Dissolute Rage
by digby
The last thing I want to do is re-open any self-inflicted wounds on the Christopher Hitchens front — but I just can’t help myself.
There is a long and interesting article in the October issue of New Yorker called “He Knew He Was Right” which is really worth reading. (Sadly, it’s not online.) Perhaps his ranting represent some overaching philosophy that is above my head, but frankly, I just find the man incoherent — if fascinating, in a trainwreck sort of way.
He’s also such a monumental prick that I’m very hard pressed to care whether I slander him or not:
In the noisy front room of the North Beach restaurant where the friends had met, Hitchens made a toast: “To the Constitution of the United States, and confusion to its enemies!” The conversation was amiable and boozy; Hitchens might be said to care more for history than for individual humans, but he was in an easy mood, after a drive, in beautiful early-evening light, from Menlo Park. (He and Blue, a writer working on a novel, live with their thirteen-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C., but spend the summer in California, where her parents live.) During the ride, he had discussed with the Pakistani-born taxi-driver the virtues and vices of Benazir Bhutto, while surreptitiously using a bottle of Evian to put out a small but smoky fire that he had set in the ashtray.
And then the young doctor to his left made a passing but sympathetic remark about Howard Dean, the 2004 Presidential candidate; she said that he had been unfairly treated in the American media. Hitchens, in the clear, helpful voice one might use to give street directions, replied that Dean was “a raving nut bag,” and then corrected himself: “A raving, sinister, demagogic nut bag.” He said, “I and a few other people saw he should be destroyed.” He noted that, in 2003, Dean had given a speech at an abortion-rights gathering in which he recalled being visited, as a doctor, by a twelve-year-old who was pregnant by her father. (“You explain that to the American people who think that parental notification is a good idea,” Dean said, to applause.) Dean appeared not to have referred the alleged rape to the police; he also, when pressed, admitted that the story was not, in all details, true. For Hitchens, this established that Dean was a “pathological liar.”
“All politicians lie!” the women said.
“He’s a doctor,” Hitchens said.
“But he’s a politician.”
“No, excuse me,” Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour. (Hitchens’s friend Martin Amis, the novelist, has chided Hitchens for “doing that horrible thing with your lips.”) “Fine,” Hitchens said. “Now that I know that, to you, medical ethics are nothing, you’ve told me all I need to know. I’m not trying to persuade you. Do you think I care whether you agree with me? No. I’m telling you why I disagree with you. That I do care about. I have no further interest in any of your opinions. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make an excuse for.”
“That’s wrong!” they said.
“You know what? I wouldn’t want you on my side.” His tone was businesslike; the laughing protests died away. “I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ Fuck off. You think a doctor can lie in front of an audience of women on a major question, and claim to have suppressed evidence on rape and incest and then to have said he made it up?”
“But Christopher . . .”
“Save it, sweetie, for someone who cares. It will not be me. You love it, you suck on it. I now know what your standards are, and now you know what mine are, and that’s all the difference–I hope–in the world.”
How’d you like to face that over Christmas turkey?
I took very seriously the charge that I was lowering myself to his level by saying he was open to the idea that the holocaust was a hoax and I apologized for it. But I would have to have completely lost my standards, my humanity and my mind to have fallen as low as that asshole. I still regret the imprecision of my comment — but not quite as much as I did.
*Ezra wrote more about this back in October.
Update: To be clear: I’m not saying that Hitchens is a monumental prick because he thinks Dean is a liar. He’s a monumental prick because he says that Dean is a “raving, sinister, demagogic nut bag” who he and a “few other people” saw should be “destroyed.” (Who the fuck is he?)
He is likewise a monumental prick because he behaved like a complete asshole to the woman in the story:
“I was telling you why I knew that Howard Dean was a psycho and a fraud, and you say, ‘That’s O.K.’ Fuck off. No, I mean it: fuck off. I’m telling you what I think are standards, and you say, ‘What standards? It’s fine, he’s against the Iraq war.’ Fuck. Off. You’re MoveOn.org. ‘Any liar will do. He’s anti-Bush, he can say what he likes.’ …. etc.
Whether or not Howard Dean told the story properly or lied about it seems somewhat trivial in light of Hitchens’ inappropriate vomitous verbal explosion. Particularly when he’s staking himself to the moral high ground by defending that paragon George W. Bush, the man who made hundreds of speeches in which he made sure that a majority of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in 9/11. I don’t remember Hitchens setting the record straight on that one.
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