So, Htichens goes on "Real Time" and pounds the Pope. Bill Maher becomes another in a long line of mainstream media Quasimotos; fleeing any accountability for his crimes, Hitch finds endless sanctuary in The Church. Child molestation is the ultimate taboo, what a devastating point! How relevant! I mean, it's not like child abuse accusations have ever been carelessly tossed about ruining the lives of innocent people. It's not like the very mention of the crime affords the professional scold an easy applause line. It's not like Hitchens will ever have to see the corpses of the Iraqi Children he encouraged George W Bush to blow to bits.
Well, maybe we should thank reason for small favors, at least it saved us from too much plugging of "Hitch-22", Hitch's new autobiography. Not sure how he works the title allusion to Heller's classic, but Hitch has been found of quoting one exchange with Yossarrian: "What if everybody thought that way? Then I'd be a damn fool to think any differently!"
The young Hitchens saw this as a clever affirmation of his independent thought; but to view the exchange today in light of Hitch's mercenary conformity is ironic to say the least. Imagine the passage in the book where Yossarrian is offered a bribe by his superiors to simply "like us." Imagine Yossarrian saying "for how much?" and you capture the arch of Hitch's career.
Bob Somersby calls it "Versailles", the opulent palace were the elite punditry politely engaged in "debate" and "analysis" but never ask the unpleasant question. "Hitch, old boy, any seconded thoughts on the McCarthite tactics you used in attacking opponents of the invasion of Iraq?". As Somersby says, "really dahling, it simply ISN'T done!" Asking Hitchens about leading the march to Impeach Clinton and install Bush would be just about the ultimate in bad taste, even on a "real" program like Maher's.
Hitchens still enjoys an amazingly uncritical audience on the left. The ladies pooh poohing him on a recent "Morning Joe" is about the closest he's gotten to a real take down since Charles Taylor laid "No One Left To Lie To" to waste many years ago on Salon. Will the new book finally roust a few writers out of polite silence? Dahling, pass me those french fries......
As Bart Simpson famously quipped at Genius School, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. When I post on anything not directly related to C. Hitchens on this site, I'm told by the CMC (Concern Troll Community) that I should stay on topic. And when I post on anything that is directly related to Hitchens, I'm told by the same fraternity to get a life.
Well, I do have a life of sorts and I try to live it to the about three-quarters full, and following the career of C. Hitchens has not been a major part of even my online life for yonks, hence the precipitous decline in posts around here of late. In the realm of Newsland, on of the things that has engaged my interest since the Nobelization of Saint Al Gore has been the Climate Change Scam - and I hope most readers will agree that no other words describe it quite so well. We all know climate is not weather, but this winter my little bit of the world had its second earliest (December 18) and its latest ever (March 29) snowfalls of the past 20 years, and there's been a lot more of the white stuff than usual all over the Northern Hemisphere this winter. I know, it isn't climate, just an awful lot of weather.
But added to all that snow we now have some stats on Arctic sea ice cover, and as far as I'm concerned they are shockingly bad news for the climate alarmists who have predicted ice free Arctic summers by as early as 2012 (Al Gore in 2007).
Here's one from the Danes, who we all have a duty to support as a great bastion of civilized meteorological observation (quite unlike the Chaucerian frauds at NASA and the University of East Anglia).
And here's another from JAXA in Japan, which underlines the trend. Yes folks, the Arctic ice is flourishing this year, much to the relief of polar bears and Inuit alike, and an observation that flies in the face of all those multi-million-dollar Sim City models that pretend to predict the future as if climate science were astrology. Since observation trumps modeling at every turn, it looks like game over for the global warming gamers and their shameful chorus of child-abusing scaremongers.
Off with their budgets and bring on the lawsuits, I say. Don't let these fiends into your country without greeting them at the airport with an arrest warrant for fraud, extortion and crimes against humanity.
When Christopher Hitchens gets into his Devil's Advocate role, it is only natural for all right-thinking non-contrarians to leap at the chance to play Fedei Defensor. And so for the sake of all our souls, I'll give it a quick go. With all the hullabaloo about the Pope covering up child molesting, the fact is that Benny has done far more to protect children from abuse than Hitchens ever has and contributed far less to allowing child abuse to be perpetrated than Hitch ever has.
