Study and ponder the following lines written by Christopher Hitchens as George W. Bush went tottering back to his Texas estate in 2009:
I wouldn't reconsider my vote for Barack Hussein Obama, in other words, and when he takes the oath, I hope to have a ringside seat. I already know something about "the speech" and its Lincolnian tropes. (If you want your own understated preview, take a look at what he said to the crowd in Baltimore Saturday, as his whistle-stop train made its way from Philadelphia to D.C.'s Union Station.) But, on the last day of his presidency, I want to say why I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor in 2004.
Note, please, that as well as being perfectly inane in point of sentiment and unbearably hackneyed as to metaphor (the whistle-stop train and the ringside seat, for goodness’ sake), this passage is wearily ill-written and uncomfortably confessional — as if some flickering automatic pilot was in (you should pardon the expression) the driver’s seat. But quite probably, Christopher Hitchens was in some sort of suppressed panic on that day. Politically and journalistically, the Dubya, Dead-eyed Dick, Rummy, and Condie show had been his meal ticket. For years after briefing Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq (drunken outburst attributed to Hitchens as reported by Alex Cockburn: "It is glorious, and it IS my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war."), Hitchens appeared on top-dollar trash talk-shows to make cool evaluations of the horse he had backed. While he may not have actually lunched with Laura at costly, joyless expense-account hangouts in the capital, he still managed to play the courtier with everything except the courtier’s accomplishments of wit and gallantry, mistaking the servile for the loyal.
As a stylist, Hitchens is the idol of the half-educated. His blizzard of literary tags and historical allusions is a mere show of learning. To take one example, in late 2001 in one of his final Nation columns, he rebuked Noam Chomsky and others being “soft on fascism” and in the same breath said that, “it no longer matters what they think,” oblivious to the fools errand implied in criticizing the thoughts of people whose thoughts don't matter in the first place. In a further example, Hitchens tried fairly hard to claim Albert Einstein as a fellow member of his atheist alliance against religion, including by extensively quote mining Albert with approval in The Portable Atheist, and yet elsewhere Hitchens has described Albert as a deist. Also, in a work specifically on atheist apologetics for atheists employing extensive quotations from the great scientist, it is noteworthy that Hitchens omits to include Einstein’s specific objections to the Hitchensian atheist world view, including the remarkably apposite “Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is the same as that of the religious fanatics, and it springs from the same source.” Good liars, it is said, must have good memories. The same goes for would-be successful impostors.
An atheist and a theist go into a restaurant in search of a free lunch....
Hitchens’s imposture — an affectation of reasonability, enlightened professorial wisdom and encyclopedic knowledge personified — had at least the merit of originality when it was in the service of an unashamed vulgar fraud such as George W. Bush.
But in the Obama era, which is the Bush legacy, Hitchens must try to deny that his past positions have any connection with the present state of affairs. This gives him little to write about — or with. And a whole bunch of mini essays praising the supple brilliance of Orwell’s anti-totalitarian mind do not serve to cover the nakedness. The rest is dotted with wrong-headedness or banality. ‘Wolfowitz is a bleeding heart.” Really? The late Howard Zinn and the still with us Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, three profoundly interesting and original left-wing Jewish American academics, are described as representing a “quarter” that is guilty of “rationalizing” the attacks of September 11, but famously they did no such thing. On Iran, Hitchens writes like an adoring hack in a one-party state:
So backward has the theocracy made its wretched country that it is even vulnerable to sanctions on refined petroleum, for heaven's sake. Unlike neighboring secular Turkey, which has almost no oil but is almost qualified—at least economically—to join the European Union, Iran is as much a pistachio-and-rug-exporting country as it was when the sadistic medievalists first seized power. So it wouldn't be surprising in the least if a regime that has no genuine respect for science and no internal self-critical feedback had screwed up its rogue acquisition of modern weaponry. A system in which nothing really works except the military and the police will, like North Korea, end up producing somewhat spastic missiles and low-yield nukes, as well.
As Hitchens himself reminded us of what I.F. Stone once said of Theodore White’s treacly prose, a man who can write like that need never dine alone.
It has to be said in fairness that Hitchens has occasionally shown himself irritated by Obama’s exploitation of bigotry and stupidity in American life. But even when he’s right, he’s wrong. He contributed to the foolish misreading of Sarah Palin by offering partial sympathy to those seeking to portray her as a potential Manchurian candidate, a straw-man criticism which was set up — partly by Palin’s own people — the easier to demolish it. During the whole of the Obama presidency, Hitchens has been running on empty and failing to write a single memorable column. Increasingly he has turned to demonizing Iran, where for all I know he can beat better devils than he did with Iraq, or to episodes in his personal struggle against the evils of religion, which he depicts with such excruciating egocentricity as to make sighted men blind and walking men lame. “This week sees the opening on various cinema marquees of the film Collision: a buddy-and-road movie featuring last year's debates between Pastor Douglas Wilson, who is a senior fellow at New St. Andrew's College, and your humble servant. (If I may be forgiven, it's also available on DVD, and you can buy our little book of exchanges, Is Christianity Good for the World?)” is an introductory paragraph that summons the instant response, “Hold it right there!”
* If the tone of this essay sounds vaguely familiar, that's because I've borrowed without attribution the entire framework of the text and substituted various nouns. phrases and quotations in place of the originals. The first reader to name the source correctly will win the honour of being Hitch Know-it-all of the Month.
“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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