Nonsensical Hitchens Has Become a Joke
By MATT KENNARD, Columnist
Photo by flickr’s ensceptico
I remember the first time I read Christopher Hitchens. I wasn’t that old, maybe 13 or 14, but even at that young age I recall being dazzled by his command of the English language, his razor-sharp mind and the courage he demonstrated in unashamedly taking on society’s sacred cows – those institutions or individuals elevated to sainthood by popular culture for reasons often divorced from reality. Hitchens has dispatched Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa with righteous ferocity during his career.
I had been bought up on a self-inflicted diet of George Orwell, and, as a kid, I remember wondering what it might be like to have a mind of Orwell’s caliber when talking about current events. Hitchens was not Orwell, but I trusted him in the same way, believed that he had an independent mind; that he would not lie if he knew the truth.
As an ex-pat British journalist now living in the United States, just like Hitchens, I still follow his career and writings with keen interest. He is now a big, bright star in the American media firmament, talking on endless chat shows and lending his writings on politics and literature to a host of august journals.
Back when I first started reading him Hitchens was on the left, but that wasn’t what attracted me to him. He used his journalism to take on the powers that be, whether they were left, right or center. He had a disdain for platitudes, for lazy narratives and baseless hearsay. He had written expertly on the criminal Turkish occupation of Cyprus, the subject of his first book; he penned acerbic polemics on the criminal U.S. war in Indochina; he vented against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Hitchens was never a bien-pensant on the left, however: he supported the Falklands War, and intermittently came out with shock positions that would offend his comrades. But even if you disagreed with him, you had to concede he was thinking for himself, and his equations had some equilibrium.
Hitchens is a different man now. His facile word skills are still there, his fearless attacks on venerated institutions, his quick mind, but he’s not serious like he was. His pronouncements make no sense and have no inherent logic. Instead of expressing rational thinking in cute phrases, he now, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, dresses up flatulence in bouquets.
I’ve been watching him during the 2008 election and his illogical and strange pronouncements have really been embarrassing to watch. It’s telling that the point when his political bearings went off-kilter was the same point when the establishment started to accept him with open arms. Now he is everywhere; you literally can’t turn on the TV without his brash private-schoolboy schtick in your face.
His position in the 2008 election is that you have to support Obama because, (a) John McCain is senile, for which Hitchens provides no evidence, apart from a few linguistic lapses, which are inevitable as the factor of speeches goes up on the campaign trail. And (b) Sarah Palin is a religious fanatic hostile to reason and science.
On (b) he is undoubtedly correct and any right-thinking person couldn’t disagree (probably she doesn’t even). But, wait. Hitchens himself voted for George W. Bush in 2004. Yes, the same president who doesn’t believe in evolution, wants creationism taught in schools, is against stem-cell research and acted like a zealot in the Terry Schiavo case. Doesn’t that qualify as religious fanaticism? Why does he suddenly care now about religious fanaticism when Bush’s pea-in-a-pod Sarah Palin is the vice presidential candidate?
The only reason I can think of is after supporting the Iraq war, he just doesn’t want to be caught on another sinking ship.
Just think about it. McCain is Hitchens ideological bedfellow:
(1) Hitchens says he used to be a single-issue voter on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to the Western world. Well, McCain is probably even more hawkish than Bush (if possible) and wants to bomb Iran. Surely that would get Hitchens on board, especially as Barack Obama wants to – shock, horror! – talk to the leaders of Iran before bombing them.
(2) McCain, like Hitchens, had a religious fervor when supporting the war in Iraq and the surge. But Obama was against both.
(3) And Hitch, if religion is your problem, McCain is much less fanatical than Bush. Even McCain’s foreign policy is closer to Hitchens than Bush. Bush recently took the slave state North Korea off the terrorist list, against McCain’s wishes, and I’m assuming Hitchens’. Obama has said he would talk to Kim Jong-Il.
So Hitchens’ ideas are nowhere; he is scrambling to patch together his disintegrating platform and it shows. He has used Palin’s fanaticism – nothing worse than his previous favorite for top office, Bush – as an excuse to go against a presidential candidate who is actually in agreement with all his ideas. It’s cheap and see-through, but hey, this is Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens nowadays is even too dense to have an opinion on domestic policy. Nowhere does he comment on taxes, or health care; he just doesn’t care. Why? Well, foreign policy gives his ego full license to wander off on macho rants about murdering scum fascists, but you don’t get any of those primal screams on domestic policy because it’s not some abstract fantasy about Good and Evil, about democracy and fascism or any other puerile oppositions.
The descent of Hitchens into some fat joke, the risible and edgy plaything of the American right wing, has really been solidified by his weird performance in the 2008 election. Conservatives in the U.S. have expressed surprise at his about-face, and this is a perfectly legitimate emotion. Hitchens disgraced himself by backing Bush in 2004, but perhaps, worse now, he has now shown himself to have no spine, his faculties of clear thought and logic have been jettisoned in clear daylight by not backing McCain.
It’s not tragic though. Hitchens is good for a laugh. Watch him on a show and he will be arrogant and rude, he will make funny one-liners, he will give you all the good branding he has worked on so assiduously. But that’s what he is: a stand-up comic, not a political thinker.
Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.
I’m glad someone else is saddened by the bizarre, twisting fall of a former hero of mine. I can only assume that Hitchens is now suffering from early onset dementia. What basis do I have for that? None, but neither does he for calling McCain senile. (And although I’d do anything to see McCain get elected, I don’t for a minute think he’s senile.)
I don’t think Hitchens even believes half the stuff he’s spouting these days.
Amen brother! It is strange that I agree so much with Hitchens on religion but when he gets to politics it’s like he enters the bizzaro world. He is paradoxical in a sense because he gives the pretense of being a clear thinker and lucid word smith, yet he goes to great lengths to make his positions slippery and semi-unintelligible. My theory is that he knows that he is not the most intelligent and astute observor on the far left, and this is extremely frustrating to his ego. So he has to create his own ideological platform to be unique, elusive, and therefore beyond people’s grasp in order to feel like a top-dog again. But the only way he can do this is by contorting and straining the application of his espoused ethical principles in strange and inconsistent ways (as the above piece illustrates). If you watch his debate with Scott Ritter you can see him use his slimy debating tactics to keep his position slippery enough to be elusive. He resorts to cheap debating tactics, logical inconsistencies and sophistry to elude the reality of total defeat. It is sad in a way. I think I parted ways with him after the Kissinger stuff. Maybe he should just write fiction like his hero Rushdie. Has anyone seen his book of letters where he gives himself the last word in every exchange…what a cheap tactic…. But why I am I suprised?