Yes, the reviews of Rich Hitch-22 are still cascading onto the 'lit' pages of the broadsheets, much like the BP oil spill, unstoppable and yet unwanted. And to be fair, the book has provoked the entire gamut of critical responses, with reviews ranging from appalled, to critical, to the merely contemptuous (reviews from friends of Hitchens, or from writers who are afraid of him and hope to gain his favour by fawning over him in print, don't count).
'Billed as a memoir, Hitch-22 is a hodge-podge of autobiography and Christopher Hitchens's musings on political and cultural antics of the last 50 years. The question that first struck me when presented with this book is: who would want to read it? Hitchens is, by the standards of Anglo-Saxon journalism, a skilled turn and he's had an interesting intellectual journey from British Trotskyite to American neo-con sidekick, but my guess is that most of those who'd be willing to part with money to read this are those who are regular consumers of his columns.
If you've followed his work, I doubt there's much here that will be new. I've never sought out Hitchens's writing, but even having haphazardly digested his work over the years, there was a great deal that was familiar. As a sort of greatest-hits treasure trove, Hitch-22 will have an appeal for his admirers, but if you don't want to read any further I can sum the book up as too long, far too long and meandering but with half-a-dozen cracking anecdotes, the best of which is Hitchens being spanked (with a rolled-up parliamentary order-paper) by Margaret Thatcher (he insists he has witnesses...
Hitchens is well read (especially by the standards of journalism) and there is almost a mania for quotation and learned allusion. I don't know whether this is simply his temperament or whether he's trying to play the sophisticated Brit for the folks in Kansas, but if you do the scholar strut, you've got to get it right.
The phrase pecunia non olet doesn't come from Juvenal, but from Vespasian. That an old Trot doesn't know where the term permanent revolution comes from is sad (no, it's not Parvus). Hitchens, in his enthusiasm for Portugal, writes: "In Portuguese bullfights, the bull is not tortured or killed." It's funny, but in the Portuguese bullfight I watched, the bull had these javelin-like objects stuck into him (perhaps they had slipped the bull a powerful anaesthetic beforehand). I could go on....
This is, finally, the great boon of being a media gadfly, you have all the joy of condemnation, without any of the tiresome business of responsibility. Hitchens might have occasionally left his armchair and incommoded himself in some godforsaken dumps and risked his neck in hazardous regions, but it was for the purpose of getting copy and not distributing medical supplies.
It's like being a critic, you can poke fun and carp, without the labour of creation. Indignation is the best business to be in because you look so good, so pumped up on ethics, garlanded with fragrant morality as you slate others for the paucity of their principles or their low behaviour. And then if some of those you sympathised with, say Saddam or Mugabe and his cronies, let you down, you can always turn the indignation on them and earn some more money.'
HW proudly presents the latest installment of Stabler's review of Hitch's unreliable memoir of his incredible career.
I am almost certain The Times review of "Hitch-22" by Joan Bakewell ( this rather fawning, superficial piece is the only real review I can find of the thing so far) at Times Online has already been revised fairly significantly. We see Sidney Blumenthal was betrayed not for "smearing" Monica Lewinsky (hardly) but for "unwisely gossiping" (perhaps the only gossiping to be done with Hitch?). Actually, Bluementhal was doing neither, but relating an elementary fact in a private conversation ( She most certainly WAS staking Clinton) that could have been confirmed by a smidge of what is sometimes called "journalism." Called out, Hitchens choose to print further untruths about Bluementhal "The Nation," which published them along with much contrary evidence in the form of their editorials and Alex Cockburn's "Beat The Devil" column.
Now I revise: it looks like Blake Morrison has weighed in with a a barely veiled advert for the tome over at the Guardian. How does one get these "book review" jobs? Morrison repeats one of the most dubious bits in the book, that Bill Clinton liked pot brownies as a student at Oxford. Paying homage perhaps to the integrity of the Starr investigations Hitch whored for, this is proven by the fact that Clinton was sometimes in building where pot brownies were made. Hitchens also suspected Clinton was a Snitch(!) for the C.I.A., which begs for some sort of Hall of Fame for acts of psychological projection.
