If sack and sugar be a fault...

First, read this:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/02/hitchens-201002



When I feel punchy, like now, Hitchens seems nothing more than a lubed-up Brit with a good grasp of history and a flair for tested yet worn Anglo syntax and diction that Americans find delightful. Armed with these and a desire for thoughtful mischief, he has to his credit found an audience, composed (predominantly) of pale men who feel that the whole bloody Earth is off its axis, and damnit/bollocks! when WILL our united voice again ring across vales and over hillocks? When will WE be not only right, but righteous, again?


Worse is the transparent psychology behind Hitchens’ look-at-me contortions on the public stage. Granted, if my mother had slit her throat with her lover in a suicide pact when I was a teen, I’d likely have authority issues as well. His (resultant?) embarrassingly public drinking regimen completes the picture of a sympathetic figure----but one wants a political writer to hold those wolves. (Hunter T is dead for a reason.)  Solution? Hitchens rejects any discussion of his drinking as an ad hominem attack, suggesting that his critics haven’t better arguments to counter his ideas (usually borrowed, these, and stylized). To be clear: mine IS an unabashed attack on the man, a suggestion as to why you shouldn’t take him seriously.  Cheers.


Hitchens’ readers ingest a combination of prep school smarm and developmentally retarded neurosis that feels so very much like edgy truth. I will qualify this ugly assertion, that Hitchens is specious on a good day, and Falstaffian on a bad one. He takes the old maxim of “not liberal when young = no heart…not conservative when old = no brain,” and turns it on its ear: “not everything when it suits a Britney Spearsian self-promotion at all times = not famous/irrelevant/poor/unpublished.” Hitchens is a reality-show lit-critter. Ratings, baby. Bend the story, and worse, bend your beliefs to fit.



I. Religityousness



What is it to be a “new Atheist?” A lot like being an old Atheist, but more pissed off that everyone doesn’t get it already.

Hitchens is terrifically skilled in political nonbelief as well. Or rather, switching between belief systems so often as to make his pronouncements weightless. A Marxist first, the next year a radical, the next a garden-variety liberal, a libertarian, a neo-con, a conspiracist and anti-conspiracist in equal measure.
In short, a polemicist ceases to be relevant when he visits most every point of the compass. One can’t have it all ways.
In God is Not Great, the formula is clear: flood the emotions of the reader and hope that he will throw his hands up and agree that God is a fabrication, reject the very notion of Faith based on how dreadfully unfair life appears to be. What, I ask, do one man’s sob stories have to do with the dissolution of all religious belief?

Unless Hitchens turns out to be a modern-day Job on a bad day…eh. The sentence finishes itself. The sad boy mothered terribly, two sips past slurry yet still thirsty for attention, has struck a chord with those not disciplined enough to dig into the same arguments made in seminaries around the world. Life has treated you roughly, Chris. That isn’t the world’s burden to bear. It is yours alone.

The beautiful thrust of thought circling the science vs. religion debate is the assessment of the middle ground, to realize that the “miracles” in the Bible (let’s just talk Christian here for a minute) are explicable in that earlier man hadn’t the language of, or the empiricism behind, Science. The ways we discuss creation are built with the tools of the time: imagination and words. One needs a story, an answer, to quiet the nightmare of wondering Why? How? Especially before one had so much knowledge at one’s fingertips. I.e., can we shut the fuck up about Adam and Eve already? Clearly that’s a human story to explain our origins when we had no concept of primordial ooze. But it gets written. And practiced. And fought over.


But it isn’t incompatible with science—it’s simply an artistic rendering of an event unimaginable to those who wrote it. (Yes, I am dismissing fundamentalist thought, so solly.)


An evolved mind might recognize that some great gift was bestowed upon us, however we came to be having this very nuanced argument! And here we are. Forced to struggle with the idea that the original screed is wrong, a valiant attempt at explaining science when there WAS NO SCIENCE. That creation and science are hand in hand. We got the script wrong, not for lack of trying but for lack of test tubes and glass and fire and practice, a few grand ago. Now in the vacuum of study, we cotton to ideas from a fat Brit bitchboy lush who’s mad at God? No thank you.


Any good scientist ought to be able to face up and say, “Shit, man, this stuff is beyond me. Something else is at work here. I’m not sure what to call it, but until I figure it out, until my well-funded experiments yield an Answer, until I know where we came from and where we go, I won’t piss on belief to sound important.” The rest is bread and circuses.


p.s., Don’t make me bust out the late-career Einstein quotes.



II. Kill Father


Rejecting Gore Vidal at 85(!) years of age has the whang of an angry eulogy at dear Dad’s funeral. When admiration is deeply felt, the pain of disagreement is felt exponentially. This equation helps to quantify the depth of the Vidal dismissal. His literary father took (as Chris himself puts it) a “suicidal” course on matters politic. Ah, so. The twice rejected boy feels again the deepest sting of “parental” departure…but this time, the son is an adult hardened by experience and scotch, and so he strikes back.


Like a father, Vidal helped to make Hitchens. Before their mutual admiration led Vidal to pronounce Chris his literary heir, Hitchens was academy-famous. A name to drop to demonstrate a basic level of with-it-ness at a party. After, he was table conversation.


Hitchens is now most like Vidal thusly: one who stays up nights writing put-downs. Simple bombast.

The difference is, Vidal has laurels aplenty upon which to rest his palsied hand. Et tu, fattysmoke?


Finally, let’s remind ourselves of this plain fact: in fifty years, Vidal’s name will still be spoken in the circles that matter. Hitchens will be mentioned as a footnote, a wry aside.


III. 9/11


The final chapter is my most personally felt. Hitchens’ rejection of Vidal’s 9/11 question is simply arrogant. Shrugging off the question of “what really happened” that day is repellent, especially given his baseless reason: that these are "guttersnipe arguments."


Oh yeah. Because Ockham’s razor works soooo well here. To wit: an old family friend of the Bushes trains a bunch of pissed off Saudis (you know, nothing to live for in SA) to fly planes into important buildings that a creepy landlord (Larry Silverstein) wants to get rid of anyway, and who stands to make (and does) $14bil in insurance money, and who, for some reason, already had WTC 7 rigged to detonate (which he does, and admits to later, on tape)………...but that’s got NOTHING to do with it, and neither does Bush’s 20% approval rating and mandate-less presidency that was immediately puffed up, and a war that he was itching to fight for old dad was started, which had nothing to do with Al-Q… Yes. That’s the simplest explanation of what happened.

And I’m not EVEN going into all the other 9/11 truth stuff. We’ll have plenty of time to explain to our kids in 20 years.
Sigh. If anyone should at least investigate further, it ought to be a self-proclaimed gadfly like Hitchens! The unlikely truth is that the very man who ought to have championed lit-dad’s thoughts was sick of being Gore Vidal Jr., and he strategically ran the hell away from his Pops at the most populist-pleasing moment. Whore!

Hitchens is a sad clown, smarter than Maher but similarly bent on seeking fame, not truth. A once-promising mind corroded, a once thick heart now grey and elastic. Avoid him, fight his ugly soul at every turn.



The “sad coda” he claims is the end of Vidal is, in fact, A last desperate grab at the memory of better days, when people spoke of them warmly in the same breath, not the cold Page-6 chatter we hear now. Vidal is 85. Eighty…five. He is lucky to be writing anything of merit, and should have earned some small degree of respect from the one person he helped most.



Balls to you, Chris. I give you ten years to live, and five to wring the last pale reflection of your former self onto the page.