Benny is against the culture of war that Hitch pimps for and which casually takes the lives, limbs, virginity and childhoods of countless children. Just compare the stances of the two dudes on, say, the Iraqi genocide or the impending attack on Iran.
Benny is against the culture of porn and perversion that sexualizes children ,commodifies the human body and trivializes the sex act and sexual relations to the detriment of all children everywhere, period. Contrariwise, Hitch is a great supporter of freedom from prudery, which translates into opening a Pandora's box of opportunities for destroying children.
Benny is against divorce and desertion of one's family, which emotionally scars the kids that are put through it. Hitch, lest we forget, dumped his pregnant wife and his infant son for another woman, leaving the lad to grow up into a dork who, while in his twenties, is working for the neocons, when any half-normally adjusted young man of his age would be working with the likes of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, et al, or else riding a motorbike up and down the M1 and getting absolutely blotto on lager at the weekends.
More to the point, Benny is genuinely against child sexual abuse under any circumstances. As for Hitch, what evidence is there that he's against it on principle, rather than only when he can use it as an issue to beat the Catholics or the Muslims with? Where does he stand on the Franklin scandal? What's his stance on mob-controlled child prostitution in the US?
As the NYT article linked to by our fraternal comrade Rakhmetov states:
The German Archdiocese has acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of Father Hullermann, though it attributed those mistakes to people reporting to Cardinal Ratzinger rather than to the cardinal himself.
Church officials defend Benedict by saying the memo was routine and was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” according to the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese.
I rest my case.
So, Hitchens is calling for the Pope to be arrested over the latest sex scandal. Fine. I hope it works out for him better than his previous calls for justice to befall Clinton and Kissinger. By the same token, the same principles of justice, one could quite reasonably call for Christopher to have his eyes put out, tongue cut out, ears deafened, arms and legs amputated, and then have the still living trunk dumped into a cesspit. That punishment, shown worldwide on prime time TV, might go some way to restoring a bit of justice on account of the evils Hitchens has enabled vis-a-vis the Iraq War. Not being a fan of barbaric punishment, I couldn't advocate it myself, but I can certainly see the merits of it as a deterrent for others who might want to vent their personal frustrations over erectile disfunction and/or pick up a few extra bucks by warmongering.
Chris slithered onto the set of Real Time with Bill Maher yesterday to plug his new autohagiography, "Hitch-22," though, fortunately, he didn't actually have a chance to talk about it:
With the reputation of the Catholic Church in free fall over revelations that Ratzinger was in fact well aware of the activities of pederasts in his archdiocese at the time, Hitch has a pretty easy time here shooting fish in a barrel, though he does claim that the last time that he was on Maher's show he allegedly somehow warned us all about this. I checked his last appearance, he was too busy in that battle of wits against Mos Def to get into the sins of the Catholic Church, so I don't know what the bloody hell Hitchens is yammering on about here. Perhaps he's referring to a previous appearance.
Not much to quarrel with Hitchens about concerning his commentary on this latest scandal of the Vatican's, and he even concedes that having US troops in Germany and Japan is unnecessary and that America has far too many nuclear weapons, but not to worry, he does lurch to Decency by the end of the interview, cheering on the latest act of US aggression against Somalia.
Fuck Hitch! Fuck Hitch! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Fuck him! Without a condom. Without a penis or a vagina. Without a second sodding thought. Just fuck him!
Having surpassed the half-life of the fallout over dropping the A(nti-Semite)-Bomb against Excitable Sully that had the whole blogosphere in such a furor, The New Republic writer Leon Wieseltier has now taken aim at our Preening One in this recent Fora.tv event (at 1:44:04), labeling him a "buffoon" and following up on that with some shots at the New Atheist movement in general. No doubt Hitchens has a dirty limerick or two in store for Wieseltier after such a slanderous accusation (There once was a man named Wieseltier who could take peggings and cocks, but if given an enema would have to be buried in a matchbox...).