Anyway, Blakewell made the point in her earlier version that there are considerable things left out of "Hitch-22"; that we learn he is married with three children "almost by accident." Yes, and we NEVER learn Hitchens walked out on wife number one while She was carrying his child, later opining that "when a marriage is over, it's over." The writers who were always the cruelest on the Clinton's marriage, from David Mamet to George Will, did tend to be men whom had traded in wife number one, generally for a younger model.
There may well be events avoided in such books to safeguard the feelings of family members or friends. Yet once we are past the early years this book becomes so utterly weighed down in tedious showoffery you begin to wonder if Hitchens did have SOMETHING interesting to reflect upon, and has an odd strain of modesty that denies involvement with the intriguing.
So unless you have an endless capacity to enjoy supposedly great wits engaged in porny variations of the childish "Mad Libs" game, you better not try to read this when drowsy. Yes, there is Hitch as a sort of counter culture Zelig, always at the center of the major upheavals of the seventies and eighties, while giving those Ken Starr Nighties a wide birth.
The Salman Rushdie chapter is a good example of the book's by the numbers point scoring and ultimate lack of impact. When the fatwa is issued, we are told, balls are in short supply all around; but It is rather suggested (as always) that this was a bigger problem with the left than the right.
The level of naivete Hitchens must have possessed to believe major conservative American hacks would come forward to defend a liberal in a free speech bind is astounding, and indeed Htichens spares Pat Buchannan any mention, even though he led the "Rushdie had it coming" contingent. Susan Sontag, not generally viewed as a conservative, is the hero of the day.
Yet special pains are taken to admonish Arthur Miller who MAY have avoided appearing in defense of Rushdie ( hard facts and Hitchens are as moon rocks and water) out of fear for his life, and MAY have claimed special privilege as a jew. The whole thing becomes a shaggy dog when Rushdie publishes a bullshit story to save his neck; and there is only a trip to the White House where Bill Clinton welcomes Rushdie but in that WAY of his that is somehow worse that Bush (41) who chose to ignore him.
The less said about Martin Amis, and the trip to the whorehouse the better. Thank goodness the book gives Hitch the chance to put that "bitch" prostitute with the evil smile in her place. We can stave off boredom by considering a man who has so often crapped on those who offered friendship waxing euphoric over his friendship with Amis, who we can't help but suspect is something of a little shit as well. Interestingly, he does hold out an olive branch to the Cockburns, and claims an affinity with Peter Galbraith, who has done as much to debunk Hitch's propaganda on Iraq as anyone.
But now we are in the realm of the evil, and we'll save that for next time....
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Another Unfavourable Review Of Hitch's Latest Failed Book
Careful readers and students of this blog are fully aware of how our humble team of contributors, The All-Joking All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters of Hitchens Watch, have methodically and incontrovertibly disproved, refuted, discredited, rebutted, and exposed as a contemptible lie, every single line that the Emperor Hitch I has ever written. And not only what he writes today, but everything that he's ever written in the past, or ever will write in the future. In fact, being such a self-declared expert in all things Hitch, I've managed to thoroughly debunk His Hitchness' latest flop in a long line of failed books, the hideously titled "Hitch-22," and see it for the worthless tripe it is, without even needing to read it. Yes Comrades, that's the caliber of blogging—no, journalism—that you're witnessing around here.
