The Dialectic of Christopher Hitchens

in an effort to understand my own recent bout of sullen, quick-tempered wit and invective -- hurled at errant drivers and other equally obvious humans, be they walking in front of me too slowly or talking on their cell phones in a small, enclosed bookstore cafe -- i've been reaquainting myself with the works of christopher hitchens.

it strikes me now, as i write this, quite appropriate that i just posted on how the similarities between brett favre and jay cutler both excited me and gave me much pause. i feel the exact same way about christopher hitchens, and the dialect i refer to is the one of desire and derision.

hitchens' writings evoke in me the same mix of feelings: i read him because i want to write like him, with the same assurance, clarity, wit, phraseology, and insight. yet i find in his logic the same hypocrisy over which he so loves to crucify the american left. and his logical imperfections leave me frustrated and reactive.

it's quite possible, of course, that this is hitchens' intent. he is, after all, a self-described contrarian. he is also a self-described liberal interventionist. i consider myself a committed member of both camps, and yet, once the rush of excitement that only enlivened and brilliant writing can evoke washes over me, i want to unceremoniously shake him by the collar and pronounce him guilty of the same petty demagoguery he finds in, as he so often puts it (using the word "liberal" pejoratively), "every liberal in the world."

a quick anecdote to illustrate my point.

as described by ian parker in a recent new yorker article on the drunk writer -- a fair and honest accounting of hitchens, i would say -- hitchens rips into two women who, upon finding out that howard dean had not quite been truthful in an anecdote illurstrating why parental notification would impugn the rights of women. hitchens calls dean a demagogue, psycho, raving liberal who had the support of the left because he was anti-bush. he called him these names for telling the (partly-fictionalized, it turns out, though dean had made the audience believe it was a real patient of his) story of a girl who had been raped and left pregnant by her father. dean asked the crowd if parental notification laws seem like a good idea in such instances. the two women hitchens was talking with said that, to them, it didn't matter that dean had lied. he was a politician who was trying to make a point, and what mattered more than white lies were how he would govern.

hitchens would, naturally, have none of it. he told the women to "Fuck off" roughly five times. while i don't disagree with hitchens that being as truthful as possible at all times is important, especially in the case of politicians running for the highest office in the world, i think that, had dean simply said, "here's a possible scenario that we should consider when thinking about abortion laws," he would have been fine. but i don't he would have been for hitchens -- it's quite clear that if hitchens doesn't like you, which is usually the result of your disagreeing with him, he will simply cease his logical argument and hurl nasty invective after nasty invective directly in your face.

and that's where hitchens stops being a terrific writer and turns into a sodden, drunk, s.o.b. he does it, of course, with all the usual fanfare and witty prose you'd expect of hitchens. but that he does it is frustrating and symptomatic of a pompous, arrogant, and unilateral thinker. in another instance, hitchens concludes an otherwise spot-on essay wherein he explains his opposition to the death penalty for saddam hussein by writing,

"It is a shame that the Kurds were not part of the centerpiece of this trial, just as it is impressive that their leaders are the ones most in favor of magnanimity. And these, by the way, are the people that every liberal in the world is currently arguing that we should desert."

this is pure canard, and hitchens knows it. many liberals, myself included, argued against the iraq war because, in part, the kurds were already running their own part of iraq. further, many liberals want to see iraq divided into three areas, whether we pull out right away or not, to help protect the kurds' interests. very few liberals i know or read or talk to want to desert the kurds.

this single-minded assurance, arrogance, and simplistic thought reminds me of someone else: the very leader EVERY LIBERAL in the world despises.