The Inevitable…
Let me outsource my Hitchens commentary to Phil Nugent…
For this, Hitchens gives Chomsky a sound, blunt bashing upside his pointy little head, which is what Chomsky deserves and what Hitchens is good for, The one problematic thing about the essay is that, when a man goes so far in damning another man as a fool and a churl and a sanctimonious bullshit artist, it seems an odd thing for him to fail to acknowledge that he once strove to identify himself as that very man’s greatest defender and ideological ally. “Chomsky,” Hitchens writes, “still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual.” Fifteen or more years ago, Hitchens was writing articles in which he had nothing but harsh words for those who failed to recognize what he then saw as Chomsky’s towering stature as a public intellectual, and lamented the fact that someone he now regards as on the level with an apocalyptic street crazy wasn’t at the head of the rolodex of whoever was booking Nightline.Back in the ’80s. he wrote a ferocious defense of Chomsky after his hero was attacked for allowing an essay he’d written in defense of free speech to be used as an introduction to a book by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. The situation was complicated, to put it mildly, but Hitchens’s approach was characteristic: he held Chomsky up as a hero who could do no wrong while excoriating everyyone who found fault with him as a propagandist stooge. And this was in the days when Chomsky regularly issued political pronouncements that were… well, consistent with what he often says today. It’s not as if there’s any question of who moved…
I think the common thread running through the decades of Hitchens’s political writing is the thrill he gets out of taking the most extreme moralistic (as opposed to moral) position possible, for the chief purpose of then condemning as many people as possible for being too cowardly, weak-kneed, short-sighted, whatever, to go as far as you have. When Hitchens was younger and the thought of international terrorism upending Manhattan a paranoid fantasy, the best way to have fun doing this was to assail the conservative ruling classes, in the manner of Chomsky and Gore Vidal (who Hitchens also once regarded as a master and supreme example of the politically engaged man of letters, and who he has since thrown on the compost heap with Chomsky and Michael Moore.) At his peak of inspired, empty, self-glorifying rhetoric, he was able to spend an entire book painting Mother Teresa as his moral inferior. But around September 2001, Hitchens was at an age, and the world was at a place, where it seemed more promising to start denouncing people who weren’t as pro-American or who were too soft on terrorism. It must have helped that, given Hitchens’s notion of cool, it must have been a lot easier for him to fall in love with George W. Bush than with a tacky, soft-hearted hillbilly like Bill Clinton–someone who I suspect Hitchens, like a lot of people Clinton’s age in politics and the media, could never forgive for having become the first Boomer-Generation President of the United States, when it was so clear that Bubba was not the man these worthies could accept as more deserving than they of the title…
He’s someone who picks his targets for shock value or to align himself with whoever picks the seating arrangements in whatever level he’s just ascended to, and who, having declared his allegiance, talks about whoever’s on the other side of the issue of the day as if they were ax murderers. Everything comes down to those he disagrees with not having the passion to hate someone as much as he does; in the early seventies, the point of every complex geopolitical situation came down to using it to demonstrate your loathing of Henry Kissinger, just as, thirty years later, the question of whether you supported a war of choice against a weak and non-threatening country when a major terrorist act of mass murder for which that country bore no responsibility. and which had yet to be fully answered for, came down, in his mind, to: why don’t you hate Saddam Hussein? It’s a useful point of positioning for him, because, while Hitchens is often blatantly dishonest, devoid of empathy, and views any kind of nuance as a form of intellectual and moral corruption, he can always make a supremely convincing case for why you should hate someone.
If Hitch doesn’t beat the cancer, we’re going to be subjected to an endless series of navel-gazing testimonies from the small, incestuous circle of British intellectuals that helped bring him to prominence in the first place. They’ll remember his cleverness, his ferocious intellect, his incisive wit, etc. and wring their hands about his late life turn to neoconservatism etc. American commentators will echo these arguments, although the second round will be altogether less personal and less interesting.
To be sure, I hope Hitch beats the cancer. His survival is unlikely to change my reading habits either way, though. Because let’s be frank: Is there anyone who would be even vaguely surprised if Christopher Hitchens converted to doctrinaire Catholicism? It would give him a new community of fellow travelers to be incisive and indignant about, a new crowd to shock, and a new ax to grind.
he really is just such a pleasure to read though, on just a sensory level. Pretty much regardless of the content of his prose, he’s got that swashbuckling way with words that just makes it funner than most any other writer.
That makes it even sadder he hasn’t done anything worthwhile with his obvious gifts.