From the many underwhelming excerpts that have been dangled out in front of us in a desperate attempt to promote this vacuous bore of an autohagiography, and given one hatchet-job review after another in the press and amongst Comrades, I think it's safe to say at this point that Mother Hitch, large with child at the moment, will be giving birth when his water breaks shortly to yet another stillborn book. Another failed book, and not the first one for our Hitch, on a failed life that it even fails to engagingly recount. We learn from the inside how one of the greatest gentlemen of letters and wit of his generation, one who had so much potential, talents, and blah blah blah etc.. etc.. etc.., has been transformed into an international laughing stock, and has indelibly tarnished his reputation amongst all serious people with his demonstrably (our side has won the argument Chris) batshit-crazy views post-9/11. The Washington Post evinces this plain reality with a nice little cheeky review chock full with ridicule, and is today's reading assignment for Hitch Hunters out there. Some snippets:
HITCH-22
A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens
Twelve. 435 pp. $26.99
What a guy. At Oxford, Christopher Hitchens pumps the Fist O' Protest and bellows "The Internationale" -- against the Vietnam War, provincial English hairdressers who won't cut the hair of black people, segregated cricket teams. He knows, and blabs, that Bill Clinton took his dope when they strove together, or at least at the same time, among those dreaming spires. (Not inhaling! Gobbling it in brownies, like Alice B. Toklas!) He has his scrotum waxed and submits to waterboarding for Vanity Fair -- not, alas, at the same time. (Full disclosure: Hitchens was the only critic to dump on my quickie first book, "Ear on Washington," back in 1982. He was a newbie, wild to be noticed at the Nation. I forgive him.)
We quietly applaud this, as it reinforces this narrative that Hitchens is erratic, manic,
bizarre, all over the place. And I think I'm going to have to call bullshit on Hitchens claiming that Clinton ate pot brownies, as it sounds like sheer speculation on his part. The Popinjay has long claimed that he doesn't even remember seeing or being in the same room at Clinton at Oxford, but yet he somehow knew at the time that Bubba was big on brownies? Please.
He acid-washes Princess Di and Mother Theresa in articles. Maggie Thatcher spanks him. He's bosom buds with Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Ian McEwan, Clive James, James Fenton. (Who? Oh, right. That guy, the poet.) He whores in a horrible brothel with his best chum, Martin Amis. He wriggles into Cuba when it's wicked and almost meets Che. He hits the nastiest global hot spots. He bloviates the naughtiest things he can think of on American TV, oblivious to the impact of his home-hacked hairdo and stained English teeth, convinced that nobody notices he's pie-eyed.
Ouch! For a book that consists of nothing more than name-dropping, navel-gazing, and narcissistic boasting of one form of another (I thought that only people like Ron Jeremy could suck their own cock like this), it's pretty embarrassing how he expects us to be overcome with awe over how he's personal friends with... James Fenton. Wow, not the James Fenton? Sure, Martin Amis, another has-been, has had his moments and is obviously a talented writer, but let's face it, Chris is not actually close to nor hobnobbing with anyone truly that memorable or impressive.
He was the son of a failed midranking officer in the Royal Navy and a far-too-chic Mummy, exotically named Yvonne. He adored Yvonne, and she him. She hid her family's Jewishness from him and his brother, and even from her husband, the commander. And she issued two memorable edicts: "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring," was the one that took. The other, touchingly, was, "If there's going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it." To that end, the Hitchenses scrimped to send their blue-eyed boy to a "public" school -- actually a stolid Methodist outpost unheard of by the smart "Brideshead Revisited" set. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Methodists sing the very best hymns, and perhaps helped inflect the author's rolling prose.)
But then came Oxford. There, he was so busy inciting to riot that he scraped through with a third-class degree. Why does he hate Bill Clinton so much, considering they barely brushed elbows? Mostly, he suspects that the former prez was the CIA's snitch on American hell-raisers there.
Or maybe he's jealous that a certain fellow Soixante-Huitard and Oxford alumnus actually made something of himself.
"Hitch-22" (ghastly title) is a fat and juicy memoir of a fat and juicy life, topping 400 pages. As you plunge in for your Zelig-like wallow in the past century's zeitgeist, you begin to shiver: My God, didn't this guy leave anything out? Here's the terrible and tragic 1973 suicide of his beloved Mummy, via pills, in an Athens hotel room with her dreary defrocked-vicar lover, violently dead by his own hand...
