Bored to Death. originally posted August 15, 2010
There are plenty of reasons to dislike this guy. He is obnoxious. He hates Mother Theresa (“friend of poverty, enemy of the poor, fundamentalist fanatic”) and Bill Clinton (“wasted eight years of America’s time”).He denounces Zionism as “a form of Bourgeoisie Nationalism”. Following the 11 September attacks, he battled Noam Chomsky over the proper response to radical Islamism for an entire year. He believes – with the fervor of a recent convert to American messianism – that the Iraq war was justified by a higher moral purpose and sanctified by the (so far) incalculable benefits that will eventually be seen to have resulted from the war. He did that stupid waterboarding stunt. He denies being a “conservative” but admits to being a “neo con” and with the imperviousness of a neo-con doesn’t “give a fig about world opinion” and has yet to admit that he might have been wrong about any of it (except of course in the “execution” of policy—as if there were no connection between absurd aims and failed execution). He voted for Ralph Nader. And in one unforgivable exertion of blind egoism and drunk/dry-drunk alcoholic brotherhood, he maintains to this day that he does not wish that Al Gore had beaten George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had won in 2004.
The reason Christopher Hitchens pisses me off is something else entirely. Because I like him. The fact that he’s wrong about Bush and Iraq and HCR is less important to me than the fact that beneath the fastuous, political windbag lies an ironic and eclectic louche, a withering snark with a ferocious wit. Someone you’d like to have a drink with if you still drank. As hard as he tries to be a quarrelsome, contentious cogent man of reason, a mordant critic and pitiless adversary, he is an extravagantly colorful observer, a great political pugilist and contrarian but also a dandy. He’s hilariously relentless in his critique of Christianity as a wicked cultand has penned the blasphemous atheist manifesto God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and better yet, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. He tears down the facade of sainthood erected by the hagiographers and rebuts the critics point by point, but does so effortlessly and rationally and never comes across as mean-spirited or humorless. He worships his friendships and is artless about his obvious romantic infatuation with the delicious Martin Amis (who can blame him?) and only recently declared that “I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.)” Continue reading →
