Christopher Hitchens

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“Many Women Are Not Only Very Tired Of Being Treated Like Second-Class Citizens But Are Very Funny About It”

November 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The decentralization of media has given us the Kardashians, holy fuck, but it’s also opened up an infinite number of channels for new voices, many of them comic. In the Guardian, Anna Holmes points out that the Internet has provided women a platform for feminist-tinged wit, which is great because comedy stems from dissatisfaction and the must put-upon people are often the funniest. An excerpt:

“This outpouring, which can be found in print, pop culture and all over social media, has been fuelled by any number of things. Among them are the democratising nature of the internet, the inclusion of new and previously marginalised voices and the fact that many women are not only very tired of being treated like second-class citizens but are very funny about it.

This may come as a surprise to some, because feminism and discussions of gender politics have rarely, if ever, been celebrated for their embrace of the farcical or the witty. In fact, an accusation of humourlessness has remained one of the most pervasive accusations levelled against those involved in agitating against sexism and misogyny.

You might recall Christopher Hitchens’s infamous essay ‘Why women aren’t funny,’ published in Vanity Fair. The late polemicist ended up undermining his own argument for male superiority by explaining that ‘humour, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle.’ And last year, in a disappointing interview with The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, the normally perceptive comedian Louis CK alleged that comedians and feminists are ‘natural enemies.'”

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“How Did The Fool Become A Sage?”

April 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

The problem with pundits is that it almost doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong, provided that they have a forceful personality and can put on a show. The news keeps cycling, its white noise drowning the wrong-headed shouts that should have been embarrassing, that should have carried consequences. In a new GQ postmortem, Michael Wolff points out that despite popular opinion, Christopher Hitchens was just as much of a toolbox as he is. An excerpt:

“This transformation from political irregular and zealous polemicist to towering moral figure was curious, if not amazing, to many people (perhaps all of us) whose careers had intersected with his. How did the character actor become a leading man? How did the fool become a sage? And what about the bad stuff? Not just his full-throttled embrace of the Bush war but, before that, his casual and convenient betrayal of his friend, Hillary Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, back in the Monica Lewinsky days. Or his take on Bill Clinton, as virulent as that of the most kooky right-wingers. Or his weirdly tolerant relationship with some of the era’s most infamous Holocaust deniers. These are the kind of epochal contretemps that, in the chattering class, usually make for deep enmity rather than enduring love.

Then, too, this sui generis British figure, full of British class issues, British political hair-splitting, British literary conceits, and plummy accent to boot, became, in his transmutation, a super-American – a gunslinger journalist.

What was the nature of Hitchens’ alchemy?

He was, self-styled, a writer engaged with his time, a bookish man called to join the day’s great and bloody battles of conscience. But really his issues were largely of another era: internecine squabbles on the left; a Cold War attention to the world’s geo-sectarian divisions; God’s existence… or not. He never much grappled with technology, or money, or media, or the developing world’s rising middle class – influences that, surely, were remaking the world a lot faster and a lot more profoundly than his long- time preoccupations.

He saw himself as a Sixties guy, even making the case that he was a significant figure in the tumultuous period from 1966 to 1968: ‘I did my stuff in helping my American comrades discredit first President Johnson and then President Nixon.’ Although, in fact, he was still a teenager in 1968. (‘If you remember the Sixties,’ in Robin Williams’ famous formulation, ‘you weren’t there.’) His was a nostalgic show.”

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“Hitchens Would Take To The Print Columns Or The Airwaves And Denounce The Recently Departed As A ‘Thieving, Fanatical Albanian Dwarf””

February 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Th opening of James Kirchick’s Newsweek piece about a new book which hangs in effigy Christopher Hitchens, who peed on a tombstone or two in his day:

“One of the journalistic impulses for which the late Christopher Hitchens will be remembered was a propensity for writing nasty obituaries of people he loathed immediately after their deaths. It was only a matter of days, sometimes hours, following the expiration of figures such as Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, or Alexander Haig (to name just a few of the targets of his wrath) that Hitchens would take to the print columns or the airwaves and denounce the recently departed as a ‘thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf,’ ‘hyperactive debutante,’ ‘cruel and stupid lizard,’ ‘Chaucerian fraud,’ and ‘neurotic narcissist with an unquenchable craving for power,’ respectively. ‘For a lot of people, their first love is what they’ll always remember,’ Hitchens once told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb. ‘For me it’s always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going.’

In light of this, the one thing that can be said in praise of Richard Seymour’s UnHitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, is that its subject would appreciate the effort. Indeed, I bet that Hitchens would be highly pleased that someone had expended so much time and energy to denounce him posthumously in the style that he had himself mastered, even if it took the author more than a year since Hitchens’s death to produce it. Concocted in the style of a 17th-century polemical pamphlet (a literary template favored by Hitchens), UnHitched purports to be an ‘extended political essay’ that exposes its subject as, among other things, a ‘terrible liar,’ ‘ouvrierist’ (one of several words deployed by the overly earnest Seymour that will drive even more learned readers to the dictionary), a plagiarist, and, most unforgivable among Hitchens’s erstwhile friends and colleagues on the Anglo-American socialist left, ‘the George W. Bush administration’s amanuensis.'”

 

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“What Makes Teresa Of Calcutta So Divine?”

May 6, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the wake of Christopher Hitchens’ death, I put up a post about his prose broadside against Mother Teresa. Here is the 1994 film analog.

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“She Spent Her Life Opposing The Only Known Cure For Poverty”

December 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

mother-teresa-india

Christopher Hitchens, that godless heathen (I mean that as a compliment as well as a statement of fact), just passed away from esophageal cancer. From “Mommie Dearest,” his enthusiastic flogging of Mother Teresa published on Slate in 2003:

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the ‘Missionaries of Charity,’ but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.•

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“A North Korean Is On Average Six Inches Shorter Than A South Korean”

February 8, 2010 in Books, Politics | Permalink

Christopher Hitchens has used some space on Slate to put a spotlight on an interesting new book about the blighted nation of North Korea, run by the ridiculous and brutal overlord Kim Jong-il. In his article, “A Nation of Racist Dwarfs,” Hitchens shares ideas from B.R. Myers’ book, The Cleanest Race: How North Americans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers looks not only at how arrogant delusions about racial superiority drive North Koreans but how it has stunted their growth–figuratively and literally. An excerpt from the Slate article:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.•

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