Kinglsey must have warned him that it would stunt his growth, but evidently little Marty wouldn't listen.
As the Fag-gate scandal drags on (Fag! Drag! Get it!?), yet another apologist for yobbishness has lept to the defense of Martin Amis. In Saturday's Independent, Amis fanboy John Niven assures us that despite the hype and controversy, "Martin Amis remains a literary giant."
Apparently, Niven is worried that unless we all realize this self-evident truth, then sales of Marty's new novel are going to plummet as a result of Anna Ford's recent show of disapprobation and Marty's own very laudable call for suicide booths for the elderly to be made available on every street corner, which certain irony-challenged individuals (and there's a plague of them out there these days) have seen fit to regard as a serious policy suggestion.
After all, what government in the Western world is going to push through legislation singling out the over-65s for such privileges. If suicide boxes are to be provided, access to their services should be open to the entire population at a less-than-extortionate price. Anything less would be rank ageism. But I digress.
As far as the Brit Dick Lit Git Cognoscenti are concerned, Martin Amis is now the Salman Rushdie of our age, which means they may well see Anna Ford the reincarnation of the Ayatollah Khomeni. Fortunately, John Le Carre has not yet stepped into the ring for the opposition yet or things could quickly go from postal to ballistic. To give John Niven his due, he does give a cogent brief overview of the weaknesses of Ford's stance.
Of course, anyone who had read much of Amis's work would already have had a sense of his humanity and, with that sense, the instinct not to trust Ford's claims about his behaviour. Indeed, they would, like Amis, have been left wondering about Anna Ford, wondering about "the personal troubles of the aggressor". Not surprisingly it has been what she has gone on to say in subsequent interviews that have been most revealing. "Martin seems to think that having highly controversial views on a number of subjects – nuclear warfare, Iraq, Muslims – is not going to attract criticism." I don't believe Amis has a problem with anyone criticising his views; he's just less tolerant of them distorting them for their own ends – the egocentric madman that he is...
She went on to say that "as a feminist I don't enjoy reading him". This shows such a poor understanding of what a novel is (and, considering no contemporary writer has done a better job than Amis of vivisecting the reptilian side of the male psyche, a poor understanding of what feminism is) that it at least allows us the luxury of discounting anything else Ford might have to say about his work. She then staggered down memory lane to complain about the atmosphere at the weekly lunches held at Bertorelli's restaurant some years ago by Amis, Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and the like. "It was for men only, but I was once invited early on by Mark," said Ford. "All I recall was how blokey it was, with them discussing girls, sex and politics. Martin, of course, ignored me." This is all rather like going willingly on a tour of an abattoir and then complaining at length about the blood.
Fair enough. Anna could learn a lot from Martin's books if she could get over the yuck factor. Although I think the the objections she has to his work are probably more aesthetic than gender-political. But then Niven goes and spoils it all by saying something Nancy Sinatra-ish about Marty, like:
I first read him in 1985, during the first year of my English degree at Glasgow University. The book I took from the library was Money, published the year before, and my reaction was exactly what Amis experienced the first time he read Saul Bellow. "After very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: 'Here is a writer I will have to read all of.'" I read all the previous novels and then began the wait – always too long – for new work.
The most recent wait being over I am once again enjoying being back in his company. Appositely enough, one of the many powerful, interesting things the new novel has to say is how unknowably it still goes between the sexes, how much distance lies between. Reading it I have been reminded of yet another Amis quote, again in relation to Saul Bellow. He said that when reading Bellow he often had to remind himself that the author was born in 1915, not 1952. Similarly I have been having to remind myself that the author of The Pregnant Widow was born in 1949, not 1970, such is the modernity, the engagement, the vivid here-and-now of the prose.
To which one can only reply, "Oh, how contemporary!", and try to convince oneself that the author of this paean to the great novelist is old enough to have been alive in 1985, let alone to have appeared on University Challenge. Personally, my biggest beef with Amis's novels is that the worlds he creates tend to be depressingly ugly and dystopian without providing sufficient compensatory rewards to make it worthwhile reading on to the end. Perhaps "the vivid here-and-now of the prose" has a lot to do with this. For some of us, the modern world is bleak enough without having to jump into a Martin Amis novel to experience it on speed and in stereo.
You keep all your smart modern writers, give me William Shakespeare. You keep all your modern painters......
London's Times online has released an excerpt of Hitch's upcoming memoir. In this bit, Hitch writes about drinking...responsibly. He gives us a series of incredibly trite rules for drinking:
Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food.
Negative. The main point of a drink is to get buzzed.
Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood.
So, if you're in a bad mood, you should just absorb all the pain and turn to the Power of Positive Thinking? Sounds like advice for suckers.
Cheap booze is a false economy.
That depends entirely on how much money you have. Baltika 9 is, plainly, good economy.
It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain.
Agreed.
Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed — as are the grape and the grain — to enliven company.
You would know from experience? Narcotics are no worse than alcohol. It's just a different high depending on what you take. Everybody has a drug of choice.
It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know why this is true but it is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.
This is just a ridiculous and even sexist thing to write. It ain't true, buddy boy, and I honestly don't know what the hell you're talking about.
The second best website on Hitchens is something called The Daily Hitchens. It's good because he (I guess his name is Tom) literally makes updates almost every day. I don't know the guy, but his decent heart is in the right place. And he recently gave a sort of shout out to us on his site. Rakhmetov wrote that his site is like the product of an autistic 12 year old. I tend to think of it more like a website from the 90's or an old school newspaper. He also routinely buries the lead stories with old clips of the ghost of Hitchens past droning on about his typical nonsense. Anyway, I wanted to thank him at least for his "This Just In" column. And for recognizing us as the greatest website on Hitchens that has ever existed. I hope Tom keeps doing his thing and doesn't lose interest in Hitch (which I fear he might when he matures) because I rely on his site for new material. He's also welcome to post on here should he have anything of his own to say.
Still sticking up for his fellow schoolboy in disgrace, Christopher has fired off yet another letter to the editor attempting to clear the chain-smoking Marty and smear his accuser, the lovely Anna. This affair is rapidly taking on shades of the Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and Ahmed Chalabai imbroglios, in which the Preening Popinjay has proven ever-ready to supply character references, excuses and flak for his confederates. Also, the way he is turning on Anna, using her own reasonableness and willingness to compromise against her, is reminiscent of the tactics of the Mafia-lawyer-cum-extortionist-thugocracy who rule the roost in his adopted hometown of DC, where, to quote Vince Foster's suicide note, "ruining people is considered sport." It just goes to show what an unmagnanimous, petty-minded, vindictive and partisan wee shi-ite our bird can be when his feathers are ruffled.
Ah, so now Anna Ford withdraws most of her charges against Martin Amis (the drop-by on the way to the airport, the smoking) and it all comes back to her (Letters, 25 February): I was the one who (allegedly) had a cigarette and in other ways exhausted and upset my dying friend. Does this not rather defeat the purpose of her original clumsy letter, which was to impugn Martin? Next she'll be forgetting – or re-re-remembering – that I later came back unaccompanied, at Mark's request, and was not cautioned to be anything but myself. Or that I came to the funeral, bringing Martin's express commiserations during his absence in America? When did a widow of such long standing last exploit a poor memory in such an inexpensive way, and still come up beaming complacently? For shame.
Christopher has decided to do for Anna what he did for Mother T, Cindy Sheehan, and Hillary Clinton - attack the individual's reputation through misrepresentation, innuendo and snark, or in the case of the "fat slags" and "the black dyke", by means of a vulgar schoolyard insults. Oh, at the moment it is just at the level of "clumsy" letter writing, "forgetting", "impugning", and "expoit[ing] a poor memory". But it's early days yet. Still, enduring this sort of mud-slinging is a preferable fate to the one he tried to fit up Sydney Blumenthal and Henry Kissinger with.
