Life and Dick of Christopher Hitchens

I’ve just finished Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch 22, a work larger than life for its scope and intensity and all the more so because within months of its release he has just recently announced that he has a bad form of cancer and that he is dying. This is a particularly gruesome irony when he opens the book with the idea of aging and mortality as the impetus behind it. More specifically, he cites a published misprint in which he is listed as dead.

What I mainly enjoyed was the depth and breadth of Hitchens’ thought, his acute intellectuality. To me it was like tasty and nutritious foodstuffs amid starvation. One can hardly find nowadays one of these old school intellectuals, the last of a hyper-educated breed whose scope of knowledge and classical training partially serves to show us what has been lost. Hitchens is a master rhetorician, stylist, polemicist, gadfly, but most of all an independent thinker in the face of a world of endangered intellectual values. If his book does nothing else for me it makes me appreciate once again the lenten state of journalism and the anti-intellectuality of today’s discourse. It’s so refreshing to hear somebody break from the rank and file thoughts and insidious political correctness that are so common as to be seen as givens instead of as the lame assumptions they truly are. (Not that he’s also not guilty of a calculated outrageousness.) Gore Vidal used to be a model for this but he got too old and apparently lost his marbles and became a fool of the worst kind: a 9/11 conspiracy crank. It really is too bad Vidal has spoiled himself: he’s like a declining TV show that should have been canceled but some executive didn’t know when to pull the plug.

I am not naïve in my apparent adulation of Hitchens. As with anybody I am on guard against his slippery and persuasive rhetoric, his convenient lacunae, his declarative axioms. I’m not blindly persuaded by his arguments and dodgy rationalizations and I do not accept his conclusions simply because I can follow his arguments. But I do trust that he is not going to be lazy or take the path of least resistance. I don’t think today’s writers and thinkers are necessarily more transparent and avoid the appearance of obfuscation. I just think they’re fat, content and happy and so are their readers. Disrupting comfort levels is not demanded of them by their audience or themselves. Out there is a world of many preachers and many choirs. The latter know which newspaper or magazine or website they can go to hear what they want to hear. Our current marketplace of ideas trades in the byte and the slogan and the sports fan mentality where you support your side, your party and piss on the other with prepackaged notions and phrases plucked from the air, from localized Zeitgeistes. There doesn’t seem to be the time and space for hair-splitting and lengthy reasoning, it’s much easier to forget the inconvenient grey areas with which reality insists on complicating matters. When I read most of what passes for journalism or when I hear everyday people get political I can quickly and easily pigeonhole their “position”, their limp stand on an issue usually well-chosen to be safely black and white. It’s amazing to see how these “arguments” exist out there and are picked up on by people and regurgitated through some mysterious process like the spread of urban legends. A fifteen year old that has never said a word is suddenly empowered by a slogan. Although I wouldn’t expect somebody to trust me, I don’t think this “pigeonholing” is narrow-mindedness because it can be tested. Am I not going to know what a Zinn or Chomsky thinks about any given subject? How about a person who denies global warming: what are the chances they think Obama isn’t a citizen? You only have to plug a given issue into their madlibs formulae to get in return the expected psittacism.

A lot of the reaction against Hitchens has been his apparent shifts, his changes of mind, his defections and apparent contradictions, but as he explains at length, and to highjack an analogy from the recalcitrant Howard Zinn, you cannot be neutral—and here I’d add unchanging—on a moving train. Hitchens quotes John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change then my opinions change: and you, sir?”

The book ends with a moving (especially in light of his imminent death) reevaluation of his life, of “grown-up” and sobering revisions of his former idealism, and a welcome (to me insofar as it is overdue) admission that in effect what was the old Left and any revolutionary clout it had to it is quite simply moribund. There are more personal confessions such as his doubt that he has been the father he should have been—the kind of very human doubts that plague one when youth and its lack of regrets is another far-off incarnation. I certainly respect Hitchens for his revisions and growth. I am suspicious of anybody whose positions and opinions do not change over decades. (Young people marching behind a banner of idealism now scare me—please keep them away from the guns.) How can one see the changing world with unchanging eyes? How can a person at forty take seriously ideas they had at twenty? I see this all the time, this complicating of things that used to be easy, this muddying of the black and white as the grey hairs sprout. It takes more bravery and integrity to explain to all your about-faces than to once again reaffirm an old and over-used dogma. Unfortunately the latter is admired as consistency and loyalty. That’s part of the Hitch-22 of the title: the dilemma of being consistent to your values while accommodating the untidy and changing world.

