Way back in 1992, Christopher Hitchens notched up one of his most notable nicknames when he caricatured Mother Teresa as the "Ghoul of Calcutta". Catchy and cute, the name was an instant and enduring winner, provoking howls of derisive laughter from the aisles and grins of wicked amusement from the galleries overlooking the floodlit stages upon which the Hitch struts his his stuff.
The critique and the put down were very welcome in many quarters although they were as sourly received in others as this website is among the Hitchophile and Hitchomaniac fraternities. The lady in question had been the focus of so much hagiography in the eighties that it was an audible relief to the great mass of current event followers to finally see someone with the guts to try to tear down the curtain on the MT media machine and break its spell, although being Christopher Hitchens, he took things much too far of course. Also, if Teresa was not been as much of a saint as Malcolm Muggeridge had made out, she was also far less of a sinner that Hitchens would have us believe. As Alex Cockburn observed, “my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Mumbai, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?"
But amid the grins and grimaces, few people stopped to ponder whether the "ghoul" epithet was a fair or accurate description of the woman in question, since however much money she may have taken from less-than-pristine sources or campaigned against the "evils" of abortion, contraception and, for all I know, beastiality, necrophilia, felatio, cunnilingus, orgasm, onanism, and doing it doggie style, she was never actually caught red-handed robbing graves or feeding on the flesh of the dead either literally or metaphorically. Indeed, for all her faults, she was thoroughly on the side of saving human life and against ending it. I know it seems rather churlish at this late date to point this out, but Teresa was not a ghoul in any meaningful sense of the word.
Lamentably, the same cannot be said of Hitchens himself. His income sources, many and varied though they are, include a number of media organs that have at the very least acquiessed in nine years of campaigning on his part for wars that have robbed millions of people of their lives. In the past, I've called him a warmonger and a cheerleader for war and genocide, but a serious look at the connection between how he makes his living and the wholesale destruction of what is for the most part reasonably innocent human life in the meat-grinding enterprises he has sought to dignify, glorify, or even sanctify as indispensable to the preservation of civilization leads any reasonable unbiased observer inexorably and unequivocally to the logical assumption that there is more ghoul in Hitchens than in Burke, Hare and Sweeney Todd put together.
However, there is another less direct way in which what one might call "Christopher's ghoulish tendencies" have been observed to operate; namely, his propensity to lay there in the coffin with the corpses of certain dead-but-with-cred literary luminaries in the calculated hope that some of their cred will rub off on him; a sort of "gilt by association" if you will. For instance, his well-known although not-so-well-read writings on George Orwell and Tom Paine, along with what reads as a concerted effort by Hitch and his media backers to show him off in a certain light, have allowed Hitch to bathe in the afterglow of these luminaries as a sort of Latterday Saint George or Total Tom Paine in the Rectal Area. To take one example, the review of Why Orwell Matters by David Brooks in the pages of one of Christopher's regular employers, The Weekly Standard, begins with typical subtlety:
GEORGE ORWELL was one of the best essayists of his time, and Christopher Hitchens is one of the best essayists of his. Orwell is famous for his intellectual honesty and his willingness occasionally to anger his allies on the left. So is Hitchens. A book by Hitchens on Orwell seems natural and inevitable--like an Ali-Frazier fight or a Hepburn-Tracy movie. The publishers are not hyping things when they advertise this book as "a true marriage of minds."
Another instance of this same thirst for "gilt by association" can be seen in the Preening Popinjay's pathetic prattling on about Gore Vidal having made him his "Dauphin". If only the old man had snuffed it before 9/11, then we might well have been treated by now to a Hitch hagiography entitled V is for Vitriol: Vidal's Victory, or Why Gore is Great. As it happens, Gore's grave has not yet been occupied, but fortunately for Hitchens, another suitable candidate has presented himself in the shape of Hunter S. Thompson, who checked out in 2005.
This year the complete collection of Hunter's interviews was published and somebody had the brilliant idea of getting Christopher to do the introduction. Doubtless this was done as a surefire way to sell an extra hundred thousand copies, but one of the side effects has been to give our Big Bird another juicy piece of carrion to feed off. I imagine quite a lot of HST aficionados will be less than pleased with this package. Certainly it has stirred the passions of Ramon Glazov at The Exiled, who on September 11, published a polemic against the Popinjay that is ghoulishly entitled HOW CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ROBBED HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S GRAVE. Glazov also has a go at Martin "simply a leech" Amis and the rest of the Brit Lit boys that young Master Hitchens presumably used to hang around smoking Woodbines and swigging Strongbow behind the bike sheds with. I'll finish with my favorite paragraph from what I found to be a delightful and richly deserved hit job.
Unlike Amis, Hitchens can’t stop acknowledging his debt to Hunter S. Thompson. There’s a weird Spice Girls structure to the Oxbridge “Blitcons” (a shortening of “British literary conservatives”) that Hitchens is a member of. Julian Barnes is ‘Froggy Blit,’ Ian McEwan is ‘Nerdy Blit,’ Salman Rushdie is ‘Curry Blit,’ Martin Amis is ‘Celebrity Blit,’ and Christopher Hitchens is ‘Gonzo Blit.’ The duties of Gonzo Blit include submitting to safe-word-protected waterboarding, bullying Arab youths, pretending to be a Bob Dylan fan, and, according to The Guardian, “courageously” asking people not to pray for him during cancer treatment (which shouldn’t matter to an atheist anyway). This is all pretty hardcore for Amis, though, when he claims that Hitchens is an all-round tough who ‘likes the smell of cordite’ (probably unaware the stuff’s been obsolete for over 50 years).
“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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