Hitchens has a mind like a bacon-slicer (to quote Agatha Christie). He can chop the legalistic logic quite as finely as Jamie Oliver can a clove of garlic. But the fact remains that there is absolutely no hard evidence that Martin didn't light up, and Christopher's oh so confident memory is, if anything, more an indication that he is bullshitting than that he actually remembers the trivial details who did and didn't have a Harry Rag 22 years ago. And indeed, his weaselly use of the word "allegedly" in parentheses should be taken as evidence that Hitch does not actually remember whether he himself lit up or not. And if we can't trust him to remember that, how can we possibly trust him to remember whether Marty puffed?
On the other hand, Hitchens does implicitly accept that someone lit up. And if he can't be sure it wasn't him, and nobody has suggested it was the dying Mark Boxer, then it cannot be ruled out that it wasn't Martin Amis.
With ordinary decent God-fearing Christians, you can be reasonably certain they are telling the truth if they swear on their honour, the Bible, or if all else fails, their mother's life. But with Christopher, the only way to check is by a combination of a polygraph test and careful monitoring of the smirk on his face. It isn't that he's an inveterate, incorrigible and congential liar, although for all I know he may well be one, but that is is a consumate one; well-versed in the art and capable of lying both convincingly and without scruple when the occassion arises. And for all we know, his loyalty to Marty may outweigh his loyalty to the truth, even in what seems to outside observers as such a petty matter, while his evident desire to humiliate this woman who has attacked his friend may well have risen to a level that he is happy to lie about her for the sport in it. The problem with Christopher is that you can never put such behaviour beyond the bounds of possibility because he can be a vicious as a rottweiler when it comes to attacking people. In this, he's truly shameless, and that is what's so absolutely shameful.
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Fag-gate fresh revelations: Three literary friends shared same girl
Anna Ford and Mark Boxer: Lucretia Stewart recalls "the initial furore surrounding [their] relationship and the way they would enter a room, like a royal couple."
With the scandal deepening by the day, it's getting hard to keep up with all the sordid developments. But as we've vowed to hunt the Hitch regardless of the terrain, we cannot afford to falter at the first sign or smell of lust, lechery or debauchery.
In previous episodes we've relied on the morally superior centre-left Guardian and the staunchly suburban right-leaning Mail for our leads, but today we are going down into the gutter to pick up some gossip from the Evening Standard, a once respected institution that has, lamentably, turned into a real snot rag of a tabloid and is held in such low regard that they actually have to give it away — and even then people refuse to have their fish 'n' chips wrapped in it.
Any-old-how, in the 21 Feb issue, the ever sporty Lucretia Stewart (an accomplished travel writer and novelist herself) reveals that she personally has - you know!, "done it" - as in "been intimate with", not just Mark Boxer but with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens as well. And Hitch, apparently, got her into this particular milieu:
I can't remember when I first met Martin Amis, and I can't remember if I ever met Anna Ford, though I do recall the initial furore surrounding the relationship between her and Mark Boxer and the way they would enter a room, like a royal couple.
But, peripherally, at any rate, Mark was part of my group, my gang, the people whom I hung out with.
This was principally because I was then great friends with Christopher Hitchens. All the clever New Statesman boys - Martin, Christopher, James Fenton, Julian Barnes - were the ones I wanted to know.
Lucretia also reveals that people have been calling the Hitch "the Hitch" for as long as they have been calling Inspector Morse just "Morse".
Anthony Howard was then the New Statesman's editor - his nickname was Foetus Features; Julian's was Farouche Features; Martin's nickname was Little Keith, after his protagonist in Dead Babies, and Christopher's was The Hitch.
The boys liked hanging out with other boys rather than with girls, laments the luscious Lucretia. "Along with Clive James and Mark Boxer, maybe Craig Raine and Ian McEwan, they would meet for regular weekly lunches, on a Friday, I seem to recall, at restaurants such as the old Bertorelli's in Frith Street. Women were rarely invited or indeed welcome."
Her involvement with the boys began with a chance meeting with Christopher "one evening at dinner at the home of the late David Leitch and his then wife, Jill Neville."
Then comes Lucretia's big bombshell. She had sex with all three of the principal Fag-gate "smokers", but apparently in each case it was very much a Hobbesian affair — nasty, brutish and short:
I think Jill had hoped to fix me up with Christopher, but it didn't take, though we became, over the years, great friends, and through him I met the others. Mark, Martin and Christopher became briefly my lovers but, more importantly, they were my friends.
Anna Ford should take note of this testimony, because depending on the order in which Lucretia had carnal knowledge of these three, there's a very real chance that Anna may have caught some of Hitch's germs.
The way Lucretia tells it, when the prim and proper Anna came onto the scene, she did for "the gang" much the same thing that Yoko Ono did for the Beatles.
There's no way she could have been part of the gang, nor, I suspect, did she ever want to be. Emma Soames came nearest to it - as an honorary chap.
Anna, by contrast, was a feminist, for God's sake, and though Martin isn't as anti-feminist as some people make out, it's not really his thing, nor is it a guy thing, whatever they say (the boys used to make jokes about Ian McEwan being such a feminist that soon he would start suffering from PMT).
Punting on the Cam? This has nothing to do with Ollie Kamm but something that goes on a fair bit up and down the river beneath the Mathematical Bridge at Cambridge. If Hitch was involved in this kind of frivolity, it might go along way towards explaining his dislike for picnics, champagne, lobsters and you know what.
In the early days of her romance with Mark, they were punting on the Cam one day with a group of friends including, I believe, Martin Amis and Clive James. It was a beautiful summer's day; delicious, cool white wine was being drunk; everyone was relaxed, snoozing and enjoying themselves. Suddenly Anna sat bolt upright in the punt, causing it no doubt to rock alarmingly from side to side. "Mark," she said, "what is the history of punting?"
In Lucretia's judgement, the roots of the Amis-Ford spat go back that far. They have been squabbling over a love who is lost to both of them. She concludes with poignancy:
It is always easy to rush to judgment, to say that you know or knew what was going on, but I think that this recent, ridiculous spat (to which Martin wrote a dignified response) is because of a tug-of-war over Mark. And I don't think Martin was doing that much tugging. I have read the piece that he wrote after Mark's death and it was very moving. He had loved Mark. Very much. And Mark's premature demise was a great loss to him.
But, before that, Anna had taken him away. It was a loss that had begun when Mark married Anna and moved to Brentford, a place that before then might only have existed in Mark's cartoons and might have been designed to get Mark away from all he had known and loved before.
The Hitchens-Beast on Freethought Radio the other week:
AG: Have you been doing some debates? I know that you were doing a lot, have you done some recent...
CH: [Interrupting] Oh yes, I mean I do one or two a month, at least.
AG: What's coming up?
CH: Um, I'm just trying to think what the next one is. I have a debate with Rabbi Wolpe, who's one of my favourite liberal, Jewish antagonists, that's in Boston coming up quite soon.
AG: OK, and is there a way for people to check, do you have a website?
CH: I wish, well, [snickers]... I don't really have a proper website, it's annoying. There's a website that monitors me that's run by people who don't like me. [DB and AG laughing] I think it's called Hitchens Watch [more laughing]. And there's another one, amazingly, that's run by people who do like me. I'm really bad at surfing these things. But if it's happening in your area, without being vain [sic], I think I can say that it will get publicized.
This is not the first time that The Fallen One has lashed out at this little ol' blog. At this point we're well within our rights to accuse Hitchens of being a "stalker," but then again, of course if we blurted out something like that the next thing we would know he'd have us all lined up in front of a Grand Jury for the remark (incidentally, NY Times Gilf Maureen Dowd christening Chris as "Snitchens" during the Blumenthal affair alone completely demolishes Hitch's lil' crypto-misogynist "Why Women Are Not Funny" thesis). Ah, the love that dare not speak it's name. It's truly hard to understate how pathologically narcissistic and egomaniacal our Preening One is to be occasionally following a blog like this. Although Hitchens Watch does boast a very elite fan base (so elite in fact that this site's audience is numbered in entire dozens of viewers), you'd be surprised by who actually follows this site from time to time, the very creme de la creme of the online crop.