To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need… It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions.

I already mourn Hitchens’ probable passing. He is a rare inspiration to me. In him is embodied much that is lost: an insistent on argument, on being critical, or fighting for what is right and seeing through the bullshit that manages to cloud matters. There’s also the generous humanism which tries foremost to see humans qua humans, to endure and maybe even respect or adore those people with whom one disagrees “politically”, but who make up for it in wit or conviction or some je ne sais quoi, and at the same time to dislike that absence even in those who might be on the same “side”.

If you think I’m overly pessimistic then please offer me a replacement: somebody with a malleability guided by reason and argument, somebody that can argue from such expansive resources of learning and experience and who lives by convictions, morals and a personality. It is something which is now beyond old-fashioned and generally put under the heading of “having character”. I know it sounds like a stuffy stiff upper lip description but its very absence precludes its own renaming. There have been at times hints of examples in my local experience—but nobody that wrote books or had the impact that Hitchens has had. An example of the opposite, of our sordid present American reality, the man who personifies what we’re left with, is that shameless lying fat sack of shit Michael Moore, a man of such low character that I immediately lose respect for anybody who has any respect for him.

“The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated.” (p.416)

Hitch-22 is a fantastic book that all should read, especially anybody that fancies themselves in any way an intellectual. It’s like reading Einstein if you’re serious about becoming a physicist. It is also a very funny book. I won’t waste time trying to connect his sense of humor—heavy in irony and wordplay—to the kind of cultivated mind I’m convinced is practically extinct. Two examples stand out. The first is from his descriptions of his own “public” school experience which he found not so awful considering the history of such horror stories by Orwell et al. As if at a loss to offer the reader what they expected he offers an epitome of that perverse system by quoting Ian Watt regarding his time in a Japanese prison camp:

Well, we were in a cell that was probably built for six but was holding about sixteen of us. There wasn’t much food and we hadn’t been given any water for quite a while. The heat was absolutely ferocious. Dysentery had begun to take its toll, which was distinctly disagreeable at such close quarters…

Added to this unpleasantness, we could hear one of our number being rather badly beaten by the Japanese guards, with rifle butts it seemed, in their guardroom down the corridor. At this rather trying moment one of my young subalterns, who’d managed to fall asleep, started screaming and flailing and yelling. He was shouting: “No, No—please don’t…Not any more, not again, Oh God please.” Hideous noises like that. I had to take a snap decision to prevent panic, so I ordered the sergeant to slap him and wake him up. When he came to, he apologized for being a bore but brokenly confessed that he’d dreamed he was back at Tonbridge.

I had heard versions of this other example of humor before from talks Hitchens gave and I think also from things written by Martin Amis with whom they were created. (I think their more-or-less private joke has now been over-exposed, jumped over the shark, and will be imitated and cheapened by doofi like me.) These are the puerile yet high-minded word games in which the words of familiar titles or phrases are exchanged with (usually) obscenities. What might you come up with if you exchange “Heart” with “Dick” in great works of literature? “Dick of Darkness”, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Dick Is a Lonely Hunter”.

In closing I offer my own creation. I don’t remember why, but I began my own, exchanging “Death” with “Dick” with some titles:

Dick be Not Proud

A Dick in Venice

The Dick of Ivan Ilyich

Dick of an Salesman

On Dick and Dying

Dick Comes for the Archbishop

A Dick in the Family

The Dick of the Heart

Chronicle of a Dick Foretold

Dick is a Lonely Business

Naked in Dick

Dick Sentence

Another Good Review