Crib From This gets Hitched.

I know—dumb title; but who cares.

Over the years, we here at Crib From This have characterized the writings, spoken remarks, and ideas of Christopher Hitchens variously as dumb, smart, funny, and irrelevant [this is not a typo—ed.]. Through the thick and thin of these reactions to his work, it remains that Hitch is among the few commentators to appear regularly in the 'mainstream media' (whose ranks Hitchens—previously a longtime columnist for The Nation magazine—joined when he emerged as an early and ardent propagandist for prosecuting the Iraq War) to reliably possess any kind of panache or even sense of humor. So when Hitch revealed, a number of months ago, that he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening form of esophageal cancer, we, of course, felt that this was some pretty crap news.

So, in any event, when we happened accidentally upon a couple of his recent contributions to his column in Slate, we were pleasantly surprised to find that both are pithy and of a high caliber. Neither of them is—as Hitch has sometimes been perceived to be—controversial or even provocative. Rather, they both communicate successfully more-or-less obvious truths that lots of other commentators and/or media lack the clearheadedness or intellectual distance from the daily news cycle to state. This is the kind of commentary that is so thoroughly lacking right now and why 'the news', as it were, has become so unworthy of anyone's serious attention over the past six months or year-or-so.

Anyway, we link, first, to Hitchens's lucid take on the recent, bizarre, Rick Sanchez episode. Rick Sanchez is, by the way, a person I had never previously heard of and someone whose career, etc., I fail to find at all interesting. And this is precisely why Hitchens nails it: he doesn't find Sanchez or his remarks to be particularly interesting either. Part of the reason for this, Hitchens argues, is that it simply isn't controversial to "note the effectiveness of the Jewish Lobby."

And we link, second, to an article in which Hitchens reflects upon the inanities and utter lack of substance detectable in the supposed political 'debates' preceding the upcoming mid-term elections occurring across the country. A taste:

Asking my hosts in Connecticut if there was anything worth noting about the upcoming elections in their great state, I received the reply, "Well, we have a guy who wants to be senator who lied about his record of service in Vietnam, and a woman who wants to be senator who has run World Wrestling Entertainment and seems like a tough lady." Though full enough of curiosity to occupy, say, one course of lunch, that still didn't seem to furnish enough material to keep the mind focused on politics for very long.

And this dearth—of genuine topics and of convincing or even plausible candidates—appears to extend from coast to coast. In New York, a rather shopworn son of one Democratic dynasty (and ex-member by marriage of another) is "facing off," as people like to say, against a provincial thug with a line in pseudo-tough talk. In California, where the urgent question of something suspiciously like state failure is staring the electorate in the face, the Brown-Whitman contest hasn't yet risen even to the level of the trivial.

Hitch then carries this discussion in the direction of a general, broadly applicable, and yet incisive and satisfying question:

Consider: What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

This may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement. But how fresh and original are these faces? They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? Many of the cynical veterans of that moment, from Dick Armey to John Boehner, are the effective managers and controllers of the allegedly spontaneous Tea Party wave we see today.

Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run. How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: "I will always put the people of X first"? (Quite a lot of times, to judge by recent campaigns.) This is to say no more than that you will be a megaphone for sectional interests and regional mood swings and resentment, a confession that, to you, all politics is yokel.

I think that pieces like these—more reflective, more genial, less polemical, and yet every bit as unwavering—suit Hitchens's authorial voice just fine. It's almost as though his longtime infatuation with Orwell has begun to rub off on his style in a more direct way. I like it. Let's hope that the new, 'mature Hitchens' is able to stick around for a good while longer, because we need people to be writing like this in the midst of our present political/cultural landscape.

So, for as long as he continues to turn out work of a high caliber, we say: we'll gladly Hitch our wagons.

An atheist denunciation of the polemical atheists.PART ONE: The rise of Oprah-atheism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, mellow, moderate, liberal, young man.

Re the proliferation of books for popular audiences that have entered the market over the past few years or so purporting to be (or marketed as being) 'arguments for atheism'. Call it atheism-for-beginners. Common to all of these popular-market writers -- among them Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins -- is a combination of self-seriousness and one-dimensionality. Each author (with the possible partial exception of Hitchens) peddles his atheism in a voice approximate to that of 'experts' or even 'scientists' who appear on infomercials in order to endorse a that allows bald men to regrow their hair. Each acts as though his atheism is novel or unique. Think Oprah; think The Secret. As though atheism is this cool thing that the authors have just discovered, or there's this brand new formula that scientists have been developing in the lab. Or as though the state of world affairs is such that there are special, atheism-ready conditions on the ground, ripe for exploitation.

