Humanizing The Vacuum

Ta-Nehisi Coates, responding to Glenn Greenwald taking Hitchens to task over his blustery support for the Iraq war:

Virtues don’t excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it’s potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery’s expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.

At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either “justice” versus “self-preservation.” To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Or, from one of Coates’ own comments below the post:

But on the broader question, for me, so much of this comes back to writing and race. If I disqualified people for the horrendous ideas they held or advanced, my personal canon would be sliced in half. I don’t think those horrendous ideas should be shooed away. But they aren’t a counter to whatever better ideas the person espoused. You can be a horrendous bigot, and a great father. You can be a raving misogynist and a great novelist. Neither cancels the other out–though I understand people often write as though it should.

To be fair to Greenwald, he doesn’t say so either.

I saw him on the God is Not Great tour in May 2007 at a local synagogue. The set-up reads like a hoary joke: a rabbi, Catholic priest, and iman awaited their rounds with the great boxer, smiling like tetanus victims. As I recall he reduced the venerable Nathan Katz, religious studies professor at FIU, to tight-lipped rage when Hitchens attacked him for endorsing the most reactionary elements of Judaism. “How dare you? How DARE you, sir?” Hitchens thundered, like Orson Welles as Father Mapple in Moby-Dick.

At the post-lecture book signing (for which he absented himself twenty minutes and returned, emitting discreet waves of scotch and Marlboro Reds), he held up the line by talking sweetly and without condescension to old ladies who wanted book recommendations. I hadn’t bought God is Not Great yet, but I brought my copy of Paine’s Age of Reason. His face darkened when he noticed it wasn’t the canary-yellow hardcover. “I’m very sorry, sir, but my publisher [eyes roll] ordered me not to sign any book that’s not my own.” He must have seen my momentary embarrassment because he very quickly added, “But let’s keep this one between ourselves because your taste is extraordinary.” He recommended a couple of chapters for me to emphasize and signed my book “with love” from “Hitch.”

I came to Hitchens late: his name popped up in early 1999 in the waning days of the impeachment proceedings against his nemesis Bill Clinton – as I understood it at the time he and a friend, Clinton flak Sidney Blumenthal, fell out over conversations which may or may not have been on the record. Then came 9/11 and the furor with which Hitchens assailed the left for malfeasances committed by Noah Chomsky and later Gore Vidal, both of whom had been beloved mentors. But I won’t scratch this scab again. I’d wager that we’ll be reading Hitchens on Byron, Powell (about whose A Dance to the Music of Time he could not convince me deserved the considered look), Waugh, Kipling, Wilde, and a forgotten speech about Jewry and Daniel Deronda published in 1993′s For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports that is a masterpiece of probity, especially when one remembers how he discovered his own Jewishness (one of the first and best chapters in his memoir Hitch-22).

I won’t say farewell or “rest in peace” – it’s vulgar, and the man’s dead already. Read his books.

The Awl publishes a long, truculent, loving analysis of The Christopher Hitchens Problem. Maria Bustillos identifies what makes Hitchens crusade — I mean this literally — against religion such a bore, even to those of us who embrace the instinct with enthusiasm:

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens’ best-selling diatribe, enumerates his (quite justifiable) hatred of the crimes committed in the name of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc., without bothering to acknowledge that the cruel and greedy will twist any institution at all, religious or secular, to suit their purposes. All three authors appear to believe that Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc., are literally evil organizations.

Can these authors (one of whom wrote The Selfish Gene, one of the most fascinating and brilliant books of the last century,) really be so boneheaded as to fail to understand that every institution, political, academic or religious, can be, and has been, ennobled by free-thinking, brilliant men and women as often as they have been perverted by criminals and thieves and idiots? Yes, there is Pat Robertson, and there is Fred Phelps, and there are also Dr. Rowan Williams and Reinhold Neibhur and Bishop Fuglsang-Damgaard and countless principled and even heroic men and women of faith, it seems ridiculous to have to say.

Bustillos is incorrect about one point: after scoffing at Hitchens’ disinterest in the King James Bible and Dalai Lama, she wonders: “Hitchens mawkishly advises that we seek the infinite in ‘the beauty and mystery of the double helix’ instead. Why not a rose? Seriously.” I can find several instances in God is Not Great, among other Hitchens books, in which Hitchens praises religious art, Milton, George Herbert, and, yes, the King James Bible itself.

But I defend him for the same reasons Bustillos does:

But there is the business, there is the performance of a journalistic persona, there is the professional bon vivant, and there is also the man, whose voice on the page is still so young and alive, and who belies all the bullshit sometimes, even now.

She closes with an excerpt from an address delivered squarely at the young audience of the Prestonwood Christian Academy — a beautiful one. I won’t cite it here. Read it yourself.

Martin Amis on his beloved comrade Hitchens:

Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs. Similarly, he is an utter stranger to what Diderot called l’esprit de l’escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase is sometimes translated as “staircase wit” – far too limitingly, in my view, because l’esprit de l’escalier describes an entire stratum of one’s intellectual and emotional being. The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious drinks party, or indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory desire, has just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself on your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of persuasion, can haunt you for a lifetime – particularly, of course, when the staircase was the one that might have led to the bedroom.