I have long regarded Wieseltier as an odious reactionary and anti-Semitism hustler, but if he's going to continue with such clear-eyed and sober insights as this (concerning Chris that is), he may be lucky enough to find himself removed from my Official Enemies List one day.
Last Saturday, I made the mistake of reading The New York Times Magazine. There's an interview with Slate blogger and soon to be California Senatorial candidate, Mickey Kaus (he's challenging Barbara Boxer on the hilarious grounds that she's too liberal). Kaus (pictured above) is known to me as the Slate dweeb who used to write a lot of frequently updated incoherent crap complete with an inordinate amount of boldface type for emphasis. What stands out from the interview, aside from his goofball photograph, is when they ask him how much money he makes blogging for Slate:
I had been making in the mid-90s, and then I had to take a pay cut along with everyone else, and I was making in the 80s.
How the hell did he get that job, again? I seriously wanna know, because the guy can't write for sh*t. I guess his dad was a federal judge or something? Kaus added that bloggers for The Atlantic make even more, which means other hacks like Megan McArdle are faring even better. Great. More reason to hate.
Anyway, if Slate pays a no name geek like Kaus that kinda money, what do you think a bestselling author like Hitchens takes home for his weekly column? Half a million? Christ. I want some reader input on this question.
It's all very troubling considering the fact that Slate pretty much sucks. Aside from Jack Shafer that is, and an occasional (and I stress occasional) freelancer. Shafer's a damn good reporter: the only consistently enjoyable and insightful column the site.
What's linked is a disgusting, racist rant, written by a research fellow at Hoover, that desperately and pathetically attempts to "expose" Noam Chomsky as a hypocrite because he's against capitalism but yet still lives in a capitalist society. Once the value of NC's home in Cambridge is reduced from his alleged net worth, the remainder amply demonstrates what a risible joke this whole performance is, as well as revealing the degree to which Chomsky gives away his money for activist causes. Schweizer though seems unable to grasp that just because Chomsky puts money away in a trust fund for his grandchildren, or invests in a common retirement fund for professors, it doesn't mean that he's no longer for increased taxation of trust funds and investors, including himself. In fact, following Schweizer's reasoning to its logical extent, if you're against corporations and don't think they should exist, it's hypocrisy to buy anything from them, work for them, or have any interaction with them whatsoever. As an analogue, no doubt there were commissars and apparatchiks who denounced Andrei Sakharov for being a hypocrite, as he was opposed to the Soviet totalitarian system yet was a relatively privileged professor who had personally profited from a career working for the Bolshevik State.
But all this is secondary, and is probably just the pretext for the subtext of the article, i.e. another ignominious entry in the annals of dog-whistle anti-Semitism from the frothing far-Right. The gist of the article is that Chomsky is a rich, cheap, self-hating Jewish financier, obsessed with money and primarily motivated by his own avarice. Just in case Schweizer missed any classic, Jew-hating stereotypes, there is even a nasty little anti-Semitic caricature of Chomsky complete with a giant nose and him clutching a bag of money. Admittedly though, this is not very shocking, given the Right these days. Barney Frank, Keith Olberman, Al Franken, Karl Marx, and Jewish financiers like George Soros and Peter Lewis (and Chomsky it seems!) are the bugbears of today's Far-Right, whose whole ideology increasingly bears resemblance to the Nazi Dolchstosslegende myth.
If Hitchens was genuinely serious about anti-Semitism we would not be associating with an organization that publishes such crypto-anti-Semitic trash, or at least he would criticize this kind of thing. Hitchens has defended Chomsky from such egregious and hysterical attacks before (and likely still stands by that essay), but unfortunately I suspect that any comment on this from CH will be conspicuous by its absence.
Fun for all the family in the Faroes, where one of the finest traditions of Viking civilization is still being upheld down to the present day under the auspices of the Danish Crown.
This week's Slate finds Hitch defending the descendants of the Vikings yet again from the decedents of Issau who also double up the followers of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon Him. The current attack shows signs of shaping up into a shakedown of the Danish press their role in "defaming" the Prophet, and the technique obviously has our Popinjay flustered. To wit, to woo:
I have just finished reading one of the most astoundingly stupid and nasty documents ever to have landed on my desk. It consists of a letter from a law firm in Saudi Arabia, run by a man named Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to a group of newspapers in Scandinavia.