I, for one, can’t see it. I think his writing is vastly overrated. He has a trait of often writing as the center of the article — i.e. he and his opinions are the center. He also seems to assume a fair amount of knowledge on the part of the reader and I find that style of writing off putting. I am educated and usually know who or what he is referring to; however, I still appreciate the “set up.” All in all, a terrible person and overrated writer.
Hitchens has never accepted the fact that he cannot be George Orwell, on account of there being a George Orwell to fill that position.
Orwell washed dishes and got shot in the neck fighting a losing war.
Hitchens would much rather drink like a fish and engage in intellectual masturbation.
Not true! He did go to Northern Iraq for photo-opportunities with Kurdish forces. Spanish Civil War play-acting.
I always wondered if he fell in love with a Kurdish lad/lass and that’s why he was so fond of anything Kurdish
And he really hasn’t grasped the fact that a big part of why he couldn’t be the next Orwell is that the first one had a lot of compassion.
hitch is little better than a dennis miller. both enjoyed some sort of reputation and both pissed it away because 9/11 made them have a number 2 accident in their jammies. sure, hitch read a couple of books, but his tired crap and pathetic bitching is like a semi-literate dennis miller kissing up to bill o’reilly.
Excellent comparison! — I never like either one and am glad they have gone over to the “dark”side. Now I don’t feel the compulsion to hide my dislike in polite company.
If more commentary was outsourced to Phil Nugent, the blogosphere would be a far better place. That is all.
Seconded. I love Nugent’s writing to an unhealthy degree.
Wow, I’m almost tempted to defend the Hitchens and I can’t stand him. This dates back a long way: I was at Trinity, Oxford, at the exact time he was next door at Balliol, and Clinton was enjoying the fruits of his Rhodes. (Jealousy has always seemed to me to be at the root of Hitchens’ hatred for Bill.) Look, he’s a performing seal. He knows it, and he exploits the very skills that Balliol taught him, the same ones I personally despise, the fluency, the superficial sham of knowledge, the utter disdain, all that. There is absolutely no point in trying to engage him, he’ll just lie his ass off for convenience. But he can’t help it; it’s just the way of his people. He’s always been a wannabe aristo pig — always. Just laugh when the clown amuses you, and turn him off when he doesn’t. He deserves no more, nor less.
I always thought that Hitchens was out of place on the left, since conservatism has always been a better home for gifted rhetoricians who can’t be bothered to stake out a political philosophy. There is no such thing as Hitchenism any more than there was a William F. Buckley theory of the state. Serious scholarship was also beneath either figure.
I believe it is some sort of military maxim that an army that advances fast enough doesn’t have to worry about its rear. By the same token, a political speaker like Hitchens who is careful to keep the initiative may never have to explain himself. Chomsky’s problem is pretty nearly the reverse. Despite the highly polemical cast of so much of his work–and even his linguistics’ books are pretty pugnacious–he does have a discernible point of view and is consistent to a fault. Which is how you become a magnificent target. Of course, the unforgivable thing about Chomsky is not his rather dogmatic rationalism but the uncomfortable extent to which he is simply right on many matters. He’s in something of the same position as Marx, another guy who has become someone who must be ritually disavowed at every opportunity. It’s like a loyalty oath. Everybody disagrees with everybody about almost everything, but it’s like sacrificing to the emperor to denounce Chomsky.
I suspect that Chomsky was wrong about many aspects of linguistics, but at least he was wrong in a useful, productive way.
I first became consciously aware of Hichens from a piece he wrote published in Slate discussing something or other about ballistic missiles. It included an irrelevant and egregiously stupid aside asking aren’t all missiles ballistic? What impressed me was the sheer pointlessness of the aside. It added nothing of substance to the piece and served only to seem like a smart comment to those who don’t know anything of the subject.
I subsequently came to recognize this as a characteristic feature of his writing. There was a book review in The Atlantic about something Napoleonic where he tossed off an aside about the Napoleonic wars being the first true world war. This actually is a commonplace observation of the Seven Years War of a half century earlier. He got them confused. But it is easy to picture him at a cocktail party throwing out such pseudo-learned observations to a crowd of admirers.
He is, in short, a bullshitter. And not a particularly subtle one. So much so that the mere act of publishing him diminishes the stature of the publication. It tells me that the editors are willing to publish bullshit, or are incapable of recognizing it. The Atlantic’s habit of regularly publishing him is on my list of reasons why dropped my subscription after years of devoted reading. It reveals a lack of intellectual seriousness.
I read this line and my brain went “ping!”
You just described the entirety of the case against the existence of anthropogenic global warming: bullshit that sounds smart to people who don’t know anything about the subject. Or, George Will’s entire career.