Note this sneaky "I think it's called Hitchens Watch" he attempts to slip in there without anyone noticing it. Nice try Popinjay. Hitchens should stop being so fucking disingenuous and cease pretending that he doesn't actually know what the name of this website is, "I think." And how dare The Unspeakable One and his minions laugh at us like this, why the mere mention of Hitchens Watch's mighty name should send chills down the spine of our feathered Popinjay and his flock of parroting psittacines. I'm bloody outraged. Just for that, we're going to have to start doubling our Hitchens-Is-A-Drunk jokes. And I even take umbrage with this "run by people who don't like me" bit, as if this site is all about personal attacks and ad hominem. Poppycock from the Popinjay. To the contrary, one of the remarkable things about this blog, and something that we can verily pat ourselves on the back for here, is how clean and bloodless our hands are after having taken on someone as slimy (or "oily" as William Lane Craig described it) as the Hitch-monster. We've managed to skin a Hitch with nary a trace of genuine malice or ad hominem, but strictly on the merits. In fact, I'd even issue a challenge to you, dear readers: You have to name me an act, or statement made, by Hitchens Watch, that was seriously ad hominem or an outright mean-spirited personal attack against that drunk Chris Hitchens. There's a prize in it for you.
And it's rather amusing that CH goes out of his way to explicitly mention Hitchens Watch when his oldest and most devout fanboy website "Hitchens Web" has gotten far more hits than us (it posts the links for his Slate column, I don't know how we'd survive without it), or when there's "Hitch Bitch" (we're still in the process in putting together a frivolous lawsuit to shut it down for copyright infringement and/or plagiarism), his stillborn blog on the Daily Mirror, his derelict "Build Up That Wall" site (which does deserve props for being genuine enough fans to link here), or the new "Daily Hitchens," which looks like it was made by an autistic 12 year-old (another swooning, prepubescent male member of the Hitchens Fan Club toiling away in his mom's basement—Hitch must be so thrilled that this is now his average rank-and-file fan—and indispensably providing us with his vast archive of stale and already ubiquitous Hitchens videos from 2006).
Ouch, what a burn on Chris that arguably his most popular website is one allegedly "run by a nutter and a conspiracy theorist" as Harry's Place has taught us. What an embarrassment for Hitchens.
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Another puff of Fag-gate: Anna calls Martin "a silly little cretin"
Anna Ford examining Martin Amis's acne about half a lifetime ago
Like all great battles, it's not over till its over, and despite showing recent signs of dying down, the spat between the divine Ms Anna Ford and the mundane little tag team of Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens looks like it still has several rounds to go.
Anna, you'll doubtless remember, made a conciliatory gesture in the Guardian (for non-Brits, that's the paper read by people who think they ought to run the country, according to Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister). But it seems this may have merely been a feint while she launched a fresh counterattack on the enfant terrible's reputation in Peter Hitchens's rag, the Daily Mail (read by the wives of the people who run the country).
Anna gave away some tittle tattle at at a reception at Bayswater restaurant Le Cafe Anglais that was picked up by arch tittle-tattler Richard Kay, and it goes well beyond her previous griping about Martin's "immature whingeing narcissism" in the Guardian. For instance:
At the moment all I know is that he is being a silly little cretin,' she tells me. In another spirited salvo, she even suggested his fame sprang from his famous father, Lucky Jim author Kingsley Amis.
Explaining why she had gone on the offensive, she says: 'Look, everyone knows what it's like when there's someone annoying you and you just really want to say: "Excuse me. But who are you to say that?" I think I've made my points to Marty pretty clear. I was outraged by his comments and felt I had to say something and drive home that not everyone wants to listen to his egotistic waffle.'
I'm sure that there are about 58 million people in Britain who will say "Amen" or whatever the non-Christian equivalent is to that last sentiment. But there's more:
In a parting shot at Amis she said: 'I actually don't think he is all that fantastic a writer. Perhaps he is only where he is - and been able to enjoy his opportunities - because of who his father was. But that is just my own opinion and irrelevant to this particular matter.'
So now Fag-gate and its sibling Godfathergate have jumped the corral fence at the Guardian and are beginning to gallop across the pages of Fleet Street's finest tabloids, where it threatens to overshadow Brown's bullying, the Sterling crisis, and even Obama's treacherous betrayal of Britian's stance on the Falklands. How long will it be before the fearless preening popinjay himeslf swoops back in with a blitzkrieg attack on Anna's rear?
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Fag-gate update: Anna lets Amis off hook, blames Hitch for smoking
Ford now admits she wrongly accused the novelist on that [smoking] count. Instead, she agrees, it was Hitchens who "fugged up the room so densely with your 'one cigarette' that I had to open the window". Hitchens owned up to that in his own contribution, in another letter the Guardian.
But she does hit out at Amis and Hitchens for their failure to give support to her when she was widowed, shortly after the sickbed visit in question in 1988. She told the Guardian yesterday that she had received "not a letter, not a thing" from either of them. "Other people helped, but Martin and Christopher – not at all.....
Still, other parts of the letter have a conciliatory tone. Descending to the vernacular, Ford addresses Hitchens and Amis as "Dear chaps".
Hitchens did not hold back in his contribution to the fray. In his letter he called Ford's criticisms "spiteful and false".
Ford has refrained from retaliating in similar terms. She told the Guardian she did not feel bullied by Amis's and Hitchens' co-ordinated counteroffensive: "I don't mind that, because that's what they do." She even said that she feels "a tiny bit sorry for Martin.
It all began on an ordinary Saturday in the Guardian. Marin Amis was sobbing his heart out in the press about how he is unfairly treated in the the press.
"And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, "Why do you do it?" They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It's something the news- papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn't it?"
I read it and winced, along with about a million other guardian.co.uk browsers. "Martin," I thought to myself, "you are in dire need of a skin transplant. Your original epidermis seems to have been totally flayed off." I kept mum, not wishing to increase the sum total of Martin's embarrassment at having written the piece and the Guardian's for having run it. But others less sympathetic than I had different ideas. Among them was the legendary Anna Ford, of TV newscasting fame, who has apparently been nursing a personal grudge against Martin for yonks. She chimed in with a letter accusing Amis of (bad enough) bringing "Chris Hitchens" to the house, (even worse) smoking in the bedroom where her husband lay dying, (worse yet) sliding the visit in before a flight from Heathrow, and (worst of all) playing the absent fairy godfather to her daughter in the subsequent years. Anna's note was short, sharp and admirably succinct:
"Dear Martin Amis, You complain about the "reckless distortions" and "chaotic perceptions" of you in the press (Review, 13 February). You seem bemused, hurt and outraged. Perhaps a closer and more honest look at yourself in relation to others could be one explanation? Two stories from my own experience of you illuminate what I mean.
First, you visited Mark Boxer, my husband, when he was dying. You came with Chris Hitchens. Mark was exhausted because you stayed far too long. You smoked over his bed. I later learned the length of visit was not borne just of affection, but you were filling in time before you caught a plane at Heathrow. You wrote a piece about your feelings and tears as you left. I saw no evidence of these.
Second, Mark asked you to be godfather to our daughter Claire. She was six when he died and when later she was reading English at University said she was studying Martin Amis and did I know anything about him? Oddly enough, I told her, he's your godfather. We invited you to lunch. You paid scant attention to Claire (didn't even cough up the statutory five bob expected from godfathers!) and she hasn't heard from you since.
Can I suggest this level of narcissism and inability to empathise may be at the root of your anger with the press and your need to court attention?"
Wow! Confession time. Back when I used to watch UK TV News, I always loved Anna much more than I did Angela Rippon. And now, reading this note, I feel myself falling all over again. Boy, did she hit the spot!
Not surprisingly, this prompted a retaliatory strike from Martin, by now feeling more hurt than at any time since he had to go through all that excruciatingly painful dental work. Actually, Martin's letter was rather dignified, from a lad's standpoint. He was conciliatory and patronizing by turns and he attempted a plea bargain by admitting being a useless godfather while denying a couple of the lesser charges. It was also brimming with the sort of modern male bondage speak that makes real men reach for the doggie bag.
