In enemy territory

The soul-death (or is it brain death?) of Christopher Hitchens is one of the more inexplicable tragedies of the post-9/11 era. Occasionally, out of morbid curiosity, I still read his half-cocked screeds in order to locate the consistent core of the man (if there is one). He seems both an iconoclast and a true believer, a bloody-beaked hawk and a freedom-loving socialist. He's certainly some sort of political moralist with a penchant for corpse-kicking (see The Missionary Position, or his elegy for Ronald Reagan [which, in perfect neo-Hitchens style, ends with an irrelevant dig at John Kerry]). The New Hitchens fears Stalin's ghost so much he's willing to defend the childlike wargames of George W. Bush as necessary to some nebulous antifascist world movement. He also seems to believe that American neocons (such as Paul Wolfowitz) are selfless activists driven by quiet moral principles.

I still don't quite get it, but this fascinating interview with Johann Hari clears up a bit of the confusion. Here's a good quote:

The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy? And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists.

Well, that's not exactly true, Hitch: we're busy fighting the theocratic fascists here at home. Plus an old socialist like you would surely recognize that lefty hawks will only support an interventionist liberation if there are no sordid profiteering motives involved. As for Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps we were just remembering your own perceptive views from 1991:

An earlier regional player, Benjamin Disraeli, once sarcastically remarked that you could tell a weak government by its eagerness to resort to strong measures. The [first] Bush administration uses strong measures to ensure weak government abroad, and has enfeebled democratic government at home. The reasoned objection must be that this is a dangerous and dishonorable pursuit, in which the wealthy gamblers have become much too accustomed to paying their bad debts with the blood of others.

Surely this old intervention in the Gulf was just as "antifascist" as the current mess in Iraq? Where are your principles, man?

Well, I think I figured him out: Christopher Hitchens is a misanthrope. He unveils this new tendency at the end of the Reagan elegy, when he ponders the "stupidity" of the entire American political system. The Hari interview clarifies his position even further:

This kind of theocratic fascism will never die because we belong to a very poorly-evolved mammarian [sic?] species. I'm a complete materialist in that sense. We're stuck with being the product of a very sluggish evolution. Our pre-frontal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big. Our fear of the dark and of death is very intense, and people will always be able to profit from that.

As we all know, those enormous adrenaline glands are also responsible for that fight or flight response which makes us so unpredictable under stress. Hitchens has fled, and now reclines and drinks comfortably in the neocon tent, with a small gladbag of lefty principles at his side. He's surrounded by enemies from both left and right, and is still visited by concerned old disciples. His life is practically a misanthrope's utopia. Except, Hitch is not nearly as savvy, independent, or funny as his forebears Mark Twain and George Orwell. Nowadays, he's more like Whittaker Chambers without the historical burden. I'll keep listening, only because I sympathize with a contrarian who's lost the plot. But since he owes allegiance to neither God nor mammon, we gotta figure there's either a hilarious court jester or a perceptive village idiot lurking behind Hitchens's tiny frontal lobes...