..out of the dark

In what is shaping up to be the worst eulogy-competition since Reagan died, we have now passed through: the first bout of fawning admiration from Hitchens' fans (whom he would have hated intensely). Then the second barrel-jump of apologetic relativism ("Maybe moral bankruptcy is a sign of courage in our times?"). And then over to the final leg in the "but certainly the man was a courageous and vivant journalist anyway!" run.

The best of which turned out to be this one:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher

And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.

It wasn’t just the position itself, it was his lordly condescending assumption that he could sort this whole thing out for the ladies in 1,000 words that probably took him twenty minutes to write.

Well done! Strip away the pretentious language - and you would be left with an opinion so abhorrent in itself, and so brutishly arrogant, that any point he may have attempted to polemicise about was lost. While any discussion would be scuttled before it began. But wait, the eulogy isn't over yet, so let's see what this flash of clarity will be followed by.

I don’t know how long Christopher will be read. Posterity isn’t kind to columnists and essayists and book reviewers, even the best ones. I doubt we’d be reading much of Orwell’s nonfiction now had he not written the indelible novels 1984 and Animal Farm. But as a vivid presence Christopher will be long remembered. A lot of writers, especially political writers, are rather boring as people, and some of the best writers are the most boring of all—they’re saving themselves for the desk. Christopher was the opposite—an adventurer, a talker, a bon vivant, a tireless burner of both ends of the candle. He made a lot of enemies, but probably more friends. He made life more interesting for thousands and thousands of people and posed big questions for them—about justice, politics, religion, human folly. Of how many journalists can that be said?

And once again. In spite of Hitchens having few and rare contributions, small or large, to any kind of debate at all - a very common trait among current political writers, admittedly - he must still be congratulated for being part of the self-inclusive circle of journalistic opinion makers. By which all serious and professional writers justify their own work, while dreaming of one day becoming such a controversial figure themselves, with such a large and engaged audience.

It's not really much of a wonder we see this type of admiration, though. Because Hitchens was the best of them. He beat everyone of the current political writers at what they attempted to do: namely write with engaging language about things they have no idea about, for the sole purpose of being at the middle of the stage when the play is conducted.

Hitchens excelled at this. He could, in a drunken stupor, pull an hour long lecture about jihadis and Islamic hostility to the west out of his ass, and genuinely impress all the "politically engaged" masses in the audience. He would do this with no concern about the actual subject-matter - the arguments would be based exclusively on linguistic tricks to plug established talking points, and I think Hitchens never gave Islam (or anything) much thought at all. But instead he had two goals with the lecture. One: to prove that he could improvise a lecture the "pro-human rights" think-tanks in Washington would need a week to prepare.

And two: to take the audience's euphoric condemnation of religion and blind faith, and push it down their throats again. Remember that the ones who would, and still do ride the "Islamic fear" the hardest are, almost exclusively, religious people themselves. We don't hear about this too often, but human rights organisations that donate massive amounts of funds to drive Israeli efforts on the West Bank, or for example to "politically suppressed" inside Iran (read: Ancient Christian churces), or disenfranchised in Egypt (read: Coptic Christians) - are predominantly Christian, and supported by activists who are Christian.

Hitchens was not stupid, and he knew how this worked. So if you wanted to make a point about blind faith - what better way to do it than at the expense of your own followers? It's not like opinion-makers ever managed to highlight how absurd the demand (a real, and very literal demand) that the president of the United States should be a god-fearing Christian. While religious people elsewhere would be inherently evil. How does this mesh? It only works when we already assume that our religion and our people are good, and they are evil and insane.

In fact, this was the premise of Hitchen's last book, which gave him a lot of trouble with large parts of the commentariat in Washington. Simply because he bends the popular polemics against faith against Christians as well.

I've seen the following happen twice. An evangelical Christian (who is otherwise sane) reads the first couple of chapters, and feels like finally someone who can speak with grand words have taken their side against the Islamic hordes. Then halfway out in the book, something happens, and the doubting Thomas comes out. This isn't a coincidence, of course. And while I would never attempt to suggest Hitchens had some sort of noble motive with any of this, the fact is that Hitchens got under people's skin on purpose.

Whether it was drawing out the Bush-administration's argument out to it's logical conclusion: "It doesn't matter if there are no WMDs!", or using his own bravado to complete a discussion with talking heads on Cable news that otherwise would have gone on uninterrupted for decades, or if it simply was talking on TV about something off the cuff he had no knowledge of, falling down on whatever side he would choose for the day - he provoked people.

"Intelligent" journalists in the US admired that. Because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and he sounded intelligent. He sounded British, he sounded clever and engaged - and that was all it took for a lot of people to ignore whatever else happened to fall out of his mouth at random.

Observe:

"In the past few years, I have written often about whether the figure of Saddam Hussein is or was a model taken from Hitler, from Stalin, or from some combination of the two. It has occurred to me recently that it can all be put more simply. He is or was a reincarnation of Jeffrey Dahmer. Look in his kitchen drawer, and you will find instruments of torture. Look in his bathroom cabinet, and you will find poisons. Look under his floorboards, and you will find bones and skulls. Look in his flowerbed, and you will stumble over body parts. Look in the rest of the garden, and you will find a substantial piece of a nuclear centrifuge, employed to make weapons of mass destruction."

But why would Hitchens pick this particular name? Problem is that Dahmer was a red-state conservative. He flipped out and started killing people, men, he was sexually attracted to. And he repented in jail later on and became a Christian. Eventually he was killed in jail by someone insisting they did the will of God. So why would Dahmer turn up here? Was it because Hitchens was preparing a deep polemic about Saddam's threat of nuclear weapons? Or was it simply because he was fascinated by the right's amazing ability to turn extremely bad arguments around, and simply insist - to public assent - that they were good ones after all?

In the same way - was Hitchens trying to argue up the winning side, and simply doing it too well? Or was he making a deliberate effort to simply piss people off. We shall never know.

I'm going to round up now. But what Hitchen's legacy is, is that he adopted the methods of the intellectually corrupt elite in the United States - and beat them to death in their own game. Occasionally that allowed others with nominal brainpower to point out the absurdity of the positions he defended more easily. But for the most part, Hitchens will forever simply be the most successful apparatchik of our time. Someone who found the right context to easily exploit stupid people. And who did so indiscriminately simply because it made his balls feel bigger.

Whatever else he did with his time will all be forgotten by next week.

And it will be no huge loss.