Pics, links and brief thoughts
Corey Robin writes:
Hitchens had a reputation for being an internationalist. Yet someone who gets excited by mass murder—and then invokes that excitement, to a waiting audience, as an explanation of his support for mass murder—is not an internationalist. He is a narcissist, the most provincial spirit of all.
Source: Christopher Hitchens: The Most Provincial Spirit of All
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He writes:
I rarely wrote about Hitchens because, at least for the time that I’ve been writing about politics (since late 2005), there was nothing particularly notable about him. When it came to the defining issues of the post-9/11 era, he was largely indistinguishable from the small army of neoconservative fanatics eager to unleash ever-greater violence against Muslims: driven by a toxic mix of barbarism, self-loving provincialism, a sense of personal inadequacy, and, most of all, a pity-inducing need to find glory and purpose in cheering on military adventures and vanquishing some foe of historically unprecedented evil even if it meant manufacturing them.
And later:
Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.
Source: Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths
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Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
The Iraq War still burns for a lot of the Left because, in the run-up to the War, those who questioned it were loudly denounced by conservatives and many of the country’s most powerful Democrats. They were dismissed as soft-headed crazies unmoored from reality and serious foreign policy thinking. Except the crazies were right and the serious people were wrong. There wasno WMD. There was not an imminent mushroom cloud. The country did go to war on bad intelligence. It did show an ugly disinterest in managing the effects of that war.
Some of these serious people have attempted to come terms with these disagreeable facts. Others have sought out every reason not to. Hitchens died among the latter.
Source: Hitchens, Cont.
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Katha Pollitt: Regarding Christopher
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.
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Shell Oil Spill off Nigeria Likely Worst in Decade
“Peter Idabor of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency told The Associated Press on Thursday that oil from the spill in Shell’s Bonga field has spread to roughly 100 nautical miles. Idabor said he expects oil to begin washing ashore on Nigeria’s southern coast later Thursday.”
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The Ron Paul newsletters are new to me (I don’t follow American politics closely). I was struck most by several statements on HIV that betray deep prejudice. Look at this for example:
At the recent world AIDS conference in Japan, researchers admitted what I have long told you: there is no prospect of a cure or vaccine for AIDS. For one thing, the virus keeps mutating. A drug that might work today won’t work tomorrow. Researchers also admitted that they had been lying about the incidence of heterosexual AIDS to increase funding for homosexual programs. Those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get a blood transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay, as was Kimberly Bergalis. Note: more and more patients ask if their physician and dentist are married and have children.
The biggest risk to hard-working, moral (white) Americans? A “malicious gay”.
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I actually forward all my UCT email to gmail, mainly so that gmail can filter all the crap out of it. Why, for example, is the fraudulent email referred to below not filtered?
Dear colleagues and students
You may have already received an email which has been circulating to students and staff at UCT. It claims to be from former SRC member Jessica Price and claims she has been stranded in Wales and is requesting funds because her passport and credit cards were allegedly stolen. We are aware of this email and urge you to ignore it, as it is a hoax.
Sincerely
Communication and Marketing
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Christopher Hitchens: ‘the consummate writer, the brilliant friend’
Ian McEwan’s tribute to his friend.
The place where Christopher Hitchens spent his last few weeks was hardly bookish, but he made it his own. Close to downtown Houston, Texas is the medical centre, a cluster of high-rises like La Défense of Paris, or the City of London, a financial district of a sort, where the common currency is illness. This complex is one of the world’s great concentrations of medical expertise and technology. Its highest building, 40 or 50 storeys up, denies the possibility of a benevolent god – a neon sign proclaims from its roof a cancer hospital for children. This “clean-sliced cliff”, as Larkin puts it in his poem about a tower-block hospital, was right across the way from Christopher’s place – which was not quite as high, and adults only.
I should add, Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant writer (in the sense of a master of language and the polemic form), an obnoxious and arrogant man who adopted both defensible (atheism) and indefensible positions (Iraq) and who wrote both great books (Orwell’s Victory) and less great books (God is not Great).
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