For some perverse reason I actually really like the way Christopher Hitchens writes. as far as agreeing with what this man writes, well..., but I think the man has a knack at prose. He makes me chuckle because he is kind of an asshole, and I guess sometimes I wish I had the vernacular to shred someone in a way that Hitchens does, without using vulgar language. Like this passage
The no-goodness of C.S. Lewis is one of those things that mysteriously holds its value, rather like the no-goodness of G.K. Chesterton, for example, or of St. Augustine. One scans this stuff to be sure that this is what these people actually wrote and believed; it's going to the zoo to scrutinize one's relatives and ancestors with a friendly but objective eye.
(Free Inquiry April/May 2006)
I think that's a pretty good smack down and funny. But I was not laughing after reading an article written by him this evening.
Hitchens seems to have fallen prey to the same banal mentality of Dick Cheney and company. Hitchens wrote in his most recent column, for Free Inquiry, about his most recent book publisher, Verso. Verso published Hitchens book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Which Hitchens opens the article by saying that no one in the New York book publishing world would agree to print his book on the gruesome "Mother" Teresa, and that Verso approached him and stated "Is it true you want to take on the old nun? Because if so we insist on doing it"
Well Hitchens went on to publish eleven books through Verso, and now he is all up in arms because of a book they just published called Message to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden.
Hitchens goes berserk, and rightfully so, because this book goes on to actually praise bin Laden. I guess there is a section of the book, which is not available online, that a former CIA officer applauds bin Laden and Hitchens grabs onto these statements and spews this absolutely banal GOP talking points bulletin
I would not bother to point out these illusions - bin Laden makes a point of slaying noncombatants, killing teachers in girls' schools, running a corrupt multinational money-laundering corporation instead of taking a vow of poverty, running away instead of offering himself as a martyr, etc., etc. - if they were not fairly commonly accepted among liberals, in some ignorant and subliminal way, leftists identify bin Laden with the third-world, and anticolonialist of politics of say, Frantz Fannon.
Now to be fair Hitchens wrote Franz Fannon, yet no such character of any great importance exists in our collective history. However a quick google search will ask you did you mean Frantz Fannon. And sure I did, here is what it says of Frantz
was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
I'm putting my money on maybe Hitchens had two too many double Dewers on the rocks and forgot the t in Franz.
But my beef is that any one that is considered to be an intellectual would believe that it is necessary to recite a laundry list of bin Laden's horrible atrocities because liberals don't seem to know about them.
What is going in this world. I find these statements from this man more troubling than anything Bush has said. Well, mainly because Bush has not had an original idea in 20 years, but because unfortunately Hitchens represents the intellectual right today, and if he is being serious about this, then there is a major disconnect going on.
I would also like to point out to Mr. Christopher Hitchens that any publisher that would print a book that "takes on the old nun" would most likely print a book that would embrace the head spokesman and perpetuator of radical Islam.
Hitchens is right at the end of his article though. Bin Laden is not anti-imperialist, and I most certainly would not associate Frantz Fannon with bin Laden. Bin Laden most certainly favors the imposition of a new empire. A Muslim imperialism in the form of a caliphate, which would be strong enough to enact Sharia within its borders and threaten its imposition on others.
Well Hitch, bin Laden already accomplished that in Afghanistan back in 98-2001 but unfortunately your henchmen were in charge when this imperialist decided to take his mission abroad. And here we are 5 years later and this imperialist is still running around.
Essentially Hitchens is just a wannabe William F. Buckley Jr. and he will forever be hidden among the shadows of that man. No matter how hard he tries to impress the "extreme" right of this country