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Friday, December 16, 2011
Too Soon
If you're the kind of person who'd ever felt, for so much as a second, that your lifetime would be the poorer for it without a big, morally clear-cut, global battle between good and evil to decide the fate of the planet, and you were able to convince yourself that invading Iraq as part of the reaction to 9/11 was that conflict, that I can totally see how you'd be the kind of person who thinks that Christopher Hitchens was a great writer and thinker and one of the moral compasses of his generation.
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7 comments:
I already commented over at Whiskey Fire about how I couldn't stand him long before 9/11. As a natural-born contrarian myself, I think his contrarianism went way beyond any point of necessity and headfirst into just plain fuckheadedness and attention-whoring -- not to mention misogyny. Like the proverbial stopped clock, he was on point occasionally, but the rest of the time -- jeez, what an asshole.
Thank you for this. If I had to read one more time, "I disagreed with him a lot, but he was a damn good writer," I don't know what I would have done.
About five years or so ago, C-Span's "Book TV" aired a debate b/w Hitchens and a British MP named - I think - Galloway (Galway? Something like that) regarding the Iraq war. The MP was against it, Hitch, of course, was for it.
The debate was actually quite good. Both men were sharp, erudite, entertaining. And they brought to the debate the kind of British informality that you can see when you watch their Parliament, a far cry from the tepid politeness that is demanded of our politicians here.
But what struck me as strange was how each man seemed to have chosen his position on the war. For Hitchens, it seemed clear that some up close and personal experiences he had had with the Kurds when Hussein was slaughtering them had convinced him that any price was worth paying to rid the world of Saddam Hussein - full stop. And so he just could not be bothered to even contemplate the most rudimentary cost- benefit analysis of the war.
For the MP, he had spent a good deal of time attempting to help the Palestinians, and had been assisted in that by the Iraqi government. So he didn't think that Saddam Hussein was solely a force for evil; he looked at the war thru the lens of a small country being attcked - unprovoked - by a big country.
What struck me was that both these persons' entire view of the war came down to nothing more than who was wearing the black hat. And the actor wearing the black hat was whoever the person on stage identified as the bully. All that differentiated them was where they drew the line to decide that question.
For Hitchens, Hussein was the bully because he was bigger than the Kurds. For the MP, the US was the bully because we are bigger than Iraq.
For two very sharp, very well-spoken individuals, neither appeared to had given their position on the war more than the most rudimentary of thought.
That would be George Galloway, I'm sure.
The problem with people like him assigning Saddam the white hat is that it enables people like Hitchens to claim that anybody opposing the war is assigning Saddam the white hat. "Objectively pro-Saddam" was I believe the phrase that the Bushies (though not Hitchens, I hope: he was a good writer, and I trust too good for that) used.
Thanks for information.
Placentia Fitness
Hitches: frequently, horribly wrong, but (almost) always interesting.
Dear Phil,
Can I interest you in reviewing my new book of fiction, UGLY TO START WITH, published last month by West Virginia University Press?
I've won awards for my writing. If you write me back at johnmcummings@aol.com, I'll send you some information.
I would be grateful to hear from you.
Thank you.
Kindly,
John Michael Cummings
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