"As for point 2, you are conflating two separate visits (and I made several such, not only to your house but also to that Tudorbethan hospital in Maida Vale). The visit described in the memoir I wrote about Mark was my final visit. The next morning I was scheduled to fly out with my family for our usual holiday in the US – where, days later, I read Mark's obituary in the New York Times. (Perhaps this is how the "plane to catch" business comes in.) On that occasion I said my last words to him and he said his last words to me, and I remember very clearly what they were. Then I left, and managed to reach my car before I was overwhelmed. (And, for the record, I never smoked a cigarette in Mark's bedroom.)
So I hope you can delete these items, at least, from your overall roster of grievances. And I wonder how it serves Mark's memory, or warms his ghost, to suggest that his two devoted friends (I and Christopher) behaved with such implausible callousness. What sane person "fills in time" at a deathbed? We both loved him, and still mourn him Many did, and many do. He was a powerfully delightful man."
As if all that wasn't enough, the Preening Popinjay popped in to put the boot into Anna and back-up Martin's story, literally word for word. Well that's what literary friends are for, isn't it? Hitch made use of his protean memory to reach back 22 years and recall that Martin definitely hadn't smoked in Boxer's bedroom but he himself might have. Which sounds like a dead giveaway.
"I did indeed accompany Martin Amis on one of the (several) bedside visits he made during Mark Boxer's last illness, and can be quite certain that he abstained from smoking (Letters, 20 February). Conceivably it was I who was the offender, though even in 1988 that could not possibly have been without permission. The same goes for the mean innuendo that any welcome was outstayed (which is in itself incompatible with the hurtful allegation of a swift and heartless "drop-by"): there were persons attending who would have anticipated and cut short any such thing. These lazy but suggestive errors to one side, it is both ungenerous and untrue to doubt, let alone to deny, that the least lachrymose of my friends was more than once overcome with grief at Mark's early death. He told me that after his final call – which was just before he left for America and when Mark had whispered "goodbye" to him – he sat in his car unable to drive away for weeping. (His departure for Heathrow, if it matters, was on the following day.) We both shed further tears when our beloved Mark died not long afterwards."
So there you have it folks, Christopher and Martin are a pair of old softies at heart. And we all know that like George Washington, our Hitch cannot tell a lie, at least not from his own perspective de jour. All of which means Anna is outnumbered two to one, although fortunately the evidence of bestest, bestest literary friends is discounted by 80% in a British court of law—as we aren't under Sharia yet—90% when it is given in such a pompus and priggish vein. Despite his bold-faced denial though, we can demolish his credibility by calling on video evidence of Christopher smoking in public at an event where smoking was prohibited and refusing to put his fag out even after being requested to stop—and that was well into the present century. Christopher continues:
"In recalling this, I feel at least some of the offended propriety of violated discretion that Ms Ford has now managed so cheaply to throw aside. But apparently where Martin is concerned it is now felt that anything goes. To this already-debased cultural free-for-all, she has chosen to add the extra and encouraging thought that – however spiteful and however false – every little bit helps. I don't care to think of what her late husband would have made of this astonishingly late but still nasty slandering of one of his most cherished and devoted friends. As for Ms Ford herself, at least she used to enjoy a slight reputation for throwing only wine."
Well I'm sure we all shudder to think what Christopher's four grandparents would have made of him. But how dare he accuse a lady of slandering in public!? This isn't Sydney Blumenthal he's dealing with now. It's a former newscaster. To bring a bit of objectivity into this spat, few people have total recall and different people's recollections of a given event are liable to differ sharply. Obviously Anna's recollection of the visit differed sharply from Martin and Christopher's joint version. Hitch's "I can be quite certain" cannot be accepted as a statement of fact, as no normal person could be expected to have remembered with certainty that a smoking friend had not smoked a cigarette on an occasion over 20 years previously when his mind would have been elsewhere and he couldn't even remember whether he had smoked or not. So the fact that he made this affirmation at all indicates that nothing he says about the visit can be accepted at face value. Add to this the fact that he has a reputation (at least around this corner of the blogosphere) for being a serial distorter of the truth, and it becomes very easy to see our Hitch as far more of a fabulist than Anna. If his interjection was an attempt to help Martin set the record straight, it will probably have the opposite effect.
But why is the Guardian filling its webpages with this crap? Are they really that desperate to take the public's mind away from Climategate or are they simply trying to titillate their audience without flashing any actual titties?
One last link, this time to Hadley Freeman, who sums up Hitch's performance as:
"And now, inevitably, the famously shy and retiring violet Christopher Hitchens has lowered his quivering form into the mudbath to sling some slime around and argue over who felt genuine grief when Ford's husband died. If anyone out there senses the fragrance of Eau de Deja Vu, it's because you are conflating this hoo-ha with that other recent public debate between Brown and Cameron, who were somehow advised to appear on TV to compete over who felt the most grief for their deceased children."
Part 2 of a post on Christopher's criticisms of Amnesty International
Here's what AI is saying about its work with Begg and Cageprisoners:
"There has been a lot of controversy in the media surrounding Amnesty International’s work with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, in light of statements by Gita Sahgal, an Amnesty International staff member.
Contrary to Gita Sahgal’s assertions to the media, she was not suspended from Amnesty International for raising these issues internally. In fact, we actively welcome vigorous internal debate. Up to now we have maintained confidentiality in line with our policy but wanted to correct this misrepresentation. This is not a reflection of the organisation’s respect for her work as a women’s rights activist and does not undermine the work she has done over the last few years as the head of Amnesty International’s gender unit.
Our work with Moazzam Begg has focused exclusively on highlighting the human rights violations committed in Guantánamo Bay and the need for the US government to shut it down and either release or put on trial those who have been held there. Moazzam Begg was one of the first detainees released by the US without charge, and has never been charged with any terrorist-related offence or put on trial.
When President Obama promised to close Guantánamo, Amnesty International hoped that we could wind down our campaign and focus more broadly on human rights abuses related to security and terrorism. However, as that promise remains unmet, Amnesty International continues to work with Moazzam Begg and other former detainees to ask European governments to accommodate those who cannot be returned to their country of citizenship without risk of torture or ill-treatment.
In this complex and polarised world, we at Amnesty International face the challenge of communicating clearly the scope of our work with individuals and groups. Amnesty International champions and continues to champion Moazzam Begg’s rights as a former detainee at Guantánamo. He speaks about his own views and experiences, not Amnesty International’s. And Moazzam Begg has never used a platform he shared with Amnesty to speak against the rights of others.
Amnesty International has a long history of demanding justice – in the case of our Counter Terror with Justice Campaign we called for both an end to human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other locations, and called for those detained there to be brought to justice, in fair trials that respected due process.
However, our work for justice and human rights spans a far wider range of issues than counter-terrorism and security. Amnesty International has done considerable research on the Taleban and campaigns to stop violence against women and to promote women’s equality. We continue to take a strong line against abuses by religiously-based insurgent groups and/or governments imposing religious strictures, Islamic or otherwise, in violation of human rights law. Sometimes the people whose rights we defend may not share each other's views – but they all have human rights, and all human rights are worth defending."
In a by now notorious 2005 column in Slate, Hitchens piled into Amnesty International on account of its opposition to the Bush administration’s treatment of alleged terrorists incarcerated at Guantanamo and elsewhere because he felt AI had moved away from its original stance (“no overt political position was to be taken”) and he objected to the organization’s description of the US detainee camp system as “the gulag of our times”, which most other observers felt was quite a poetic way of putting things. In the course of that screed, he revealed his true feelings about common humanity, fundamental human rights and justice for all. I’ve quoted this before but it bears repeating as one of the all-time most memorable Hitchicisms, right up there with “No child’s behind left!” and “Don’t be such a lesbian!”
"I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion."
Safe it may well have been, even though the friends of the Guantánamo detainees are less forgiving than the friends of Mother Teresa, But it was actually very far from the truth. Many of the prisoners sent to Guantánamo were innocent people who were either picked up in the wrong place at the wrong time or else taken away because somebody else expressed the opinion that they were enemy combatants, regardless of whether they were guilty of anything, as was doubtless known by Hitchens at the time. As Andy Worthington, author of The Guántanamo Files, comments.
"There was no process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff — or the fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.
