The Inevitable…
By 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.