I'm disappointed. There's been entirely too little mockery here on dKos of Christopher Hitchens's hilariously hysterical
screed against Michael Moore over on Slate.
I'm not sure it's really even worth critiquing as a piece of argumentation, but it sure does reward the connoisseur of spectacles of public derangement. He's so unhinged about Moore's cultural, ideological, and economic success, it's like watching an enraged circus clown immolate himself in the town square.
It's an amazing document of blustering self-projection (um, criticizing Moore for
his slovenly appearance?), fueled, it seems to me, by his certain knowledge that in the political-gadfly celebrity sweepstakes, Moore has squashed him like a gin-soaked bug.
Almost every attack he makes against Moore (besides the insane ad hominems) is a strawman argument--I lost count of the number of times he poses a hypothetical about what Moore, as the portly embodiment of the softheaded Left, would have said to some imagined question or situation. Needless to say, whatever words or ideas Hitchens puts in the head of his little Moore voodoo-doll reveal Moore to be the bamboozling fraud Hitchens's non-argument needs him to be.
And for Hitchens to slam Moore for supposedly leaving out inconvenient facts, or for intellectual inconsistency, is such a delicious joke--especially since he takes special pains to sneer that Moore must not understand the concept of "irony"--that one is forced to read it as either a sublime self-parody or the cry for help of the self-loathing hack.
There's also an interesting strain of snobbery, I think, in Hitchens's apoplexy at Moore's success. It's most notable when he tries to smack Moore for daring to cite Orwell in his film. Since Hitchens views Orwell as his own private saint, this is an especially threatening move by Moore which Hitchens meets with withering Oxbridgean disdain for the possibility that someone so oafish and lumpen and uneducated as Moore could possibly understand what Orwell, the advocate for the dignity of the worker in the face of the smug and self-deluded elites, actually meant. God forbid a prole like Moore be allowed to approvingly quote the author of The Road to Wigan Pier.
And the funniest part is where he challenges Moore to another debate, like a schoolboy O'Reilly screaming for attention--or, maybe more accurately, like that tiny chickenhawk in the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons who was always threatening, ineffectually, to brutalize a much bigger and stronger foe who hardly notices his existence. "Anytime, anywhere, pal," he says to Moore, little fists clenched in fury, in the discourse (a familiar one for him, I'm guessing) of the barroom drunk picking a fight with someone whose contentment and attractive date infuriate him since they remind him that he is, in fact, just an unhappy and unloved barroom drunk.
The piece is such a tour de force of comical and spluttering incoherence that it's tough to even feel irritated or angered by it. Nor does one even really feel the need to defend Moore, whose movie will eventually either stand or fall on its merits. One just stands back to watch, in awe, as a man eats his own head in impotent rage at his enemy's triumph.