In Afghanistan, however, not only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were processed, noted in his book The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo, on the orders of senior figures in the military and the intelligence services, who received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait."
In weighing up Hitchens’s charges against Amnesty, we should also to bear in mind whether he himself has been anywhere near as assiduous at campaigning for human rights as they have and whether he has been as faithful to his youthful ideals as AI has been. To take the second point first, the record shows Christopher to be no stranger to personal or political treason. Those of us who have followed his career can point to an impressive list of what can fairly be called betrayals of people and things he had once been loyal to, sort of, so it ill becomes him to accuse others of straying from their principles. As for the first point, where was Christopher when George W. Bush and his menagerie of obsequious officials, jaundiced judges and castrated congress critters began mowing down great swaths of the US Constitution and the common law wherever it interfered with their power-grabbing plans? Where was his outcry when they suspended habeas corpus and decided they could ignore the Geneva Conventions? What kind of protest did he make about the show trial of John Walker Lindh — now serving 20 years for being in the Taliban at a time when the Bushies decided to bury them under a carpet of bombs rather than of gold, or of José Padilla — who was held under truly gulag-like conditions that included torture and solitary confinement in a Kafkaesque legal maze for several years before any formal charges were brought against him?
When the Empire was busily dismantling the Republic, we all know where Hitchens was and what he was saying, and anyone who’s interested can read all about it in the pages of Slate. When human rights were being trampled under foot by the most hubristic American government since the one headed by George III, the only prisoner of conscience whose rights I can remember Christopher championing was Irve Lewis Libby.
In a way, the attacks he is making against Amnesty International echo those he made against Mother Teresa, who also ran a goody goody organization that, like AI, that had a few warts but was basically doing good in the world. The torrent of bile on that occasion prompted Alex Cockburn to write, “Between the two of them, my sympathies were with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Calcutta, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?'" Today our sympathies should be firmly with Amnesty. If you were locked in a filthy dungeon, no sun to light your morning, who do you think would be more likely to lobby your jailers for a double ration of lumpy porridge?
At base, Amnesty International is all about working for amnesty, meaning the alleviation of unjust treatments and punishments including torture and the death penalty, which for humanists are unjust in any circumstances. We may not always agree with how AI operates, who it cooperates with, or on whose behalf it seeks amnesty, but in the interests our common welfare and our common humanity, we should all be giving this plucky little organization our moral if not our material support. And for this reason, Hitchens's call for AI's supporters to withhold their support for AI over a partisan issue is not just shameful, it is truly wicked.
Apologies to all resplendent, serious and dedicated Watchers for my extended absence. The combination of the death of a good friend and a massive increase in an already stupid number of flights has knocked me for a six. I thought I might just put my toe back in the water with this break from the seriousness of previous posts.
What if Hitchens is remembered for the Ass Lobster? Our Chris is a prolific writer, since his relocation to the states he has particularly been seeking recognition for the gravitas of his writing. His writing on religion, while theologically shallow, are strident calls to the non-faithful. But I invite you all to imaging a future when Hitchens claim to fame is as the source for an Internet meme. Behold... I present you with the Ass Lobster.
This, through the weird process that is Internet blogs, has developed via the legal blogs area (who knew?) into a specific meme cited in no less than the Urban Dictionary. While the initial premise may be flawed, (I have never met an individual I couldn't seduce on a picnic) and the final term may be irredeemably sexist, it tickles me to imagine the new doyen of British superiority in the US literary world becoming associated with crustacean / human sex. Maybe it's just me?
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What's so unconscionable about supporting human rights?
Part 1 of a post on Christopher's criticisms of Amnesty International
Reading Christopher's latest Slate piece, Suspension of Conscience — Amnesty International has lost sight of its original purpose, I found myself gently nodding in agreement with some of his sentiments. And with Hitch that's always dangerous, because he always has an ulterior motive. But his latest column is certainly an excellent piece of propaganda, finely crafted and well aimed — the aim being to get AI to stop collaborating with the folks protesting the gruesome goings on at US-run concentration camps and thereby deprive the latter of perceived legitimacy. The method is to shame AI into cutting its ties with a group called Cageprisoners by shaming AI's members into cutting their ties with AI. It's all fairly standard Decent guilt-by-association stuff, although that by itself would not be reason enough to condemn it.
The idea that Amnesty International has lost sight of its original purpose is rather old hat by now. I can speak from personal experience here, because in my younger and more enthusiastic days I was an AI member first in Britain and later in Japan. Like about a million other people I used to subscribe to the Monthly Newsletter, although after the first few years, like most of those people, I found it increasingly difficult to read through the tales of torture, oppression, injustice and sheer unmitigated suffering that pervaded its pages. All that notwithstanding, I used to religiously fill in the pre-printed postcards or write brief letters and mail them off to President Somosa, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Zia, Botha, Mbuto, orsome other Third-World luminary, saying something along the lines of:
"Messsrs the SLORC: Your Excellencies, I am writing on behalf of Mr. Sum Pore Fukk, who has been imprisoned for life on charges of sedition and drawing moustaches and glasses on posters of several of Your Excellencies' faces. It is my understanding that Mr. Fukk is being imprisoned solely as a consequence of the exercise of his right to freedom of expression, a fundamental right guaranteed under international law. I hereby, therefore, respectfully request that Sum Pore Fukk be released from confinement forthwith and be allowed to return to the loving arms of his dear white-haired old mother. Yours, etc., etc."
I'm sure you can imagine the effect such epistles had on the great leaders who received them. They must have generated hours of hilarious laughter and they may have even contributed to the amnestying of a few of those unfortunate caged prisoners too.
But times changed, and Amnesty International changed with the times. I had been working as a volunteer translator for the Japan Branch for several years when in 1996 or thereabouts I received a request to translate free-of-charge a rather massive amount of PR literature, itinerary schedules, etc., for a Hong Kong-based pop group who were coming over for a Japan tour. "Why," I asked the AI office, "should I be expected to devote several days of unpaid labor merely to support a commercial concert tour?" The answer that came back was that the group sang songs about peace and democracy, and AI wanted to give them publicity and support in the run-up to the handover of HK to the Chinese. This was, of course, something that went well beyond AI's remit as an organization that campaigned for the amnesty of people imprisoned on grounds of "conscience". So from time that I personally drifted away from the organization.
Looking back, I think this voyage of AI into new areas was plotted by people who had infiltrated the organization in order to blunt its effectiveness and eventually emasculate it as a political force for real change. Much the same thing happened to Greenpeace at much the same time, and the same fate is visited upon many organizations that start out radical and threaten the status quo.
A second major disappointment for me came in the present decade, when AI steadfastly refused to support the rights of people imprisoned in Europe under laws criminalizing the questioning of the Holocaust. The best-known example was Christopher's good friend and historian of fascism David Irving ("mad, bad and dangerous to know") who was jailed in Austria in 2005 for expressing certain proscribed opinions 17 years earlier, although dozens of lesser-known people have suffered a similar plight. AI remains deaf to the fact that most of these people are simply political prisoners who are sincere in their views and following the dictates of their consciences.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her fellow democrats who are being persecuted in Burma are considered worthy subjects for adoption by AI, even though they have gone beyond exercising freedom of expression and attempted to take power by threatening the Burmese regime with, horror of horrors, democratic action. Likewise, Nelson Mandela and his fellow ANC freedom fighters in South Africa were deemed prisoners of conscience by AI, even though many of them had been involved in acts of sabotage and violence. However, David Irving and his fellow "Holocaust denialists" fall outside of AI's remit because they are judged to have advocated hatred, as Marie-Anne Ventoura of AA UK has explained comprehensively:
"Amnesty International's position on the issue of 'Holocaust denial' is based on international human rights standards. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states, in Article 19, that everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression, but that certain restrictions may be placed on that right if they are necessary for the respect of the rights of others; Article 20 states that any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.
In line with this and other international human rights standards, Amnesty International works for the right to free expression and adopts as prisoners of conscience people who are imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of expression, however it will not adopt as prisoners of conscience people who are imprisoned for using hate speech to deliberately or recklessly incite acts of violence, discrimination, or hostility against another group.
