Crossposted from Moral Questions Weblog.
I have to a dirty little secret. I still think Christopher Hitchens is the man. My first exposure to Hitchens was during the early days of my political involvement in the late nineties, reading his sterling book reviews for The Atlantic and his commentary in The Nation and at OpenDemocracy.com. Reading him was like a kind of birth for me. An understanding that there was an entire panoramic to the world of politics.
The odd thing is, somehow Hitchens and I went opposite directions almost from the time I began reading him. When he had his feud with the Clinton administration, testifying for the House Republicans seeking impeachment for Bill Clinton, I was a born and bred Republican becoming increasingly leery of the growing fanaticism I was observing in the Republican Party. Then, when the trumua of 9/11 threw Hitchens, in a fit of rigid ideological mania, to embrace the strange Wilsonianism of the Bush administration, I found myself a born again Liberal, becoming increasingly skeptical the paranoid mood of the country and the Republicans’ willingness to gain political advantage. And then there was the Iraq War, and as they say, the rest is history–both for Hitchens and for me.
Watching the Galloway debate the other night, I once again remembered why it is so impossible not to admire this man, even if he is a bit of a fallen angel to the left. Yesterday, Eric Alterman wrote:
In this month’s Atlantic, the french philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, gave one of the most elegant pieces of commentary I’ve yet read on Hitchens’ place in the polical world. Levy, a ferverent war opponent, captures beautifully the ambivilence many on the left experience with Hitchens:
The scene occurs in Pittsburgh, three months ago, at the end of a fine autumn day.
Christopher Hitchens is the one who actually persuaded me to come.
We had taken opposite positions at a debate in New York about the war in Iraq (which he, like Kristol and Perle, ardently supports), and he had let slip in passing, in his very British way of mumbling important things, “Kissinger lecture in Pittsburgh; I’m giving another one, an hour later and a few blocks away, after a screening of The Trials of Henry Kissinger. You should come. You might enjoy yourself …”
As soon as I get there I go to the Gypsy Café, a trendy bar in the South Side district where the enfant terrible of the intelligentsia and a crack team of fellow conspirators (someone from the Warhol museum, the editor of the alternative paper sponsoring Hitchens’s rival lecture, a producer of independent documentaries, a professor) are putting the last touches on what is turning out to be something of a guerrilla operation.
From there I go to Heinz Hall, where, in front of a room filled with burgundy-velvet armchairs that remind me more of a brothel in Maupassant than of a lecture hall, the secretary of state under Nixon and Ford utters, in his gruff, stentorian voice, a litany of self-satisfied platitudes (“the dust of China and India” … the necessity to “identify big problems and reduce them to little problems” … yes to the war, but a half-hearted yes, just for a short while, keeping in mind the perspective of “perpetual peace” that was “proclaimed by Immanuel Kant”).
Suddenly Hitchens arrives; he has evidently made a switch in tactics and, using another journalist’s pass, has been able without warning to get access to the inner lobby of the auditorium. The conspirator turned provocateur hurls abuse at the attendees near him (“Toads! You’re all toads who’ve come to listen to a toad …”) before getting himself thrown out by security guards who, noticing me with him, throw me out too and force me to erase from my camera, in front of them, the part of the lecture I have filmed.
So we walk arm in arm into the night, with obligatory stops at bars on Penn and Liberty Avenues, and with a meager escort of reporters thrilled by the incident and the excitement Hitchens is causing in their sleeping city: Death to toads! A kingdom of toads for a bottle of wine! On our way to the Harris Theater, where the film must be almost over, a signal that the discussion can begin …
This film is Kissinger’s nightmare, Hitchens says, delighted. Wherever that bastard goes, my film precedes or follows him. Wherever he talks, there’s someone there during the question-and-answer session who asks him about his war crimes in Chile, in Indochina, in Timor. Do you realize that because of my film he can’t travel anywhere freely? Do you know that in Paris a magistrate came looking for him, even to his suite at the Ritz? That son of a bitch … Leave that lowly toad to us … You’ll see …
We’ve arrived at the theater.
It’s one of those independent art-house movie theaters, old-fashioned and militant, that still exist in some ordinary American towns. Black-and-white posters for Grand Illusion and Citizen Kane. Ads for the workshops, festivals, and retrospectives that the Pittsburgh Filmmakers are organizing here.
In front of the ticket office flyers saying “Kerry or Bush, it doesn’t matter, as long as we get out of Iraq”–which is, of course, the exact opposite of Hitchens’s stance.
And an audience in keeping with the place, made up of old leftists with salt-and-pepper ponytails, political tattoos on their forearms, pierced ears–and immediately I see that they’re in the uncomfortable position of having come to applaud a cult film (this Kissinger trial, this ultra-left charge against Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, is obviously all they care about) and also to express their incomprehension about what the film’s progenitor has become. How can he, without renouncing what he has said about Kissinger, agree on the Iraq question with Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, and the various others who in their eyes are the new embodiment of the same old American right?
I’m watching Hitchens on the stage, behind his lectern.
I observe him suddenly energized, fielding questions, battling, making fun of his opponents, pleading, insulting, explaining that yes, he is against Saddam just as he was against Pinochet, it’s the same fight that’s going on, the same antitotalitarianism being replayed; democratic revolution (as Clémençeau said about the French Revolution) “has to be taken as a whole”; jihad is just one more fascism. What a pity you didn’t understand; you are the left wing of a big party of toads …
The scene has its appeal.
It always takes a kind of courage to run the risk of disappointing or alienating your own followers; and in this case it takes courage to stand firm on both fronts–to stand in front of these 150 leftists for whom Hitchens used to be a hero, and who ask nothing more than to go on celebrating him as one, and tell them, “I am and I am not one of you. There is Hitchens No. 1, who is responsible for this film, and who, ten years later, wouldn’t take one word or shot away from it. But there is Hitchens No. 2, who continues the fight without you, by supporting the war in Iraq.”
That’s not the essential point, though. The essential point is this: I see him active on both fronts at once, and not lowering his guard on either of them. I see him, unlike Kristol, not giving in about Vietnam on account of Iraq, and thus taking the risk, necessarily, of losing on both counts. I listen to him try Kissinger on two charges, because he reproaches him for his role in Indochina in the 1960s but also for his far too flabby involvement, like that of so many of the realpolitik people, in this war against Islamic fundamentalism. And I tell myself that here, between the two branches of what from afar seems like the American conservative movement, is a debate, even a gulf, of which we have only the faintest conception in Europe.
You have to dig deeper, of course.
You have to try to get a better understanding of this conflict in the heart of the American right between the soft and the radical, the realists and the idealists.
You have to go far back into history–for instance, to the debates between the camps labeled Wilsonians and Jacksonians–and look for hidden keys to this quarrel between those who, like Kissinger, wage war in order to strengthen dictatorships and those who, like Hitchens, think of war as a vector of democracy in the world.
For now, it’s a new sign of the reorganization of the political space that, I sense, has been coming for quite some time, and that is making real divisions emerge not so much between the two political parties as between factions, not yet named, within each of the two parties.
What Hitchens has become to the Global Left, a fallen hero essentially martyred for his beliefs, is if nothing else a classic example of how inherently flawed hero-worship is. For hero-worship in the end is really little more than an intense projection, a narcissistic appeal to another to provide what you yourself lack and wish you possessed. And so to position someone as a hero, who never asked for the courtesy, is truly unfair. But all of us are imperfect people, and this is probably asking too much.
Nevertheless, I think its time to starting cutting Hitchens some slack, if for no other reason than old times sake.