Nasty? Yes. Stupid? Don't you believe it! The Muslim Mafia behind this potentially juicy scam have learned a thing or two from the ambulance chasers, the sexual/racial/ableist harassment and repressed false memory syndrome accusation human rights grievance merchants, the lady who sued McDonald's because her coffee was too hot, and, most of all, those princes of defamation in the guise of anti-defamation at the Kosher Nostra, who have successfully extorted treasure from governments and institutions throughout European Christendom on a variety of pretexts over several decades and accomplished the remarkable feat actually bringing Swiss bankers to tears in the course of their gymnastic legal shenanigans. Success on this scale is bound to be emulated, and so in today's climate of specious political correctness as ultimate morality, it was only a matter of time before smart Arab lawyers decided they would have a go at putting the Danish press through an olive press to see how much extra virgin they could extract.
The Danes entered European historical consciousness not long after the time of the Prophet by their practice of raiding the coasts of places farther west and south, raping and pillaging as they went, leading to the practice of the English and French paying them Danegeld (literally "Dane's gold") as a means of avoiding any unpleasantness. Also, the mass media have done their bit in building a public consensus in favor of just the sort of legal/moral framework in which spurious grievance claims can make it into court. So the case Hitch highlights, if it were to result in successful extortion, would be replete with ironies. And Hitch claims to be be a connoisseur of that sort of thing.
While you have to admire our Contrarian's mettle in consistently defending his Danish comrades, it has to be noted that some of his arguments are inappropriate nitpicks that only weaken his case. For instance, this one.
Yamani: In our view, all religious icons of all religions, such as the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, Moses, and (not to be compared to prophets and messengers) others who are non-religious icons but have contributed to humanity like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, and others such as Ibn Sina, Ibn al-Haitham and Albert Einstein all deserve respect and protection from ridicule and defamation.
Hitchens: Cretinism on this historic level is comparatively rare. Apparently, Yamani thinks that Mahatma is a first name rather than a Hindu religious honorific and that the words "Dalai Lama" are a secular title. Moreover (and you have to admit that tossing in a Jewish name is a nice touch), he would protect the stern Spinozist Einstein from being lampooned for the many wrong surmises he made about the Big Bang and quantum theory.
Spewing out irrelevant nonsense on the scale Hitchens has mastered is is a rare talent. "Mahatma" (translated as "great soul") is how Mohandas K. Gandhi is known to the masses, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama is known and revered on account of his official religious position rather than as a secular individual. How many readers would recognize the name Tenzin Gyatso if they read it in a legal document? So Yamani's use of these "names" cannot be criticized as unsuitable, let alone as cretinism, any more than can referring to Usāmah bin Muḥammad bin `Awaḍ bin Lādin as "Bin Laden", as if that were his surname. Hitchens does this all the time. It is ignorant. It is inaccurate. But it isn't cretinism. But then again, Hitchens is ignorant and inaccurate although not cretinous. So it is only natural that he makes ignorant and inaccurate statements as a matter of course. Also, in what sense could Uncle Albert be described as"stern", and what the expletive does Hitchens know about the Big Bang and quantum theory that allows him to claim that Einstein was wrong about them? There is probably a parallel universe somewhere in which there is a Christopher Hitchens who isn't a total scientific ignoramous, but it isn't the universe we inhabit. Still, it's paragraphs like the above that send out the meta-message that Hitchens and his backers are seriously worried about this potential legal action against the Scandinavian press.
For myself, I would not lift a finger to help the Danes in this battle. It wouldn't bother me one iota if the armies of the New Khanate of the Golden Horde watered their camels in Copenhagen. Because as a dedicated opponent of cruelty to animals, I have a higher loyalty. The Danes are in the premier league of European offenders in terms of not treating their pigs properly in intensive farms, as this CIWF Report attests. And moreover, the Danish state supports the people of the Faroe Islands, and the people of the Faroe Islands regularly butcher pilot whales in one of the bloodiest spectacles still celebrated as a cultural tradition anywhere on earth.