The language used to advocate hatred is not always explicit or direct. Sometimes it uses euphemisms which, over the years, become well known, such as denying the occurrence of the Holocaust and thereby alleging that the extensive documentation of the Holocaust is fraudulent and that its victims are lying. Since Jews, Roma, gay persons, and disabled persons were the principal victims of the Holocaust and are still subject to discrimination, this can constitute advocacy of hatred and an incitement to discrimination and hostility against those groups.
In line with its normal practice, when applying the policy to individual cases, AI considers each case on its own merit. In cases where it determines that an individual who has been imprisoned for denying the Holocaust has, in effect, advocated hatred as described above, AI would not adopt them as prisoners of conscience. This is the reason why we will not adopt David Irving as a prisoner of conscience."
Evidently AI will now decide whether or not a prisoner of conscience deserves their porridge. And in Irving's case, they conclude that he did. Charming! But at least Christopher had the guts to stand up in public and say Irving should not have been imprisoned for his views. I admire him for that, even if there is an element of life insurance involved. Because if Christopher were ever imprisoned on account of his views, say by the North Koreans for calling them a nation of racist dwarfs, I wouldn't give a lot for his chances of getting adopted by AI as he has used a fair among of "language used to advocate hatred" in his time.
Having said all this, I still think that AI remains a force for good in the world, although in terms of its principles, it is a mere shadow of its original incarnation back in 1961, when its founders could unabashedly quote Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than falling back on the mealy-mouthed subjunctive clauses of the ICCPR.
"The campaign, which opens to-day, is the result of an initiative by a group of lawyers, writers and published in London, who share the underlying conviction expressed by Voltaire: "I detest your views, but am prepared to die for your right to express them." We have set up an office in London to collect information about the names, numbers, and conditions of what we have decided to call "Prisoners of Conscience;" and we define them thus: "Any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence." We also exclude those people who have conspired with a foreign government to overthrow their own. Our office will from time to time hold Press conferences to focus attention on Prisoners of Conscience selected impartially from different parts of the world. And it will provide factual information to any group, existing or new, in any part of the world, which decides to join in a special effort in favor of freedom of opinion or religion."
Hitchens has accused AI of losing sight of its original purpose, and to some extent I agree. But that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with him that AI should not be working with Cageprisoners. I see no obvious moral reason why AI should not be drawing attention to the concentration camp attrocities that have taken place at Guantanamo Bay and points east as a major plank of Hitchens's Glorious War, just because he has not seen fit to acknowedge them. As we've all come to know over the years, with the Hitch the fix is always in, and on this occasion, he is working in parallel with his son Alexander Melegarou Hitchens of the Centre for Social Cohesion (whatever that's supposed to mean), who seems intent on acting as an attack dog in pursuit of a political witchhunt against Moazzam Begg in Standpoint among other places. Not a very pleasant profession for a young man,I'll grant, but it must be extremely gratifying for Christopher to have his son following him into the business.
We've all read the book. Now lets see the film. Thanks to an online dude going by the name of MuggedByReality we now have an hour of young (well, 43-ish) Christopher at his most cherubic being interviewed on CSPAN by Brian Lamb on October 17, 1993.
In this first segment, he talks about his former editor, the historian Mad Paul "Spanker" Johnson, and the conversation is very convivial. The bit that struck me as prophetic in view of Hitch's own Road to Damascus moment (or was he visited by too many spirits one Christmas Eve?) is where he says this:
He's a cult on the American right. He used to be my editor at a British leftist liberal magazine called the New Statesman, once a very famous weekly review where we both worked. And he's probably the classic instance of the guy who having lost his faith believes that he's found his reason. In other words, a defector.
Did Christopher have any faith of his own in those days? And could that faith perchance have been Trotskyism? The question is interesting because today not only does he deny having any faith of his own, he also denies that faith has any positive aspects at all. In other words, an infidel.
Hitchens goes on to justify his lampooning Johnson's private life in his essay "The Life of Johnson" by explaining that he didn't like Johnson's lampooning of the private lives of the intellectuals he mocked in his book Intellectuals. This, I think was a bit of richly deserved tit for tat for Johnson, a bullying of the bully, which Christopher underlines by quoting that well known motto of English schoolboy fairness: "Tackle the ball, not the man."
Also in this interview, Christopher explains where that photo from the cover of For the Sake of Argument comes from, and he enthusiastically recommends everybody, but everybody to read P.G. Wodehouse.
In case you missed it, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (triple threat) has now thoroughly defended himself and Gore Vidal against Hitch’s VF attack. Vanity Fair would only publish a tiny fraction of Ahmed’s letter, so he sent the whole thing off to an accommodating editor at the UK’s Independent. Ahmed frets:
Hitchens displays a chronic contempt for simple matters of fact and evidence.
I know. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? HW has been hollering about this unpleasant scenario for about 5 years now. I think we like having him around, though: it’s fun having a human pinata at the ready. And he never fights us back, as he’s adopted a ‘better to ignore’ strategy. So we just keep whaling on the pig. Ahmed continues, explaining:
The inadequacy of the 9/11 Commission investigation...is an open secret to many intelligence experts. In the words of 27-year CIA veteran and former Chairman of the National Intelligence Estimate Ray McGovern, ‘The 9/11 report is a joke’. The question is: What’s being covered up? Is it gross malfeasance, gross negligence? Now there are a whole bunch of unanswered questions.’
Some people would describe this sort of talk as Truther blathering. I describe it something more like skeptical people asking questions. It is often said that there are two different types of "truthers", and apparently someone has even assigned acronyms for them. There’s the LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) crowd and the MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose) set. But isn’t there at least a third category of critics? For example, those of us who say that we’re not exactly sure who was behind the attack and why, but we don’t buy the 9/11 Commission, and we still have many questions and points of concern. I think that would describe Ahmed as well (not to mention a significant minority of Americans, and a majority of the world’s population), though I am not familiar with his work beyond his letter in The Independent. I guess we’re all simply easier to smear if you shove of us into those two narrow categories.
Here, Ahmed gets off what is perhaps his best line (though there are many to choose from) and an important one for our, um, purposes:
His [Hitch’s] screed on Gore Vidal is merely yet another example of Hitchens’s escalating propensity to project his own increasingly vast distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering.
Neatly summarized. I could quote more of Ahmed’s piece, but instead, I urge you to go read it yourself. Read it and weep, Decents. By the way, I think Greywolf deserves a hat tip for being the first to spot Hitch’s hypocrisy on two fronts (also addressed by Ahmed): (a) asserting that Vidal is off his rocker when he says the United States has become a banana republic (Hitch wrote the same damn thing last year), and (b) asserting Vidal is a "crackpot" for saying FDR let Pearl Harbor happen, even though Hitch has previously backed equally shocking conspiracy theories such as the Lusitania was "deliberately put at risk" (aka, sunk) by Churchill.
Moving on, there’s something else I need to get off my chest. Hitch’s article inspired me to buy Vidal’s massive collection of essays, United States: Essays 1952-1992. Apart from the pure pleasure of reading and re-reading these articles, they reinforce my belief that Vidal hasn’t changed in the way Hitchens described (“He has descended straight to the cheap...”). Nonsense. Firstly, “cheap shot” is not a cliche Hitchens of all people should be using to try to denigrate others - how does he not realize this, even in the delusional condition he’s in? Vidal was always ruthless with his opponents and use of invective and sarcasm. Sample:
“[Midge] Decter is in full cry. Fags are really imitation women. Decter persists in thinking that same-sexers are effeminate, swishy, girlish. It is true that a small percentage of homosexualists are indeed effeminate, just as there are effeminate heterosexualists. I don’t know why this is so. No one knows why. Except Decter. (“Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” -1981)
In 1992, Robert Boyers published an arguably effective or at least very well-written critique (though I think far too narrow) of Vidal for Jay Parini’s compilation of essays about Vidal - Writer Against the Grain. In it, he accuses Vidal of relying on cheap shots to go after his adversaries. Boyers cites Vidal articles from the 1970s as evidence. I don’t agree with Boyers‘ article (and I’ve written critically of it elsewhere) but I enjoy reading it. It’s sort of a gift that keeps on giving because it’s an exercise in good faith that unintentionally entertains, as the author repeatedly misses Vidal’s jokes.
