Although he has certainly devalued his own currency over the past several years, I don't yet have quite the same visceral reaction toward Christopher Hitchens as some do. I keep wanting to give him just one more chance to explain himself, though that continues to rapidly diminish with each successive failure on his part to do so. Maybe it's because I enjoyed the cranky contrarianism of The Missionary Position, or because I can at least appreciate his continuous pamphleteering about historical figures of genuine import.
Whatever his manifest faults and substantive misapprehensions, Hitchens brings a level of erudition to the right's flawed arguments that they sorely lack in their usual screamfest arenas. But as Hitch showed last night on Real Time, in the face of real-world developments, his fancy prattle has unfortunately devolved into ornate furbelows merely designed to distract from the truth and defend the indefensible.
It doesn't bother me in the least that Hitchens repeatedly flipped off Maher's audience; it's even odds that several members of the audience flipped him off either before or after. It's childish either way, but what's worse is the substance of his continued assertions. The only thing Iraq's new vaunted "unity" government can seem to "unify" on is that our continued presence is the defining problem facing their country.
That's actually not 100% true (though of course we initiated all this chaos and destruction), but it doesn't matter anymore; what matters is that they've had enough of us, and all that's left is to figure out how to start backing out with some small measure of dignity intact, before the sects continue slaughtering each other, the country partitions, and Iran and Turkey prepare their own regional power moves. None of these features will be remotely democratic, aside from the slim hope of a successful Iraqi Kurdistan.
Hitchens refuses to acknowledge any of this, to his lasting shame. He continues to have nothing useful to say, and he continues to say it extremely well. But he should remember that he changed his mind once before, as events conspired and developed, which is what adaptive, pragmatic people must do. I distinctly recall one of his toddling, rum-soaked appearances on Dennis Miller's HBO show early in 2001. Both of them sniggered (to use Hitchens' own disdainful epithet) at the inarticulate babble of a clearly-in-way-over-his-head George W. Bush. Hitchens in particular kept making a point of how Bush's defenders kept inadvertently damning him with faint praise by attesting to how "able" and "capable" Dubya was.
Disaffected liberals of the goodbye-to-all-that stripe, when challenged on Bush's continued babbling inarticulateness, invoke various tropes that generally revolve around Bush's avowed unwavering singularity of purpose, as if being steadfast about sticking your hand -- or more accurately, other peoples' hands -- into a garbage disposal is "purposeful". Hitchens being Hitchens, he naturally relies on the headiest of this sort of cliché, the contrast of the hedgehog and the fox. But as Billmon amply shows, Bush is a hedgehog, but in exactly the wrong way.
People like Hitchens and Miller used to know better. Bush did not get any more intelligent or perceptive because of 9/11, it just made him even more hard-headed, even less susceptible to reason and persuasion, even less likely to adapt to real-world developments on the ground. Worse yet, it has not made him any more eager to learn anything useful about the region which he believes he not only can reinvent, but should. Hitchens also knows that salient fact, which he conveniently elides on each and every broadcast call to arms.
I don't know how old Hitchens' kids are, but when the time comes, I have no doubt that he will gladly consign them to their fate, running herd on the grand scheme of a fool and his cadre of enablers, of which he has proudly been one of the more prominent.
Hitchens may exhibit some shame and intellectual spine if he had been a right-winger from the very beginning. But he's an ideological turncoat -- a former Trotskyite turned armchair strategist and neocon agit-prop minister. Remember, for both these groups public morality is merely instrumental -- you may use it only insofar as it helps you achieve political objectives (that is, you have to appear to be moral when circumstances require it). But neither ideological party can afford the luxury of genuinely believing in bourgeois moral principles and ordinary notions of decency. That can only lead a true revolutionary to perdition.
ReplyDeleteAnd, if you appear to sound incresingly hollow and unconvincing, just keep hammering on relentlessly, like a Soviet bulldozer.
--M.
Right Marius, and in that regard, Hitch is not much better than David Horowitz. I guess what surprises me most about Hitchens' apparent conversion is his fealty to what he quite recently despised in overt fashion. He was still deriding US conduct in Vietnam even into 2001, as I recall, long after even the Vietnamese had let it go. So it's somewhat striking that he doesn't see any parallels at all in Iraq, even in terms of fourth-generation warfare.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, perhaps that is Hitchens' real role -- to put an erudite turn of phrase and brainier accent on a mindless policy. Until the policy expands and his kids reach draft age, one presumes.
Kids, a 30-year mortgage, college trust funds -- I suspect these are too bourgeois for the former underminer of the corrupt Western world. Plus, he's still a grungy drunk, the one thing he learned thoroughly as he was sharpening his teeth in the British press. Raising a decent family demands a good deal of self-restraint, and patience with tedious everyday routines. But this is exactly what the radical is often missing (hence his impatience with gradualist policies of improvement, and enthusiasm for 'revolutionary' quick fixes). Joseph Conrad, a man who had suffered at the hands of authoritarians of all sort, put it best in The Secret Agent: many a radical is moved by a “dislike of all kinds of recognized labour,” which, says Conrad, is “a temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid in the same coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly.”
ReplyDeleteI grant that Hitchens has an occasional sharp wit, an even sharper tongue and, what most contemporary neocon enthusiasts lack, intimate knowledge of recent history. He's been around for a while -- so he knows a good deal about his new ideological adversaries, and is very good ad ad hominem attacks. He also has the effective rhetorical skills of the failed writer, which is way more than can be said for the dimwitted assclowns at The Corner. But his arguments are muddled, and his attempts at coherence smack of desperation. No wonder; he often tries to defend unsalvageable positions.
--M.