Hitchens, The Atlantic, and Bond: A License to Kill (the Facts)

I really enjoyed the new Bond movie, Casino Royale, and it's not its fault that it made me read some crap by Christopher Hitchens and see how far The Atlantic has fallen.

Like most people, I stopped reading The Atlantic years ago, halfway through a 10,000-word James Fallows article about how the Japanese economy was or wasn't the growing threat it was the month before. I might have muttered something about life being too freaking short and flung the thing away, but I'll bet it just slipped softly from my hands and that was that. I had a TV then. I might have been distracted.

The thing is, I always knew it was a boring magazine. That was part of its charm. But I also always kind of assumed it cared about getting its tedious facts right. The better bores do that.

So I was disheartened when someone who knows I'm a James Bond fan showed me something about Bond from a recent Atlantic and it was riddled with the kind of careless mistakes only a barstool blowhard would make while he pulled things out of his ass. And then I saw it was by Christopher Hitchens, and at least that made sense.

Because he's always at least a little bit wrong about everything. That's part of his charm. But what was it doing in The Atlantic? They used to publish Harriet Beecher Stowe. What happened? Did they lose a bet?

Anyway, it's called "Bottoms Up" and it's supposed to be an overview -- or something -- of the political and sexual prejudices of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming. It came out in April, so I assume its "news hook" was 2002's Die Another Day.

It's not even a long piece, but it asserts that Fleming was obsessed with women's behinds (Again: The Atlantic. Harriet Beecher Stowe.) and proves this assertion by citing a scene and an exchange from the 1971 film Diamonds are Forever. A scene that a whatchamacallit "fact checker" could tell you not only has no equivalent in Fleming's novel, but was also written seven years after his death.

Hitchens then blames Fleming for imagining the original dirty bomb - "it was Fleming who first conjured it" - which couldn't have been easy to do, from the grave, since it appears in the film version of Goldfinger (1964) and nowhere in Fleming's 1959 book.

Hitchens credits Fleming with the creation of the criminal network SPECTRE - and then uses its anagram on an off-road journey to smear George Galloway's political party, RESPECT. (See, you rearrange the letters in one and get the other. It's the kind of trick that impresses people in a bar.) The only problem is that SPECTRE wasn't invented by Ian Fleming; it was dreamt up by a screenwriter named Kevin McClory.

You could look it up. They didn't, but you could.

Now, it's a good man's failing to see the movie and pretend he's read the book, but the Bond books aren't hard to find, or to read, if you're sober. But what's The Atlantic doing, running Christopher Hitchens without fact checking him?

I mean, you get careless about the little things, pretty soon some creep can lie you into a war.