In the VCU debate with Turek, in answer to the question, "If God does not exist, what then is the purpose of life?", Christopher quipped, "Well, I can only answer for myself. What cheers me up?" Um. I suppose mainly gloating over the misfortunes of other people." After that got a big laugh and a round of applause, he expanded on the point. "Mainly crowing over the miseries of others. It doesn't always work but it never completely fails. And then there's irony, which is the gin in the Campari, the cream in the coffee. Sex can have diminishing returns but it's amazing.... No, that's pretty much it; then it's a clear run to the grave."
If you listen to his intonation and watch his facial expression and body language, and you're a reasonably bright spark, you'll probably conclude that Christopher was being his usual wickedly funny self, and that although he isn't a complete and utter sadist, there's more than a grain of honesty in the admission that he enjoys witnessing and contemplating the misfortunes and miseries of others - well, certain others at least. Well, we all enjoy a bit of schadenfreude from time to time, don't we all?
I thought of Christopher's remarks and wondered what he might be thinking when he learned that one of his former comrades and latter day intellectual adversaries, the intrepid anti-Zionist British Jewish proper intellectual Tony Judt had been stricken with rapid-onset motor neuron disease, a condition that has left him almost as physically helpless as Stephen Hawking. I only heard about this today in the Guardian. Such news slowly to me at the Greywolf Ashram as I don't read or view "the news" in any sort of systematic way, but I'm surprised that it's taken so long for me to hear about it.
Tony Judt in healthier times
Ed Pilkington interviewed Tony (published the Guardian on Jan. 19, 2010) and put together a heart-rending account of his current misfortunes and miseries:
Eighteen months ago Judt was, by his own description, "a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy". He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more.
Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a progressive degenerative illness that causes the cells which control movement to die. His specific condition is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig's disease after the legendary New York Yankees hitter who died of it in 1941.
The disease ravaged Judt with astonishing speed. By December he had lost the use of his hands. By March he was in a wheelchair. By May he was wearing the "silly-looking facial tubing" as he puts it, because his diaphragm muscles were no longer strong enough to effect the bellows motion that induces breathing.
On the same theme, in the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt reflects on his condition in the first of thee short articles here.
By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic. With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me. The same is true of my torso, with the result that backache from inertia and pressure is a chronic irritation. Having no use of my arms, I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that—as a moment's reflection will confirm—we all do dozens of times a day. To say the least, I am utterly and completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers (and anyone else).
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
Whether the reader feels the urge to gloat or crow over Tony's condition or is saddened or mortified at the news is a reflection mainly of the reader's own character and sensibilities, including how well they have their superego under scrutiny, so you are welcome to check out your feelings at Tony's plight as a sort of Rorschach test. I wish someone could wave a magic wand and make Tony's neurons better again, or that he could be made well by power of prayer, ginseng or brain surgery. Call it magical thinking or wish thinking if you wish. But there are times when cold rational stoic acceptance of the inevitable without hope, faith or wishing just doesn't cut the mustard. If Tony Judt happened to be an ideological opponent of mine, I'd like to think that my wishes for his miraculous recovery would be the same, but perhaps I wouldn't be wishing quite so hard.
Over the years, Tony has had a few run-ins with the Zionists, and in late 2006, when he complained that a scheduled speech he was booked to give at the Polish Consolate in NY was cancelled after pressure from the Israel lobby, Hitch defended the lobby's right to go witch-hunting, going to the trouble of accusing him in Slate of having a "persecution complex":
How dare the Polish Consulate refuse the heroic dissident Judt a platform! And how dare the Anti-Defamation League, or its chief spokesman Abraham Foxman (it's not quite clear who called) even telephone the Poles to complain?
Well, short of a miracle, Tony will not be giving many more lectures, a thought that is bound to delight Abe Foxman and the rest of the anti-defamation clan (you don't suppose they put a hex on him?) as well as of the "lotus-eaters who make up the American liberal-hawk intelligensia" who Tony summed up so well in his 2008 book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. As John Gray says in his review:
Judt is especially hard on America's liberal hawks. These " tough", "muscular" liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left, he suggests. "They see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people's expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide." As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. "America's liberal armchair warriors," he writes sharply, "are the 'useful idiots' of the War on Terror." A few pages later, he hammers the point home: "In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them."
Let's finish with a paragraph mentioning Hitch from Tony's 2006 article in the London Review of Books entitled, appropriately enough, Bush's useful idiots.
But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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