A Hitch in time.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from

Comments

[marlowe1]

I have always found Gore Vidal to be a rather bitter crank but that's probably because the first thing I read by him was his short book about U.S. presidents where he found nothing good to say about any of them. I then read a book where he played up the conspiracy theory concerning FDR and Pearl Harbor and later on I read Anais Nin's diary where she thinks that he's sensitive and fragile and only realizes that he's a spiteful little creep toward the end (but then again Anais Nin was a flake).

So I had no problem with Hitchens going after Gore Vidal.

The reasoning behind "women aren't funny" was strange - basically he was saying that women don't have to be funny because they can get laid without it.

I probably should just shut down pro-war-liberal. I pretty much let the other guy who I made moderator own it.

Don't think Hitchens would have ever repudiated the war in Iraq since he saw it as both a war against tyranny and Islamofascism but I do believe he was quite unhappy with the way the war was carried out in such an unthinking and myopic fashion.

Oh well, he did get to live long enough to see Qaddafi toppled. And in a way that didn't overtly involve the U.S.

T

[uvula_fr_b4]

If you're inclined to like Nin despite her flakiness, you might want to check out Vidal's take on her; it's collected in his United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992, which won the National Book Award. I got over whatever half-assed inclination I ever had to read her after reading Vidal, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Oh, and watching Henry and June. (Vidal's hilarious on Miller, BTW.)

Yeah, Vidal is bitter, extremely so; a crank? Mmm, perhaps, but anybody who's essentially a lone voice shouting in the wilderness has got to be at least a little bit of a crank. If I'd had to endure the misguided carping that he did in response to Lincoln, I probably would've repaired to a cave, or at least to a Unabomber shack.

FWIW, I don't entirely agree with Vidal's assessment of Timothy McVeigh: I don't think that McVeigh was a "true patriot," no matter how much I disagree with the various choices our Curious Leaders have made over the last several decades, and if I'd had my druthers, I would've had him kept alive for a very long time, at least partly in hopes that he would eventually start singing like a canary about who else helped him. (Funnily enough, the BBC aired a radio play a few years ago that they'd commissioned, wherein Ian McKellen played Vidal as a creepy, autodidactic old queen who was interested in McVeigh for more than his philosophical reasons for carrying out the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; I don't buy this "explanation" of Vidal's championing of McVeigh, or at least, not wholly, by itself: it's too damned simplistic.)

OTOH, for all of Vidal's intellectual arguments against the U.S.'s involvement in WWII -- tempered by his realization that the Nazis, if not the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, needed to be taken down (Vidal is no Pat Buchanan) -- one can't quite escape the notion, after reading his first memoir, Palimpsest, that at least some of his rage and fury over how the U.S. entered WWII, and how Truman midwifed the national security state which you and I have lived under our entire lives, stems from the loss of his best friend and the love of his life, Jimmy Trimble, on one of the Pacific islands that the Marines took from the Japanese.

IIRC, Hitchens took issue with the term "Islamofascism" as a conflation of two separate ideologies; but yeah, he never would've repudiated the war in Iraq at this juncture (despite his earlier, initial repudiation of the first Gulf War...), if only due to his championing of the Kurds.

Hmm: wonder why there haven't been any reports of Iran's treatment of their Kurdish population; surely the "Islamic Republic" hasn't embraced them...?