But the truth is, for the memoir of a Trotskyite George Orwell worshiper, "Hitch-22" (ugh) has a humongous memory hole. Where's his wife of eight years, Eleni Meleagrou? He dumped her in 1989, when she was pregnant with their second child, for the elegant Carol Blue, whom he'd met at an airport.
Silly McLellan, this memoir is only about the people Hitchens actually loves, namely himself. Although I have to say I'm impressed that McLellan mocks the suicide of Hitch's mother here. Even we might not have been bold enough to do something like that, and we have no standards at all around here.
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Hitch 22: Part one: Hitch and Nonsense, The Early Years
—Stabler is currently reading Hitch"s autohagiography. This is the first segment of his review.
O.K., deep breath. Two things must be kept in mind. Christopher Hitchens, in Pop Culture terms or what have you, is a major voice of our time. Yes, that's what it's come to. So the "just ignore him" tact won't really do. He is also an idiot and liar of rare tenacity, so sorting out his subterfuge is daunting in terms of volume rather than, as it might once have been, dismantling any clever subtlety. That is, he long ago became a crude bullshit artist, but he keeps it coming.
One nice thing you can say about the book is that we can't judge Hitchens by his cover in the literal sense. It's seldom quite as bad as the dumb title and too cute joke on the cover, where Hitchens strikes off complements once paid him by Gore Vidal, whom he goes out of his way to disparage and embarrass in the book. It's the late Joseph Heller who really gets the shaft, his long ago praise of Hitchens's would likely receive major revisions, to say the least, after reading this book. "Catch-22", if you'll allow an obvious point, is in every way the philosophical enemy of Hitchens's crude, groveling garbage in service of the Iraqi disaster, an area where Hitchens has labored mightily to obliterate Snowden's secret.
Yet the first part of the book is a fairly breezy and enjoyable retelling of Hitchens's early life. His remembrance of his Mother and her tragic end may fail to stop short of sentimentality, but that's certainly forgivable. As a writer, we shouldn't forget, Hitchens can be fairly good, the occasional showing off ( and if Hitler DID have bad breath, that means what?) never really dragging things down. An alarm does sort of go off every twenty pages or so when a large, seldom used word is showily crammed in to impress the middlebrows, this is probably the sad legacy of William F Buckley.
His take on the last days of the old British Boarding School system is interesting in light of the subjects treatment by other writers. When we get to the homosexually charged middle school and Oxford years things do get interesting. Gossip once had it that Htichens was a vacuous young man who played the liberal activist but would jump into bed with a right winger if it meant a free (expensive) meal or the like. Let us say that Hitchens, in his honesty, does not exactly disabuse us of this notion. For an adult man who got so bent out of shape about Monica Lewinsky, he certainly sucked a lot of dick in his youth.
His take on homosexuality, again forgivably, is paradoxical. At once he claims these were "homosexual acts" created by heterosexual boys who had no other recourse being in single sex schools. Yet he also is quite clear about being in love with his young boyfriend. "He was extremely right wing, I decided to forgive him immediately." We can imagine.
Indeed, this is sort of the thread of the book, Hitchens is a man wildly taken with his own cleverness, playing the double agent with everyone, including himself. A proper life, perhaps for a man whose true love was literature but had no knack for writing it himself. For better or mostly worse, there is much more to come.....
last week Iran, this week Korea however although both were members of President Bush's Axis of Evil (ah the memories)it is no surprise Christopher is concerned to bring us the latest updates. Yes it seems there are crucial differences in the proper attitude to each, specifically the native populations.
Let me explain.
Iranians you see are OK, we only want to bomb them in order to free them, (see here for example) However the North Koreans are, according to Christopher (who has apparently met every single one of them) " millions of stunted and unemployable people, traumatized and deformed by decades of pointless labor...hopeless cases
You may scoff but Christopher has the proof, a link to an article by a certain C Hitchens that points out that North Koreans are "Racist Dwarfs" a "new species. Starving and stunted dwarves , living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult"
It turns out you see the people in North Korea are not actually people at all. They are, pale, stunted, brainwashed killer Dwarfs who live under the ground, worship a "death cult" and want to kill us all. Who wouldn't want to bomb them today, if not yesterday?