Anyway, as Ahmed also notes, it is Hitch who has seriously changed, and that’s why he doesn’t like Vidal anymore. Plain and simple. Right-wingers have always thought Vidal was crazy, especially after he nailed Buckley as a “crypto-Nazi” (talk about a gift that keeps on giving - that wonderful clip). “The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt” published by Vidal in 1973 is a stellar bit of book reviewing that can also be interpreted as a grand exercise in “conspiracy theorizing” or however it is right-wingers and other varieties of do-gooders try to knock those who dare question major events in history. Was JFK killed via a government conspiracy? You better believe it (a view shared by Hitchens as well, btw, or at least it used to be). Vidal:
The only Cuban group that would be entirely satisfied by Kennedy’s death would be the right-wing enemies of Castro who held Kennedy responsible for their humiliation at the Bay of Pigs. To kill him would avenge their honor. Best of all, setting Oswald up as a pro-Castro, pro-Moscow agent, they might be able to precipitate some desperate international crisis that would serve their cause.
On the other hand, conservatives would probably enjoy his magnificent takedown of the Kennedys, “The Holy Family,” published in 1967. It’s stunningly impressive and proves that conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination do not only emanate from naive Kennedy hagiographers. (I’ve never understood this “criticism” - I didn’t know anything about JFK’s politics when I decided he was certainly killed via some sort of conspiracy, admittedly, after I watched Oliver Stone’s JFK.) A treat from “The Holy Family”:
Not until the second year of his administration did it become plain that Kennedy was not about to do much of anything. Since his concern was so much with the appearance of things, he was at his worst when confronted with those issues where a moral commitment might have informed his political response not only with passion but with shrewdness. Had he challenged the Congress in the Truman manner on such bills as Medicare and Civl Rights, he might have at least inspired the country, if not the Congress, to follow his lead.
One great thing about reading “The Holy Family” is that like many Vidal essays it doubles as an indictment of our entire political system and our contemporary “liberal” leaders (Clinton, Obama). A bunch of lousy liars who invariably sell out the left on almost every count. As the revelations keep coming out about poor John Edwards, I often wish he had won the race, because at least his presidency would’ve been interesting. (Remember when he decided it’d be politically expedient to start attacking “the neocons” in the debates? Those were hopeful times.)
Bright liberal feminist terrorist kills three colleagues in Alabama
Academia nut goes postal in college staffroom
White gunwoman shoots dead three dark-skinned professors on deep South campus
Three dead, three injured as tenure dispute settled with mass shooting
Evil evolutionist illustrates "selfish gene" hypothesis by eliminating rivals
The possible headline permutations are literally endless. A chick in Huntsville has gone off bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And much of the world wants to know why. She wasn't male. She wasn't black. She wasn't poor or underprivileged. She doesn't even appear to be a member of Al Qaeda. Does this mean that from now on, Homeland Security is going to have to profile all white chicks and all academics as potential terrorists?
More to the point for us Hitchwatchers, is our boy going to characterize this as (a) a terrorist attack mounted by a woman exhibiting "the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type". namely: "self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred", as in the case of the lone gunman of Fort Hood, or as (b) "a non-story" followed by "an orgy of mawkishness, sloppiness, and false sentiment"? I guess that depends on whether or not he can manage to tie the shooter in with any of his usual hate figures.
But what's sauce for the Muslims is surely sauce for the feminists, the evolutionists, the academic leftists, and the whatever-else-Dr. Bishop-turns-out-to-be-into-ists, nez pas?
To give a bit of background, as numerous media have been reporting, Harvard-educated neuroscientist.geneticist Dr. Amy Bishop, working as a biology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has been charged with murdering three of her colleagues a faculty meeting.
Local media said the shooting happened after Dr. Bishop found out she had been denied academic tenure, while the University announced that the three killed were the head of the Biology Department and two professors Gopi K. Podila, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. Three other members of the Department were also injured, with two of them in critical condition.
Had Amy been a real bishop wearing a ridiculous party hat, or better still, a veiled Muslim named Fatima with a beard like a billy goat's, we can all imagine the relish with which Christopher would have linked her antics to the demonic nature of religion, which, as we all know by now, poisons everything.
However, all is not well in the Kingdom of Knowledge where Reason rules, Superstition sucks, and the Brights twinkle dazzlingly. For besides being a Harvard graduate, a Yankee in Dixie, an evolutionary biologist in the Bible Belt and a chick in a dick's world, Amy turns out to be a married mother of four who did not take her husband's surname, as well as a research scientist, an inventor, and an inspiring biology teacher. Indeed, there are reports that, just like our preening popinjay, she enjoys nothing more than helping out members of the clergy with any questions they have related to evolution.
• This class was great. Bishop makes the class interesting by talking about her research and her friends research. That speaker she had for class was hard to understand but smart. She expects a lot and you need to come to every class and study. She is hot but she tries to hide it. And she is a socialist but she only talks about it after class.
Another says:
• This prof is absolutely the bomb! Knows her stuff cold, and quick witted too. Never met anyone who knows more random knowledge. Sci-fi to quantum mechanics with a little art history thrown in the mix. Who knew? Definitely take one of her courses!
Sounds like an ideal dinner companion for Hitchy. Some more:
• Dr. Bishop is a great teacher! She talks about the stuff in the book but then she talks about extra stuff like diseases. This makes the class fun. She's super smart and thinks everyone else is too so sometimes she goes too fast.
• Mrs Bishop was totally awesome! She made this class fun and entertaining with her great sense of humor. She is always willing to help, and is great at working with students. I highly recommend this teacher!!
• brilliant & hot
And finally:
• Dr. Bishop is brilliant. Her research is fascinating. She will surely get the Nobel Prize. She is the best teacher I have ever had.
However, the site's apparently been sanitized. A commenter on City Brights say:
went through that website last night and studied the comments. I am going to tell you the truth. Yes, I'm conservative, but I will give you the absolute truth...so help me god!
60% of the comments that were not "under review" were positive. Mostly pre 2007 comments called her good things. Since then, the majority, and the remaining 40% called her bad things or said they were indifferent.
Now, here's why this author decided to decieve you. Three seperate commentors called her a SOCIALIST/LIBERAL!!! One said."She's a socialist and she lets you know about it!" Another said, "What starts out as a neuroscience class turns into a bioethics class. She has certain opinions about things, and foists those opinions on you." Yet another said, "She's a liberal from HAAAVVADDD and is a complete waste of resources! She just goes through the book and tells you to study everything. I could do that from home!"
This woman was, supposedly, a world class, Harvard trained, geneticist and apparently she felt that she was being grossley under-valued. However, when you review ALL comments, she was obviously lacking in the "people" category.
But hold the presses, there is an entirely different face to Amy that is beginning to emerge. Apparently, 24 years ago when she was a teenager in Massachusetts, Ms Bishop, now 42, shot dead her 18-year-old brother, an accomplished violinist, pumping not just one but three bullets into him. And she was Bright enough to get away with that little escapade Scot free, as we English love to say. I wonder how she managed that?
As the Beeb has it:
At a news conference in her former hometown of Braintree, Police Chief Paul Frazier said the biology professor had killed her brother in 1986. It was reported as being an accident at the time, but he said officers who were serving then had told him that Ms Bishop shot the young man after an argument and fled the scene before being arrested at gunpoint. Mr Frazier alleged she was never charged after the then police chief, John Polio, or someone acting on his behalf, intervened and told officers to release Ms Bishop. He added that detailed records of the incident had been missing for more than 20 years.
CBS has lots of tidbits on the story, including:
"Workplace shootings of that kind are overwhelmingly male," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and director of violence prevention at the University of California, Berkeley. "Going postal was essentially a monopoly position of the XY chromosome." One of the victims in Friday afternoon's shooting described Bishop as "not being able to deal with reality," according to the victim's husband. Sammie Lee Davis, whose wife Maria Ragland Davis was killed at a faculty meeting, said his wife also described Bishop as "not as good as she thought she was."
