Several readers forwarded me the new Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens and asked if I had read it, and if I had, what were my thoughts. As I've said many times -- and people think I'm joking when I'm not -- I rarely read anything by Hitchens anymore. If I wanted to wallow in sewage, there are plenty of other sources that would suffice. But this piece is about his feelings for a dead soldier, I was told. Maybe Hitchens has turned a corner with this piece. Well, maybe. Anything's possible. So I clicked on the link to see for myself. I wish I hadn't. It's not the worst thing Hitchens has written, but it's pretty damn close. And given his Greatest Hits of the past six years, that's really saying something.
As many of you know, since the piece has been floating around online for days, Hitchens celebrates the brief but heroic legacy of Lieutenant Mark Daily, who was killed last January in Iraq. Now, normally for Hitchens, this would be no big deal. After all, the imperial meatgrinder that he has helped oil and keep humming is a proper place for the likes of the late Lt. Daily. How else are they going to get the brutal training necessary to fight the many wars that Hitchens foresees past the present phase, wars that Hitchens will doubtless cheerlead with the same blustering, bumbling gusto? All part of the deal, so keep your tears to yourself and keep firing at anything that moves. But in Lt. Daily's case, there was a personal connection. Seems that the young Army officer was swayed to enlist in part by the pro-war screeds of Sir Christopher Hitchens himself.
"I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze," says Hitch. "I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.?"
Not only possible, but all too true. After consulting the words of William Butler Yeats, a secular saint to whom Hitch assures us he cannot creatively equal (another mystery solved), the old boy went to Daily's My Space page. "And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq ... I don't remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow." Hitchens finally contacted Daily's family, who told him how much the young man admired Hitch's work, and had tried to contact him from either Kuwait or Iraq.
"I don't intend to make a parade of my own feelings here," Hitchens tells us early on, then does make a parade of his own feelings, a self-pitying procession played with dented instruments. To be expected, I suppose. Hitchens has affected numerous postures since 9/11, all of which have been financially and professionally lucrative for him. So the "Gee, did I do that?" pose is really no surprise. And judging from the many favorable, tear-stained responses online, the old dear has hit another one out of the park. The misty-eyed pro-war reactionary has feelings. He is even deeper than any of us first imagined.
Naturally, Hitchens wouldn't have written this piece a year or two ago, and would've pissed all over anyone who showed the slightest wavering from the glorious crusade. But Christopher understands life in ways that few of us can seriously appreciate, so when it's his turn to weep about human loss, we are all supposed to stop and weep with him. When he describes Lt. Daily's family:
"I had already guessed that this was no gung-ho Orange County Republican clan. It was pretty clear that they could have done without the war, and would have been happier if their son had not gone anywhere near Iraq."
"As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew [!!]), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean. It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say . . ."
to the circumstance of too much money, and
not enough common sense. Further, it's my
view that the initial evidence and so forth
that was used for the justification for the
war was contrived, or at the very least over-
hyped and under-analyzed prior to making that
momentous decision, I further believe that
Congress will have little or no effect on the
outcome, other than to be blamed for whatever
ends up going wrong in this entire misadventure,
I think their war-making authority discussed
in the 1973 War Powers Act has been undermined
and handed off to People Behind Closed Doors
to whom public opinion is somewhere on a level
between nuisance insect and a broken sewer vent
pipe, an annoyance that has no bearing on
the desired outcome, I think that a lot of
people have lost friends, families, relatives,
and still others have gotten theirs back but
with parts missing, and, and, to top it all off,
this war has been the ultimate excuse to loot
the federal treasury, and this administration
has been on a spending tear ever since they
took office. I call it Daddy WarBush and Uncle
Dick, who themselves never faced an enemy
bullet during their time of eligibility, and
it stands to reason that their kids will never
be thusly in harms' way, which reminds us
of that other war, Vietnam, and bands like CCR
who laid it on the table for all and sundry
to examine, not in black and white, but
in red, white, and blue.
Greenspan said it, Iraq was about oil, and
the only thing Congress can do about it is
what they've discussed, the part about denying
any american oil company the ability to access
that oil. We've been taken for a ride on this
one, and the taxpayers will be taken to the
cleaners for it for decades to come...
"Don't vote. It only encourages them."-Anonymous
As far as Hitchens is concerned he is very FULL of himself. Seems he has a conversation with himself and thinks other people are in on it.
If you use common sense --you will know that you alone are responsible for your own actions.
By the way, for the person who said that Hitchens "ridiculs (sic)God", that makes no sense. An atheist making fun of God would be a contadiction in terms.
This wallow is about him, not the deluded young Daily.
Dennis, just you writtng as much as you did here give Chris too much air time. Next time just don't give him the pleasure of any publicity. Hitch' is a jerk off.
I see Hitchens as an extremist with the same intensity as Christian Fundamentalists but on the opposite end of the spectrum. Still I lean towards Hitchens because the Fundies are much worse.
I don't know if Hitchens is sincerely contrite but I would like to see other pro-war-used-to-bees follow suit even though it's late. Tom Friedman and Judith Miller among others need to come clean, sincerely and authentically.
Get thee to rehab, Hitchens...you're as hopeless as any ridiculous celebrity...
Even blogging about him gives him more coverage than he deserved.