn't deny them. You just got shitty with me. Pulled rank.
When I wrote Obit for a Former Contrarian in 2003, you reacted as if I stuck a shiv in your gut. You emailed me from Kuwait, demanding that I confess to planting the story in New York Post's Page Six. I told you the truth. I didn't. But you wouldn't believe me. From there it grew worse.
You later feigned little knowledge of me. The same tactic that Sidney Blumenthal used on you. Why not? It works. But mutual friends told me different stories. One wanted to set up a debate between us. Carol thought it was a good idea. You were horrified by the suggestion. Spoke of my betrayal. You never got over that Obit piece. Thing is, that piece is filled with love and respect for you. Severe criticism, too, but couched in whatever affection I had left.
You were wrong, old friend. You endorsed and pushed for all manner of imperial violence. Your glee over Fallujah blew my mind. After all you had written, roasting imperial toads with scathing wit, you were in the end no different than them.
Yes, I wrote harshly about this. To you personally, on my blog and at Huffington Post. For a moment I considered taking it all down, out of respect for your passing. But the old Christopher would blanch at that. And he would be right.
In your collection For The Sake of Argument, you wrote this to me: "For Dennis -- close reader, meticulous viewer, who answers back to the consensus. With warm fraternal greetings, Christopher." In No One Left to Lie To, you penned, "Dennis is a good man. C.H."
I'd like to think that somewhere inside of you, these sentiments remained. I'll never know. But many positive sentiments about you remain in me. Some friends have mocked me for this, but they didn't know you as I did.
So long, Christopher. I'll never forget you.
by Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 19, 2011 4:11 am
by Searcher08 » Mon Dec 19, 2011 8:45 am
Wombaticus Rex wrote:His "immense talents" would appear to amount to acute graphomania and the ability to consistently make deadlines.
I have a dozen uncles who can opine with just as much eloquence as Hitchens and they all drink more than he did, too.
by MacCruiskeen » Mon Dec 19, 2011 9:13 am
Wombaticus Rex wrote:His "immense talents" would appear to amount to acute graphomania and the ability to consistently make deadlines.
I have a dozen uncles who can opine with just as much eloquence as Hitchens and they all drink more than he did, too.
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