Pharyngula has covered the story by emphasizing the stresses academics have to go through and expressing his horror at the tremendous loss of "Good people with years of training and years of productivity ahead of them, with families and loved ones left behind, all wiped out in a flash of insanity, and leaving a body of students who are going to be scarred by this one awful event" before going on to criticize ease of access to handguns as a great social evil, without stopping to think how much safer things would be if everybody entered faculty meetings armed with a loaded Colt45.
Also, as one of his commenters has noticed, the perpetrator was white, just like Hitchy, and most of her victims are brown-skinned, just like Hitchy's. Remember he recently offended 20-odd million North Koreans by referring to them as "a nation of racist dwarfs", which is illiterate as the correct plural is "dwarves", as anyone who prefers Tolkien to Alan Bloom will tell you. It's also inaccurate as the North Koreans are actually a nation of midgets. They are smaller on average than most other East Asians (due to a decade or so of famine in the 1990s), but are otherwise normally proportioned, more so, indeed, than is Hitchens, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Incredible Hulk.
Abel Pharmboy has some info on Dr. Bishop's active NIH R15 AREA award and the cell culture incubator and software package she and her husband were developing:
She and her husband had also developed a proprietary cell culture incubator and software package called the InQ cell culture system that won a local $25,000 entrepreneurial prize in 2007 and launched a company called Prodigy Biosystems. Their webpage is only a shell but local reports indicate that Prodigy had raised $1.2 million in funding around the technology. However, the state economic development enterprise, Alabama Launchpad, reported that the product launch had been scheduled for the October Society of Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
And lastly, Amy Bishop's Profile at UAH (2007) Looks like this story is going to run and run. It is, OF COURSE, a terrible tragedy for all the individuals it has touched. But as a current social event, it is bound to get chewed over ad nauseum, and for Hitchwatchers the main thing is to watch how he spins it. I'm not sure how he is going to dig up a religious connection at the bottom of it, but it will be a lot of fun watching him try.
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The Silence of the Hitch: Why is his outrage against child sex abuse so selective?
We all know that Christopher Hitchens is an unflinching opponent of child abuse. Well, don't we? Why, of course we do! And how's that? Because, ordinary innate Decent moral repugnance apart, he has taken such great pains to show us how deeply pained he is about it. Here's a recent example of the extent of his angst:
He's outraged at the death of a young girl forced into marriage with a man three times her age, made pregnant and then dying during labour. That the girl and the man who married her were Muslims and that they lived in Yemen is besides the point, surely. But is it? Let's examine Hitch's record of speaking out about child abuse, sexual or otherwise, to see if it's consistent with the claim that he is opposed to child abuse, sexual or otherwise, at all times, or whether he only voices his opposition when it suits his agenda.
Hitch is absolutely adamant in his condemnation of female genital mutilation, most especially when performed by Muslims, except of course when the perpetrators just happen to be Kurdish, assumedly because to break his self-imposed silence of the Kurdish lambs would undermine his absolute support for the people he likes to refer to as "the secular Kurds", and not because of any particular fondness for what might, under Hitchens's rather elastic idea of secularism, be termed SKFGM (Secular Kurdish Female Genital Mutilation). So how real is his concern? Could it be that in the mind of this inveterate ideologue, the needs of young Kurdish girls to be free from the excruciating pain and trauma of having their clit slit must take a back seat to the need to bolster the reputation of Kurdistan as a political entity that can serve his masters in their Middle East strategy? If so, that would be shameful.
Who in their right mind wouldn't be against female genital mutilation? But strangely, Hitch condemns it as an Islamic practice although only a small minority of Muslim women worldwide experience it. Meanwhile, he is guilty of an epic failure to highlight it as a Kurdish practice although a majority of women in Iraqi Kurdistan have been genitally mutilated and the "Axis of Evil" governments of Baathist Iraq and Islamic Iran both worked actively to eliminate it.
Hitch is steadfast in his denunciation of the religious education of children as "child abuse", so much so that he has sent his own daughter to a Quaker school, where I understand that they teach the evil doctrines of pacifism and faith in providence, and that the inmates are forced to engage in the ritual of silent worship every morning followed by a breakfast of cold, lumpy Quaker Oats with no sugar. In sending his child to such an institution, does he not reveal himself a child abuser par excellence by his own corrugated standards? If so, that would be ironic.
When it comes to the long-established traditional custom of child marriage that is still rather widespread in the backwaters of the Islamic world, it's best not to get him started unless you want to see a grown man foaming at the mouth in a fit of apparently genuine outrage. However, when it comes to "our friends the Indians", his tune changes to a medley of something beginning with "Hello darkness my old friend" by Simon & Garfunkel and something lasting 4 minutes and 33 seconds by John Cage. According to a report from UNICEF in 2009, 40% of the world's child marriages occur in India and 47% of Indian women aged between 20 and 24 were married before reaching the legal age of 18. But as most of these marriages are between Hindus, and Hitch is intent on making whoopee with the Hindus to get them to fight against the Muslims of Pakistan in order to further the cause of liberating Muslims from their cultural bondage, the cause of liberating Hindu women from their cultural bondage natural has to be left simmer on the back burner. Is Hitchens's lack of advocacy against child marriage practiced by Hindus in India a reflection of his lack of concern about the plight of Hindu child brides? If so, that would be contemptible.
Then there is Hitch's well known evangelical crusade against child abuse in the West by members of the Catholic clergy, which could fairly be described as "No Claim Left Unsupported and No Clergyman Left Un-defrocked". Follow Hitchens's dogged pursuit of the papist pedophiles and their protectors and you'd be forgiven for thinking that levels of child rape and molestation were higher in Church institutions than they are in State ones or in American homes or society at large, which is a doubtful proposition to say the least. It is outrageous that priests have been indulging in perversions with minors and that their superiors have been perverting the cause of justice. How can someone as ostensibly concerned about the suffering of little children as our preening popinjay claims to be go on, year after year, ignoring the many other forms of child sexual abuse going on in his adopted country? Could it be that for Christopher, the problem of gangsters, pimps, politicians, policemen, businessmen, truck drivers and departmental managers at Walmart on their evenings off preying on children is as meaningless and inconsequential as the shootings at Virginia Tech? Could it be that the only time he's concerned about pedophile fathers is when they are wearing dog collars? If so, that would be despicable.
Forced prostitution, sexual slavery, trafficking and other horrendous forms of child abuse are rampant in the United States today. And yet Christopher seldom if ever has a word to say about this abuse — unless he can find a way of linking it to the Catholic clergy. But surely, if you are not equally vocal against all forms of child abuse, you are not unequivocally against child abuse at all?
So as a moral agent of a sort myself, I must ask, why so much outrage, so well well thought out and so aggressively expressed in public fora about child abuse WHEN THE PERPETRATORS HAPPEN TO BE MEMBERS OF GROUPS HITCHENS WANTS TO DEMONIZE, WHILE SIMILAR INSTANCES of child abuse PERPETUATED BY MEMBERS OF OTHER GROUPS ARE NOT GIVEN EQUAL COVERAGE? Where is Hitchens' outrage about Kurdish FGM, about Hindu child marriage, and, most tellingly, about child abuse that takes place daily in the West and outside of Catholic orphanages, including most of all in the good old US of A on an industrial scale?
USA! USA! How many kids did you pimp today?
Report: US Kids Forced Into Ohio Labor, Sex By Matt Leingang, AP (Link)
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- About 1,000 American-born children are forced into the sex trade in Ohio every year and about 800 immigrants are sexually exploited and pushed into sweatshop-type jobs, a new report on human trafficking in the state said Wednesday....
A thousand American kids every year in just one of the 50 states forced to become sex slaves — That adds up to an awful lot of home-grown child sexual abuse. This is organized, commercialized, industrialized Satanism on a scale that makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like a tea party. And after all these years of living among it, Hitchens can't smell what's going on all around him nor make any effort to protest it? As Sir Thomas More argued cogently in A Man for All Seasons, "The maxim is "Qui tacet consentiret": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent".
“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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