Our Hitch can wax poetic about protecting civilization from the barbarians (as in his recent Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture), but when it comes to barbarism one picture is worth a thousand words. So while you wave the Dannebrog and stock up on Lurpak in defense of Denmark, spare a shudder for all those millions of factory-farmed porkers reared in sardine-can-like conditions and for those poor cetaceans whose slaughter represents the Faroese equivalent of Jeux San Frontieres. A nation that allows such barbarities does not deserve the support of civilized people anywhere.
In Vanity Fair, Chrstopher Hitchens considers the Ten Commandments and then offers his own. I have particular sympathy with his point that religious texts imply women should be treated as chattels. I think this feeds the question; is religion a product of a deity, or the product of the culture of the messenger? Chicken or egg?
With Christopher's own commandments I take issue with #5 as whilst I would not condemn a homosexual for indulging in their wonts and needs with another consenting adult in the privacy of their home, I would condemn a peadophile, voyeur and psycho for their 'inborn nature'. Heeeere's Johnny! Sometimes it's good to check ones thoughts (why do you make me hit you?). Of course these do feed into the other commandments as murder and the act of harming a child is condemned. So I suppose thought crime is a moot point. But I do think Christopher is not specific enough here, and criticises the religious ones for the same fault:
"we again find mixed signals here. Why can’t rest be recommended for its own sake? Also, why can’t the infallible and omniscient and omnipotent one make up his mind what the real reason is?"
If Christopher means 'thou shalt not bully people because they are not the same as you' he should say so.
I particularly like his #8 and #9. Full VF article here.
Peter Hitchens's recent article in the Mail about how he "found God" and peace with Christopher contains some cute pictures. That's about it really, not much else we don't know. The brothers didn't get on, Pete was an atheist, then "found" religion around the time he got married (aged around 32) and Chris didn't. Pete says:
I have, however, the more modest hope that he might one day arrive at some sort of acceptance that belief in God is not necessarily a character fault, and that religion does not poison everything. Beyond that, I can only add that those who choose to argue in prose, even if it is very good prose, are unlikely to be receptive to a case which is most effectively couched in poetry.
Pete admits that before he found God, "there were also numberless acts of minor or major betrayal, ingratitude, disloyalty, dishonour, failure to keep promises and meet obligations, oath-breaking, cowardice, spite or pure selfishness. Nothing I could now do or say could possibly atone for them." No. And what strikes me about this article is the cleverly implied suggestion that he's changed fundamentally. He doesn't quite state it outright but leaves it up to the reader to make the assumption. He would. Peter's good with words.
I talk about my own life at more length than I would normally think right because I need to explain that I have passed through the same atheist revelation that most self-confident British members of my generation—I was born in 1951—have experienced.
Or it could be that he, like his brother, is a narcissist and likes talking about himself.
However, I liked this point:
Soviet Communism is organically linked to atheism, materialist rationalism and most of the other causes the new atheists support. It used the same language, treasured the same hopes and appealed to the same constituency as atheism does today.
When its crimes were still unknown, or concealed, it attracted the support of the liberal intelligentsia who were then, and are even more now, opposed to religion.
Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.
This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.
Quite. Remind me one more time why Bush invaded those oil-rich countries? Was it because God told him too? I wonder why when there are so many despots.
Being an Anglican Christian isn't just about poetry and avoiding hellfire: you also have to live it. You have to walk the walk not just talk the talk. Peter's self-congratulatory confessionalism at having emerged from his mispent youth as a different and better person is disgraceful. In the Sunday service for example, you have to repeat (and mean it):
Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault. We are truly sorry and repent of all our sins.
Pete doesn't seem truly sorry and he doesn't attempt to repent. The enjoyment of poetry is all very well, but if, say, Mein Kampf was translated into verse by John Donne, I wonder if Pete would better appreciate its message? When it comes to God, the appreciation of poetry isn't enough for Christopher, and I think he has a point.