Call me nostalgic, it's all well written stuff however I prefer the original German exposition of this theory, the idea of "Untermensch"
Finally the next time I mention the implicit racism of much of Hitchens' output and get told I'm being "unfair" or "simplistic" I'll refer you to this. As the old saying goes if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..
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Tired sad old alcoholic drones on and on about the war
This piece in the Guardian is so good there is really nothing to add.
Some choice quotes.
'Expecting to meet a sort of rakish Russell Crowe, I appear to have found a hungover Timothy Spall....Where is the celebrated rhetorician, famed for speaking in perfect paragraphs sculpted from flawless sentences? Gruff, vague and nursing a cup of tea, he clasps one hand discreetly over the other in a manner suggestive of some practice in taming the morning shakes. Having flown in from America only the previous afternoon, he explains that he had been out with his old friend Martin Amis until 3am. Gradually – fortified by two packets of cigarettes – he begins to reconstitute himself, looking less and less like Spall but, strangely, more and more like Terry Wogan. He can't really manage eye contact. Once noon arrives, though, he brightens up, proposing the first scotch of the day with one of those bluff jokes about rules for drinking so dear to saloon bar bores the world over....
When the invasion of Iraq was first debated, one couldn't fail to notice the preponderance of left-wing men of a certain age who came out in support of the war. Radicals as adults, but often from conservative backgrounds, now beginning to confront their own mortality, and preoccupied by masculinity and legacy, their palpable thrill about military might suggested that, deep down, they secretly feared progressive principles were for pussies. Now here was their chance, before it was too late, to prove their manhood.
In 2006, Hitchens' wife, the American writer Carol Blue, told the New Yorker her husband was one of "those men who were never really in battle and wished they had been. There's a whole tough-guy, 'I am violent, I will use violence, I will take some of these people out before I die' talk, which is key to his psychology – I don't care what he says. I think it is partly to do with his upbringing."
Is there any truth in what his wife said? He pauses for a second. Then, unexpectedly: "Yeah. Yes. One of the things I've realised, writing the book, is that it has to be true."
... For someone feted for his adversarial prowess, I'm surprised by how often he sabotages an argument with a lurch into self-indulgence. For example, he has written at length about the failings of Guantánamo Bay. But then he says to me, "Guantánamo slightly threatened at one point to change my attitude towards capital punishment. I thought it would have been good if some of those people could have been taken out and shot. Yeah, put up against a wall. Lincoln would have done it. Of course, I would have been against it if they had. But that's how I felt."...
It seems to me so evidently the case that Hitchens is an alcoholic that to say much more feels unnecessary. But for the record, he trots out all the usual self-serving, defensive evasions: "For me, an alcoholic is someone who can't hold his drink" or, "I'm not dependent, but I'd prefer not to be without it." The longest he has ever been was a dry weekend "in fucking Libya", and he claims he drinks only to make other people less boring. So, presumably, he doesn't drink when he's with Amis? "Er, yuh, I do.",,,
"I've got arguments!" (he said)
He certainly has. Quite how they've earned Hitchens his status as a legend, however, I am at a loss to say. Posing himself the Proust questionnaire in his memoir, he answered the question, "What is your most marked characteristic?" with "Insecurity" and says this surprised him, but I'm not sure why, because all the decades of showy erudition and aggressive rhetoric look a lot like camouflage for a deep and heartbreaking fear of not quite measuring up.'
I started reading this, kind of lazily skimming through it and didn't immediately realize it was a joke. Parts of it actually do sound like excerpted material from Hitch-22. For instance, it opens:
Before me is a photograph of Martin Amis, James Fenton and myself taken by the ravissante Angela in Paris 1979 and I am reminded of a letter I sent to Julian Barnes on the publication of Nothing to be Frightened Of, in which I congratulated him on his contrast – almost certainly unintentional – between Lucretius and Larkin.