As a young man, Christopher was conspicuously unpredatory in the sexual sphere (while also being conspicuously pan-affectionate: “I’ll just make a brief pass at everyone,” he would typically and truthfully promise a mixed gathering of 14 or 15 people, “and then I’ll be on my way”). I can’t say how it went, earlier on, with the boys; with the girls, though, Christopher was the one who needed to be persuaded. And I do know that in this area, if in absolutely no other, he was sometimes inveigled into submission.

The most felicitously written paragraphs concern themselves with the limited imagination of the atheist and the final expiration of the Hitch, consigned to join the cosmic dust:

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence” – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.

How I define my politics rests on my conflicted understanding of Ronald Reagan, specifically his Ronald Reagan-ness. Even conservatives who think the New Deal was a boondoggle grant FDR the courtesy of a high historical ranking, so it doesn’t surprise me that liberals concede Reagan’s Importance In the Grand Scheme of Things. Men like Reagan fascinate me: these men from nowhere, defined by an ambition that will cut any obstacle in its path, yet are hollow inside, coming off as stand-ins for themselves. Their children don’t like them much. The wives stoically accept that for-better-or-worse means sitting with a rictus grin through years of the rubber chicken circuit. Think of Jay Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane. Watch Reagan at this press conference held after the stock market crash of 1987. Although he speaks well (“Silver water on peach fuzz” is Edmund Morris’  excellent description of his voice) and mostly without notes, there’s a sense in which a tape recorder switched on in his brain and played his responses to reporters while Reagan dozed elsewhere. He does come close to losing his shit near the end when, switching from communicator to pedagogue, he lectures a no doubt dazed Sam Donaldson, “Let me REMIND you that [John] Maynard Keynes didn’t even have a degree in economics.”

With the exception of the ’86 tax reform, I find most of Reagan’s financial policies — deregulation, savings and loan, tax cuts — disastrous and in the long term deadly. The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 had its roots in his administration. Try explaining this to a conservative. Remind them that with one hand Reagan cut the top income tax rate and with the other signed the largest tax increase in US history to date and they’ll walk away. It’s also not a good idea for a president to show such disinterest in the banalities of daily governmental operations that two successive national security advisers ran a junta out of the White House. Liberals are a surly bunch; they’ve long accepted FDR’s weaknesses. The lip-trembling hysteria of the Reagan centennial indicates that conservatives still don’t get it, and the media loves heroes more than the fate of conservatism.

I still recommend Morris’ vilified Dutch for the quality of its prose (I laughed out loud several times) and the judiciousness of his anecdotes. If you want a well-paced revisionist take on what Reagan did right regarding the Cold War, James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan will do. Finally, Christopher Hitchens’ mordant eulogy (“A cruel and stupid lizard”) is much livelier than the enervated thing Slate posted today.

From Hitchens’ latest:

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a “racial” matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that “Hispanic” immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It’s more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there’s nothing racial in their attitude …

As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it’s divine!

As effective as Hitchens’ latest column is, it’s not just rote, but my inability to separate my satisfaction in his attacking the right for a change mitigates its impact. Dismissing Glenn Beck’s rally in DC last weekend, he uses a term I’ve long wielded against the misshapen kind of conservatism I’ve seen the last fifteen years: self-pity. These guys are all, “Poor me. Give me a break.” It undermines their purported toughness and  self-reliance:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be.

My Christopher Hitchens anecdote:

I saw him on the God is Not Great tour in May 2007 at a local synagogue. Rousing lecture. At the post-lecture book signing (for which he absented himself twenty minutes and returned, emitting discreet waves of scotch and Marlboro Reds), he held up the line by talking sweetly and without condescension to old ladies who wanted book recommendations. I hadn’t bought the book yet, so I asked him to sign my copy of Paine’s Age of Reason. His face darkened when he saw the title. “I’m very sorry, sir, but my publisher [eyes roll] ordered me not to sign any book that’s not my own.” He must have seen my momentary embarrassment because he very quickly added, “But let’s keep this one between ourselves because your taste is extraordinary.” He recommended a couple of chapters for me to emphasize and signed my book “with love” from “Hitch.”

Florid patches notwithstanding, Hitchens’ essay on coping with cancer is extraordinary, and quite different from Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, the most recent classic in the  “grief writing” genre, in which she mastered with more art than usual her trick of expunging any trace of ego and id from a personal essay. Favorite bit, on becoming a citizen of a “new land”:

The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Flipping through Hitch-22, I found the first instance of the phrase “my friend Michael Chertoff” rearing its head.

Never one to overlook the chance to publish a few mordant zingers at Sarah Palin’s expense (“courageous frontier huntress”), Christopher Hitchens uncovers the depths to which the former Alaska governor will sink to get invited to future Sunday brunches with Peggy Noonan and Cokie Roberts: she asked RNC hack Fred Malek to escort her to the Gridiron dinner, where, according to Malek, she was a big hit: “It was gratifying to see the high regard shown to her by many of Washington’s leading lights.” No doubt. Hitch reminds us that Malek in the Nixon administration (Nixon: “haunted scoundrel and repressed psychopath”) compiled the names of Jews employed as civil servants. Very gratifying.

It probably doesn’t matter: Palin’s a real shrewdie: the chance that the Sunday morning talk show hosts will punish her with anything other than a wink-wink nudge-nudge slap on the wrist diminishes the chummier she gets with them. The Democrats are witless. Besides, should anything torpedo Palin’s crawl towards 2012, men like Malek aren’t worried anyway. ”The bottom line is that we as a party have an embarrassment of riches with a number of extremely capable and well-qualified potential candidates,” he wrote on his website.