Your humble blogger's got nothing against atheism. In fact, he himself is an atheist.

There have been atheists of varying stripes since forever. In identifying one's particular species of atheism, it's often helpful to identify the religion into which one had been born and raised. This hazard -- that of having the dogma and practices of a particular religion foisted upon you during your upbringing -- befalls many a person. There's no insurance policy against it. Some such persons emerge into adulthood seemingly unscathed.

Although I have always had my doubts about the veracity of the claims of those in this apparently lucky few, I can report with total confidence that none in this lucky few -- not a single person -- was raised in the Catholic Church.

I can say this with authority, because I am -- and shall ever be -- a Catholic atheist.

Like many Catholic atheists, I endured twelve years of Catholic education. The final four years saw the gradual dissolution of both my need and inclination to pledge my obedience to a Celetial Dictator.* Perhaps it was mere coincidence that I during those four final years, I attended a Jesuit high school. In contradistinction to the meally-mouthed, self-contradictory, spineless pseudo-spiritual cant that was foisted upon me through eight years of Catholic grammar-school, my subsequent indoctrination in Jesuitism was a breath of fresh air.

Now, don't get me wrong: looking back, there's some seriously Christo-Fascist shit they serve you in the Jesuit Koolaid. But the good thing is that the Jesuits are and long have been in the business of education and scholarship. Which means there were interested in teaching their students about -- to the extent possible in any high school -- ideas. Not so much what you should or must think, but how. Again, sometimes how and what can be difficult to disentagle, and my brain's got the stretch-marks to prove it. But still.

Now, this part was very fortunate and helped open the door to the nonbelief that I so assiduously espouse. Because: where there are ideas -- and where there's the question of how to navigate ones way around and through them -- there is also atheism. Don't get me wrong, the latter by no means entails the former.

The fact is that all of the same arguments on both sides of this supposed 'pro-' vs. 'anti-' religious divide have been and continue to be recycled over and over again since.....I don' know.....Plato or something? Consider the following quotation from Thomas Jefferson:

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there.

...letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, 1816

Jefferson, of course, was a theist, which was about as many people got in his day to atheism. There are, of course, exceptions, like Rousseau and Diderot, et. al. And Jefferson was aware of these men. But, then as now, the distinction between the former -- belief in a benevolent God who does not interfere with earthly things -- and the latter is somewhat academic.

After Jefferson's time, there emerged, of course, still more forceful and often compelling forms of atheism. None of the thinkers who espoused some or another form of it harbored illusions about his having invented anything new. Theirs was a presentism that was -- in contradistinction to Harris, et. al -- not wanting for historicity. The discourses in which they were engaged were simply too gentlemanly -- in both the best (polite) and the worst (chauvinistic) senses -- to allow for much sloppiness and grandstanding.

Perhaps the most prominent exceptions to this gentlemanliness rule prove the rule. In the case of Marx, I shall simply state that he was not really an atheist author, in the sense that atheism didn't interest him in and of itself. It was his very reduction of religion to mere a mere instrumentality of bourgeois ideology -- brilliant and spot-on as it was -- that proves this fact. He made this explicit in his famous comment about religion as the 'opiate of the masses', and had previously explained this line of thinking in still greater detail in his "On 'The Jewish Question'." So, let's dismiss him, genius though he was, from the present discussion.

That leaves Nietszche. He might just be the Father of Shrill Atheism, no? There's logic in that idea. There's also logic in the proposition that he was preoccupied chiefly with the establishment of a new kind of religiosity. Yes, he was sometimes sloppy, but that was really just toward the end, when he was literally going mad. After all, those who declare Nietszche to be 'self-contradictory' are charlatans who don't understand (or aren't interested in understanding) what he was doing. The basis upon which I claim that his atheism conforms to the ethic of gentlemanliness that prevailed among his peers -- even when his peers may not have seen things that way -- is the unique performativity of Nietszche's writing. A sentence ago, I talked about his texts in terms of "what he was doing," and this is exactly how his texts are by and large to be understood: as doing, rather than saying.