Or this passage,
My time in the abattoir of scholarship that passed for Oxford in the 1960s was entirely frivolous. Isaiah Berlin was not as sharp as I had been led to believe and there was greater stimulation to be had discussing Marxist theory with the Cowley car workers – though I never got used to their proletarian way of calling me Chris rather than Christopher, so it was always a relief to dialectically return to college to guzzle a bottle of two of Château Margaux.
After Oxford, I visited Havana at the personal invitation of Castro. However, I found his conflation of Stalinism with Leninism simplistic, so I returned to Notting Hill, where I earned a few shillings from the New Statesman...
But there are a number of dead giveaway lines as well:
By the early 1980s I had grown tired of the self-satisfied London parochialism that refused to honour me as the greatest thinker of the Far Left, and moved – taking only my first editions of Proust and Rosa Luxemburg – to New York, where I quickly became America's lone moral force against the crass relativism of intellectual pygmies such as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Saul Bellow – all of whom have since conceded I was right.
All in all, this "digested read" of Hitch-22 does a fine job of making Hitchens look like the thoroughly ridiculous pompous prick that he is. It includes a nice bit of artwork too. It reminded me of an old episode of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Hitchens was on with writer Dave Barry. I've never liked Barry as a writer, but he had a funny comeback to what he clearly thought was an outrageous instance of pomposity on Hitch's part. The subject of Harry Potter had been brought up. Of course, Hitch was dismissive. But instead of talking about the book, he used the moment as an opportunity to brag about how his 8 year old daughter had just finished reading her fourth "adult-size" novel. I could not find the transcript online, but Barry's response was something like, 'I just wanted to say that my daughter is 21 and she just read The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, so I don't want people to think that Christopher has a British accent and is smarter than me and my family'.
Here's the clip (actually it's of the whole second half of the episode - and worth watch it all). It's from December 6, 2001.
He was shortlisted for his foreign reporting, not primarily for the bile spewed through his huge column, nor for his highly entertaining narcissim and hysterical persecution of ordinary people commenting on his blog. Well done Peter! Long may you continue sodding off to far away places.
The irony of Peter Hitchens's acceptance of this award and his condemnation of anyone who uses a pseudonym did not escape me.
Christopher Hitchens will be thrilled for his brother.
In other news, the Winston Smith blog won the 2010 Orwell blog prize and 'Keeper' by Andrea Gillies won the book prize.
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War! that mad game the world so loves to play. ~Jonathan Swift
It must be great being an award winning columnist, need a story? want to push for war with a middle eastern state all you need is an Internet connection, a random nutter (see example on right)and the willingness and ability to weave this into whole cloth.
The evidence of Persian perfidity, the very words of Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi (AMBK from now on) himself, viz
" [he] called Saturday for the creation of a "Greater Iran" that would rule over the entire Middle East and Central Asia," and "He said he envisioned a Greater Iran that would stretch from Afghanistan to Israel" Not good as at least one of them belongs to us iirc.
It gets worse, according to Mr Hitchens.
" His call for the abolition of Israel is of what one might call a routine nature—(ho hum) what's of more immediate interest is his railing against the "cancerous tumors" of Sunni Islam, especially as represented by Iran's Arab neighbors in the Gulf."
Now that is where the oil lives, again not good.
However one little question before the F16's fly and the troops troop into Iran, just who exactly is Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi? The AP article Which seems to be the source of this story states.
"the creation of what he calls an Islamic United States is a central aim of the political party he leads called Hezbollah, or Party of God, and that he hoped to ma make it a reality if they win the next presidential election." In other words he holds no actual position but is however a possible candidate for the next Iranian Presidential election which, if my calculations are correct, is in 2013. A potential presidential candidate, none of them ever say anything odd do they?
It's pretty clear to anyone with a map, or who knew how to count, that the idea of a shite Islamic Imperium gaining " hegemonic control over much of the Middle East and Central Asia...stretching from Afghanistan to Palestine" is an insane pipedream. How can someone like Mr Hitchens possibly give it houseroom? Because brothers and sisters the plan to get the people to go to war has rarely changed over the years.