This is the video of Christopher delivering the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA on March 3 this year. And the main subject of the lecture is, understandably, the evil and the ubiquity of antisemitism, which, if Hitch is to be believed, is a bigger pandemic threat than swine flu. He also says he believes antisemitism is "the godfather of all other kinds of racism", and he goes on analyze it as "something like a version of mental illness" and also "quite like a conspiracy theory" and it has great appeal among "Pseudo intellectuals". He brings in the Protocols and plays a recent video of Mel Gibson responding to a Jewish American TV interviewer who questioned whether he should still be making movies on account of "remarks attributed" to him about the Jews, with the words "Have you got a dog in this race?"
However, following on from his scrupulous and faultlessly executed observation of the protocols of the evils of antisemitism, Christopher gently and obliquely whispered some words of heresy. He declared that is is possible to be an anti-Zionist without being an antisemite and, shockingly for some members of the audience, it is even possible to question the Holocaust without being an antisemite, as long as you don't deny that there was a plan and an intent to erase the Jews of Europe traceable to Mein Kampf. Hitch thinks the numbers are up for grabs, the big H should be subject to debate, and he even stated complete with hand gestures that "obviously the Nazis weren't gonna wash their hands in Jew."
I don't believe that there should be any censorship or any intimidation of anyone, revisionist or even denier, who wants to bring forward any evidence. What do we think we lack; the confidence to win this argument?
With that, Christopher probably managed to offend most of his audience. I'll say one thing in his favor. Hitch isn't afraid to wrestle in the mud.
From there he went on to express his shock that stories of Israelis stealing body parts that have been appearing on leftist websites in the US (he didn't mention that they've also been in the Swedish mainstream press) and that British leftists were making common cause with Islamists. The organ stuff is something I've left well alone because it sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing that gets put out by cointelpro only to be disproved later to discredit those taken in by it, and also in deference to the refined sensibilities of our genteel readership.
Hitchens also says that you can't suffer with mild antisemitism. "With most people it's impossible to have it a little bit. It takes over everything else, sucks out all the oxygen in what's left of your brain." Indeed, to the layman's eye, the symptoms would seem remarkably similar to those of anti-Islamism and anti-Christianism too. He speaks so passionately and personally on this issue that the lecture is as solemn as any church sermon I've ever heard, and I also get a strong feeling that he does indeed have a dog in this race.
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.
Confessions of a literary hedonist: Christopher Hitchens is living proof that some people will say absolutely anything to sell a few more books.
In a meant-to-be-shocking article from the UK Politics section of the Telegraph for 28 February, Stephen Adams reports that Christopher is being an awful tease again.
Apparently, in his shortly-to-be-released memoir, he alludes to some youthful homosexual romps, including with two men who went on to become members of Mrs Thatcher's government — and him a Trotskist at the time. No clue is given, however, as to whether they were "wets", or if they were actually ministers in one of her numerous "kitchen cabinets".
I think we can safely rule out Gilmour, Tebbit, Lawson and Parkinson, but that still leaves a good few dozen possible partners for Hitchwatchers to guess about, William Hill to lay odds against, and the News of the World to go ferreting about.
He said these alleged encounters were a "mildly enjoyable relapse" into homosexuality that had begun for him at Leys School, the Cambridge independent where he was educated.
So that's why they call it "the Leys"!
Hitchens, 60, who studied politics, philosophy and economics at Balliol College in the late 1960s, has made his claim in his memoir Hitch-22, to be published in June.
This is precisely the sort of sordid confessional tale (minus the salacious details, mercifully!) that makes me glad refused that scholarship and went comprehensive and red brick. But hang on! Adams now tells us that Hitch isn't a direct source for the story.
An extract of the autobiography was published in The Sunday Times.
Oh bugger! I suppose we'll have to go and read that next. I wonder what younger brother Peter will make of this? Not to mention all the Hitch fanboys. Sure the girls will love him all the more for it. But this revelation will be sure to make thousands of aspiring young contrarians take a second look at their idol. They are going to experience the sort of trauma that the members of the Blackshorts would have faced had they learned that Sir Roderick Spode secretly designed ladies' lingerie.
“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!
”
Last Sa