No wonder Hitchens ended up on the right.
aren’t all missiles ballistic
All missiles are ballistic with the rare exceptions of the ones that are guided or rocket-powered.
I believe those are notably rare exceptions, geehrte herr doktor.
He was also, in fact, wrong. Not all missiles are ballistic. Know how I know that? Wikipedia! It took me five fucking seconds to figure it out!
Christ. Whatever Hitch drinks, I want two.
To be fair, this anecdote might pre-date wikipedia…
No, that’s being too fair. Sure, it’s a lot easier now not to be casually incorrect, because so much information is so casually accessible. But when you are correcting someone else, are pointing out that they are idiots, you had better not be wrong. This isn’t some random, typical erroneous trivia that might be excused because it was harder to “know” everything, it’s an attempt to show his superior knowledge where none existed.
As asdfsdf points out below, you do not need Wikipedia to know the definition of “ballistic”.
In effect Hitchens was saying “All these rocket designers and strategies using the term ICBM for the last few decades have been wasting a word, and I’m the first person smart enough to notice.”
“He was also, in fact, wrong. Not all missiles are ballistic.”
That was the “egregiously stupid” part of my comment. Though to be strictly accurate, it was egregiously ignorant. Not that ignorance of the various types of missiles is any great fault, but writing about them despite being egregiously ignorant on the subject is much less forgivable.
Also, appallingly ignorant of the meaning of the word “ballistic.” All bullets are ballistic, but not all missiles, unless Hitchens had really never heard of “Surface to Air Missiles.”
or offers fatuous, crude, and dishonest drivel. I think the latter.
I hear Regnery has signed up Hitchens and Horowitz to coauthor a book tentatively titled “Clintonland”.
I would actualy be very surprised if Hitchens became any kind of Catholic. He is after all, one of the world’s most famous atheists, and has been violently hostile to Christianity and the Catholic church virtually his entire adult life. It’s not true that he has a taste for the most extreme position: he does after all write for Slate and The Atlantic, both homes of gutless centrism. And this wouldn’t be like moving from the ultra left to the neocon right. After all, the argument that the real Left must oppose communism absolutely, and the only way to oppose it is to unequivocally embrance the leading conservative bullshit has been insistently made since the Popular Front. I would also point out that in the mid to the late nineties, Hitchens’ hatred of Clinton and Kissinger began to overwhelm the reasons why he hated them. So supporting the Republicans and the neocons made sense for someone for whom indignation was more important than actual conduct. By contrast, there is no one he hates today so much that Catholicism would appear as a reasonable alternative. None of the leading Republican contenders are Catholic, and the few conservative Catholic Hitchens knows aren’t very interested or very good in manipulating his sentimental attitude towards Trotsky and Luxemburg. Hitchens’ “patriotism” also works against any turn to Catholicsm. Orwell, his model on this, professed a vision of England (his term by the way) in which most people are decent, except for a tiny minority of decadent, treacherous, alienated intellectuals–against whom it takes infinite courage to stand against. Neoconservatism offers Hitchens the same kind of vicarious solidarity in American political life. This is not a solidarity that looks at minorities very carefully or challenges hegemonic ideas of nation. And the one thing about both the United States and England, is that most Americans and Englishmen are not Catholics. (Indeed, on the rare occasions that Hitchens says something nice about his native country, it is the patriotic tradition of “Protestant atheism.”)
He was also a vehement anti-Republican, and an anti-colonialist. Go read his righteous screeds on Henry Kissinger, or his fundamentally anti-colonialist criticism of Mother Theresa. And he writes for Slate and The Atlantic because he decided to resign his biweekly column for The Nation because he supported the Iraq War – and while The Nation is many things, not all of them good (I say as a long-time subscriber), it’s hardly a home of gutless centrism.
One of the weirder things I’ve ever heard on the radio was a debate on the role of religion between Hitchens and Ex-Prime-Minister Newly-Catholic-Zealot Tony Blair. Hitchens – who as a Neoconservative is one of the few friends Tony Blair has in the world – was fairly nice to Blair and even a bit soft on the Catholic Church by his standards, while being disparaging about religion in general and Islam in particular. I don’t think Hitchens would convert – but if he did, it would probably be to Blair’s Catholicism.
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the Church.
“Tested by research”, eh?
If n<2500 nun-fuckers and your control group is not screened for non-Catholics, your study is hopelessly compromised…
Hitchens restated his atheism quite recently. Apparently some of his religious friends have raised their hopes of a late or deathbed conversion and he has stated kindly but firmly that should there be such a conversion it will only be evidence that his mind went at the end.