Herman Goering was once quoted as saying (I don't know if it is genuine)
"the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
However I don't think that is true any more, the world is too interlinked. sorry Christopher, and indeed Herman. We choose not to be fooled again.
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Just when you thought he was as low as he could go
One bit did stand out though. One reason Muslim women in France must live up to a dress code dictated by a fat middle aged white man is that their choice of clothing may be,
"Incompatible—because of its effect on peripheral vision—with activities such as driving a car or negotiating traffic. This removes it from the sphere of private decision-making and makes it a danger to others"
Interesting, we'll be over next week to ration how much booze you have a day mate, that is out of the "sphere of your private decision-making" now.
Our deluded critic finishes with
"My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine"" What exactly "it" is we are not informed however it seems that "it" is a blow for "sorority" too. I'm sure the sisters are grateful for your help Hitchens.
Hitch-22 keeps leaking onto various websites and magazines - perhaps a sign that it's a very poor effort in itself that needs this boost?
No doubt, Hitch's orotund prose gets more obnoxious by the day, but I still think a lot of wannabes will buy his Memoir. The only good part I've encountered so far is Hitch's recollection of Kingsley Amis impersonating certain, well, sounds:
Kingsley could “do” the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the District-line train entering the Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter. (This was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations.) To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem. (A tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial service, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers.) The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning “somewhere in Germany,” was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted ignition key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement—of a motorbike yelling in mechanical agony—once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words “fuck off” was note-perfect.
Yes, because death has got something to be said for it, there's no need to get outta bed for it; wherever you happen to be, they bring it to you for free!
What can Hitchens "do" himself? Aside from beat the fuck out of Sean Hannity and Jerry Fallwell? I don't think he can impersonate an old hen. And BFF Martin Amis? 'Money' was supposed to be his best book: "the best novel of the 80's" Hitchens called it. I read it and it is, well, extraordinarily mediocre. If this is the best Martin's got, then he ain't got shit aside from a phony pretentious diction and a funny dad.
Mother Hitch is pregnant with yet another likely to be stillborn book, and is expecting soon, so of course he's been out eagerly promoting it, and himself, with a plethora of excerpts. From the excerpts that have been coming out it sounds like all there is in this empty little book is a bunch of boring and egregious name-dropping and gratuitous navel-gazing—well apart from him regaling us with his adventures trolling for cock that is (looks like Hitch is the type to kiss and tell!). Hitchens reflecting on his complicated state of mind you say, on and on and on? Wow, that'll be a first. And truly fascinating. No doubt not long after it's released this book will be available at fine, marked-down clearance bins everywhere, like most of his works have been.
But to give you another taste of his upcoming autohagiography, we here at Hitchens Watch present to you this so-called "Proust Questionnaire," where our boy muses on a very important and interesting subject, namely himself, the great Chris Hitchens.
The usual stuff here, and admittedly some not bad lists of fiction and non-fiction figures (with the notable exception of Eric Arthur Blair) and other preferences, but there was one shocking moment in all this where I nearly fell out of my chair in disbelief:
Your most marked characteristic?
Insecurity.
Yeah right. I guess he felt that "My legendary humility" would have been too candid.
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13 year old British kid confesses 'mild relief' over assassination of American President
In his memoir, Hitchens tells us that even as a 13 year old, he was kinda glad that JFK was shot. Because, well, a year earlier as a 12 year old he had decided that Kennedy was responsible for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear devastation. Hitch was a precocious young lad - he saw the world, and he saw it plain.
"When Kennedy was shot the following year, I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any distinct emotion, it was that of mild relief."
As a 12 year old, Hitchens of course was well aware of the intricacies of the Cold War politics between America and Russia.
"I shall never forget where I was standing."
On the ground, one hopes. Or at least in an elevator. Where else can one stand? On a grave ditch?
