Christopher Hitchens died of cancer in 2011 at 62 — a stupendous loss. He was best known as one of “new atheism’s” “four horsemen” for his book God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything. A powerful indictment.
But Hitchens wrote so much it defies belief. And though I think of myself as well informed, I feel humbled* when reading Hitchens, who knew (and understood) everything about everything, knew everyone, had been everywhere, seen everything, done everything. And while I fancy I write well, I wish I could write like him. (A cup of coffee “tastes as if it were sucked up through a thin and soured tube from a central underground lake of stagnant bile.”)
I met him once, outside a humanist conference where he was to give the keynote address. I warned him it was a hostile audience, because he defended America’s overthrow of a monstrous tyrant, Saddam Hussein. But Hitchens was of course unfazed by the warning. (At the same event I also met, in the men’s room, the actual Schempp of Abington Township v. Schempp. Banning school prayer — is that still good law?)
Recently I read Hitchens’s Love, Poverty, and War, a 2004 compendium of previously published pieces. One critiques Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way. I’ve met her too, several times, and read the book (bought from her), which I thought nice enough. Hitchens did not. His review not only showcases his own deep immersion in the Proust oeuvre, but meticulously compares passages in Davis’s translation with previous ones, explaining just how he finds hers inferior. A typically incisive Hitchensian lit crit bout.
Unlike a 500+ page lit crit book, which Hitchens disembowels, by Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan’s lyrics. Negative reviews are much more fun to read than encomiums. Dylan himself comes in for some knocks — Hitchens disparages his singing ability — but gives plaudits for the words. Ricks though is called a fool. Hitchens also refers to “the sappiness, in both ‘sap’ senses, of adolescence.” That required some work to unpack, but it’s so spot-on. It seems Hitchens could write like that without even getting out of bed.
Another joy to read is his slicing and dicing of Michael Moore and his typically morally blind film Fahrenheit 9/11. Proving beyond peradventure that Moore is totally an asshole. I mean, like, totally, dude.
His essay about his visit to the Gettysburg battlefield is richly and deeply considered — more so than mine. He (unlike me) had the benefit of watching re-enactors. His musings on that whole scene; on Gettysburg’s historical significance; on war itself; and even on maleness all make this a great read.
We also both went, in the weeks after 9/11, to New York’s World Trade Center site. Everyone masked, prefiguring a later affliction; there it was defense against searing acrid air. I’d often conducted hearings in those towers, as well as attending an annual international coin show. But my 2001 pilgrimage was mainly as an American. So too for Hitchens — newly emigrated from Britain. His lines that spoke most to me were about patriotism which, he says, is universalist (denying that “all politics is local”). Hitchens would stand here, with these people, “the only place in history where patriotism can be divorced from its evil twins of chauvinism and xenophobia.” He ends thus: “Shall I take out the papers of citizenship? Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have.”
Yes, the America Hitchens loved is the one I love too. His kind of patriotism the one in my own soul. Something of which, he writes, the 9/11 hijackers had no idea. Nor, alas, do so many Americans today who wave the flag and flaunt their “patriotism” even as they dance around a bonfire of all the good this nation represents.
A related essay is Why Americans are not taught history. Its focus is upon conflict over how and what to teach. Of course there’s no canonical version of history. And always tongue-clucking over boringly teaching “names and dates.” But when a majority of high schoolers can’t say what century the Civil War occurred, we’re in trouble.
Hitchens wrote in 1999. Since then the curriculum battles have intensified while ignorance compounds. He approvingly quotes amateur textbook writer Joy Hakim’s intro that “learning about our country’s history will make you understand what it means to be an American.” Too many today are unencumbered by that; a key reason why what Hakim and Hitchens (and I) thought Americanism meant is in that bonfire.
My libertarian heart loved Hitchens’s account of trying to break as many laws as possible in a day. This was in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York. Oddly here, Hitchens never uses the term nanny state, but does call it “petty” when so many piddling “offenses” can be leaped upon by cops with arrest quotas. Like the guy fined $105 for sitting on a milk crate outside his place of employment. “Unauthorized use” of a milk crate being a punishable offense. Ownership of said crate being immaterial. Hitchens apparently eluded capture in his own crime spree, which did include a crate-sitting atrocity. “The essence of tyranny,” he wrote, “is not iron law. It is capricious law.”
Unsurprisingly he takes on religion. Fear of death is the heart of it. Hitchens explains that those who face its reality can better invest their lives (and humanity’s) with meaning — a false fantasy must fail at that. He also argues for atheism’s moral superiority, reasoning one’s way to ethics, as opposed to behaving in fear of Hell — when all is supposed to be controlled by God anyway. With the cognitive dissonance of crediting him for everything good in the world while confounded how to think about all its evils. And, if God does control everything, his followers acting as enforcers seems absurd. Hitchens sees there a connection between the religious mentality and the authoritarian/totalitarian one — partly accounting for the latter’s incorrigible prevalence.
Discussing Mel Gibson’s 2004 slasher film, The Passion of the Christ, Hitchens dwells on the crucifixion as God’s doing — which is indeed the very core of Christianity. Hard to figure then demonizing all Jews as Christ killers (not disavowed by the Vatican until the 1960s). Without Christ’s death there’d be no Christianity. But Hitchens doesn’t note the worst moral absurdity here — that God would snuff his son to expiate all humanity’s guilt for one person’s (Adam’s) supposed sin. What concept of justice could rationalize such collective guilt? And why not simply forgive it? And anyhow, Jesus did not “die for our sins.” He got resurrected. WTF?
Hitchens also had tackled Mother Teresa in The Missionary Position. Actually invited by the church to testify as “devil’s advocate” in her beatification proceedings, he was asked to swear an oath on the Bible. Given the setting, he opted to comply without demur. His indictment is mainly that Mother Teresa, rather than working to relieve poverty and sickness, actually fetishized them as gifts from God. Thus her “clinic” provided scant medical care. Hitchens notes that his Mother Teresa documentary was (against his wishes) titled Hell’s Angel. Prompting a trademark violation complaint from the similarly named motorcycle organization.
Not everything in the book is wonderful. His hit-and-run attack on the Dalai Lama — little more than two pages — mostly discusses crimes by other Buddhists (like Myanmar’s military, and that was before it declared war on the whole society). If this is Hitchens’s best shot, it confirms my view of the Dalai Lama as one of the world’s best people.
* Using the word in its correct literal sense. Most people saying they’re “humbled” actually mean the opposite — they’re bursting with pride.
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