Our modern-day publishing phenoms peddling their atheist wares cannot be given credit for this kind of genius or inventiveness. These recent pop-cultural atheism screeds are much more fun than either Marx or Nietzsche. Their glossy monographs aren't just the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus's of their time -- which is to say, they're not just sugar-coated pills. They're candy-coated CANDY! In fact, what they represent is a brand new, groovy kind of lifestyle atheism. Remember those old I-Mac advertisements? Right around the time that Apple's television spots started to get really annoying? The I-Macs were sold in an array of colors -- of flavors -- from which the consumer could choose:

Likewise, each 'brand' of lifestyle atheism -- Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, et al. -- caters to its own sassy, au courant, metropolitan sensibility. Into science? Dennett's your man. Or maybe Dawkins....I can't keep 'em straight (they're both incredibly boring and frankly mediocre). Into literature and droll, rapier wit, with just the teeniest-spritz of Islamo-fascism-baiting? Then Hitchens is your man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of America's friendliest FASCIST NEOCON: Sam Harris.

I shall return shortly with Part Two of this series, in which I shall share with you some musings on the scary, militaristic, neoconservative, pseudo-scientific, new-agey, historically illiterate, racist ideology that one Sam Harris espouses.

* Certainly the only coinage for which I shall remain forever grateful for the existence of Christopher Hitchens.

All right, Hitch, you did the right thing in the end.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Christopher Hitchens endorsed Obama a few days ago, despite having previously -- inanely -- acted as cheerleader for the Palin/McCain freak show. For a number of years now, it has ceased to matter what Hitchens has had to say. I say that and yet, I had expressed -- in less than gentlemanly terms -- my dismay when Hitchens sleep-walked his way through a preposterous hatchet-job against Obama in a recent installment of his column in Slate. So I guess it must matter, at least a little bit.

So, I'll give credit where credit is due. Hitchens concludes his article with three paragraphs that I believe articulate the moral necessity of voting for Obama in this election, irrespective of which section of the political spectrum you occupy in normal times. Because McCain is really that unhinged, Palin is really that vapid and idiotic, and the times are not normal.

Moreover, given the interventionist economic measures pursued by our Republican White House, the huge deficits for which Bush is responsible (like his father and Reagan before him), anyone who espouses a "free market" ideology will have to look elsewhere than the Republican Party this year for their candidate. so these laissez faire types may as well line up behind such conservatives as Hitchens, David Brooks, George Will, and, satisfyingly, Christopher Buckley (son, of course, of William F., and who has, as a consequence, parted ways with the National Review, the publication his father founded), and make the only morally tenable decision available to them when they're inside the voting booth.

Anyway, here are Hitchens's concluding paragraphs, in which he doesn't mince words:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Read the rest of Hitchens's endorsement, in Slate.

Hitchens, why don't you fly your bloated, jowly, neocon-dick-sucking face back to the parochial isle whence you came, you fucking limey twit turncoat?

I hate it when this formerly admirable journalist sounds off about something of which he has no right to step within 100 yards: namely, the kind of presidential campaign Barack Obama is conducting or should conduct or shouldn't conduct. And much of the reason for this is that Hitchens lacks a subtle, historically grounded, and socially conscious understanding of the peculiarities of American race relations.

He also suffers increasingly from a lack of subtlety more generally. That's right, Hitch has been painting with a broader and broader brush as he has aged. Which makes it seem likely that he's been thinking less precisely as his faculties continue to fail him in his drift toward the frailty of old age. Remind you of someone?

Chris "Twit" Hitchens is responsible for an incoherent mouthful of Republican propaganda in today's Slate, which is called: "Is Obama Another Dukakis? Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?"

Immediate questions that come to mind: Like Dukakis, how, exactly? "Vapid, hesitant, and gutless" in relation to what? According to what metric?

Hitchens's article provides nothing in the way of answers to these questions. That's because his article is a mere provocation. It's a mercenary job. One of his Masters called him up and said, "Hey, Hitch, d'ya mind assaulting Obama with one of those unspecific, insinuative, wishy-washy character assassination pieces you do so well? You know, the kind where you fail to provide a clear point of reference, or context of any kind, but instead engage in a kind of verbal jousting match with a fictitious opponent of your own devising? Just to help us with our numbers. Thanks a lot. Yours truly, Wolfy."

Obama should continue on exactly the track he's pursuing, which is not overstating his case, not pandering and promising lots of treats to interest groups like the BLOATED, FAT, LIMEY NEOCONS FOR BUSH CLUB, and not polemicizing and taking moral umbrage. In the manner, for example, of someone who comes to mind...HINT: he sold out his own democratic socialist values for greater fame, prestige and wealth, and he did so by supporting a war that is an act of colonialism and deceit, in the latter of which he is complicit.

Hitchens has become a Republican stooge, through and through. We haven't forgotten, Hitch. Shut up or go back to the land of tea and scones, where nostalgia for colonialism is still in the air, and where you can practice your polemical brand of atheism -- which everyone knows is really thinly veiled anti-Islam racism -- all day and night in your own private English garden. God save the Queen!