As for the claim that Bill ate pot brownies in England, one wonders why Hitch didn't mention this in his book on Clinton - a tome that accuses the then president of everything from having a bent dick to raping women to war crimes. Why would an opportunist like Hitchens not take advantage of the 'I didn't inhale' moment?
Ouch! What a vigorous spanking David Hart administered, open-handed, to our valiant Hero in his longwinded smackdown of New Atheism in the pages of First Things. Hart's 5000-word sneer at the Neoatheists has caused some consternation in atheist quarters of the bloviatesphere, and he does not mince words concerning one preening Popinjay, also known as His Hitchness. Now, granted Hart does ramble on for thousands of words yet never really deals with the substantive claims of the New Atheists, and instead just sticks his nose up and scoffs at them in an empty manner, but nevertheless, Mr. David B. Hart, author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution And Its Fashionable Enemies, does it with unmistakable style and panache. We've tabulated the votes, and yes, Hart with this essay has won Hitchens Watch's coveted "Hitchens Watch Hero Of The Week" award. Congratulations Hart. Frankly, our judges were highly impressed by how handedly he beat the Popinjay at his own game. Hart is snobbish, sneering, desperately erudite, brandishes an unbearably arrogant and self-satisfied tone, drops ten-dollar words all over the place for no reason, enlightens us with gratuitous displays of pseudo-learning, is pedantic and petty, grossly mischaracterizes and misrepresents his opponents' arguments, etc.. etc.. It's all there.
Jeez, it's going to be tough for Hitchens to get out of this one; Hart really out-snobs him in this old-fashioned snob-off. But there is a glimmer of hope. There's still an opening for Hitchens to name-drop his way out. Hart unforgivably fails to mention a single incident of himself rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, unlike Chris Hitchens who is a very important and serious person who mingles with the very best and brightest and highest of society, just as a very important and serious person should. How many of Hart's former interns are frontrunning in the British election right now, huh? What, none you say? Advantage: Chris. Tsk tsk, only if Hart had started his essay off with a riveting tale of how a very famous so-and-so once told him personally something-or-other, ala our Preening Popinjay's penchant, he wouldn't be so vulnerable here.
With a little luck, this might be Hitch's only hope to slither out of such a bind.
An excerpt:
To appreciate the true spirit of the New Atheism, however, and to take proper measure of its intellectual depth, one really has to turn to Christopher Hitchens. Admittedly, he is the most egregiously slapdash of the New Atheists, as well as (not coincidentally) the most entertaining, but I take this as proof that he is also the least self-deluding. His God Is Not Great shows no sign whatsoever that he ever intended anything other than a rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor. His sporadic forays into philosophical argument suggest not only that he has sailed into unfamiliar waters, but also that he is simply not very interested in any of it. His occasional observations on Hume and Kant make it obvious that he has not really read either very closely.
He apparently believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God, literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met his demise. The title of one of the chapters in God Is Not Great is “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does Hitchens actually say what those claims or their flaws are.
On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens’ book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them. Just to skim a few off the surface: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as “an admirable but nebulous humanism,” which is roughly on a par with saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of weaker peoples. He conflates the histories of the first and fourth crusades. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the works of Aristotle and Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan antiquity, which is the very opposite of what did happen. He speaks of the traditional hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic origins of the modern hospital and the involvement of Christian missions in medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the Church over disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number of lives lost is zero). He asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake, although both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but he imagines this means that the entire account of the Resurrection is as well. He informs us that it is well known that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so on).
In the end, though, all of this might be tolerated if Hitchens’ book exhibited some rough semblance of a rational argument. After all, there really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. To be perfectly honest, however, I cannot tell what Hitchens’ central argument is. It is not even clear what he understands religion to be. For instance, he denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—has that got to do with religion? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural tradition of sub-Saharan Africa, but it belongs to no particular creed. Even more oddly, he takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries. We all, no doubt, share his horror, but what the hell is his point?
“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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