Politics: Troublemaker Extraordinaire
This week’s column is one I have dreaded writing for much of this year. It is altogether impossible to avoid now following last Friday’s news.
Late Thursday, his heart stopped pumping, and the life blood ceased coursing its way to the brilliant wisdom factory that was the awe-inspiring cerebrum of Christopher Hitchens.
I as well as his many admirers and friends the world over had hoped against hope that Hitch might defeat the esophageal cancer that wracked his body and stole his voice. The cancer claimed that and sapped him of much of his energy, but not his ability to write. Finally last week, in a Houston hospital, it claimed the rest of him.
It was by chance that I happened upon my copy of the latest Vanity Fair last weekend, a personal favorite mag of which Hitch was a regular contributing editor. I looked forward to the submissions of two of my favorite contributors with each month’s issue, his and Dominick Dunne’s. Now the great periodical is devoid of both.
Through its pages Hitch gave us quite an education and enlightenment. He voluntarily submitted to waterboarding, then wrote about it. He submitted to a lesser torture – body hair waxing – and wrote about that. And over the course of the last year, he chronicled his final fight, that with the Big C.
“A wit, a charmer, and a troublemaker,” as his VF editor, Graydon Carter, eulogized him on the magazine’s website the other day. A troublemaker extraordinaire.
In January’s issue is his final essay. Of that old adage – Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. – Hitch takes his polemic hammer and smashes it to bits. Amid the excruciating pain of the radiation treatments and a medical regimen that reduced him to nourishment through a tube (“every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less”) he declares, no, “there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.”
But it’s not Hitch in his weakened state as I and others will remember him, but rather his stronger, combative, acerbic, erudite one.
I can’t recall the first essay of his I ever devoured. Or the first television appearance of his among many in which I witnessed that superb and quick wit, time and time again. A wit that could cut up lesser intellects – or those with no intellect at all – chew them up, then spit them out. Just to observe such a spectacle was an entertainment rarely to be equaled.
I had a chance to observe this wit in person when Hitch spoke to a full room at the Miami Book Fair International in 2002.
A favorite story of mine, related by Hitch’s close friend, novelist Martin Amis, is of a young, twenty-ish Hitch appearing on TV in the ’70s, expounding eloquently on a political subject. “His host – a fair old bruiser in his own right – paused, frowned, and said with skepticism and with helpless sincerity, ‘I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’”
I’m not in the least surprised,” Hitch shot back, before moving on.
If this had been a frontier western and not a chat show, Amis added, “the wounded man would have spent the rest of the segment…snapping the arrow in half and pushing its pointed end through his chest and out the other side.”
Among his many obituaries and tributes I’ve pored through this week is this one from a fellow Oxford student of his: “He could throw words up into the sky; they fell down in a marvelous pattern.”
And, oh, what words and assemblages of them on the page and in the spoken breath.
One of my treasured new books, acquired earlier this year, is The Quotable Hitchens, an A-to-Z collection of some of Hitch’s best. What better tribute to Hitch than for me to step aside momentarily and offer him up the following column space so as to showcase some of that “best”:
On Newt Gingrich: “He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office; he has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull.”
On hypocrisy: “I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned.
On the late French president François Mitterrand: “One cannot eat enough to vomit enough at the mention of Mitterrand’s name.”
On religion and morality: “Religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.”
On women and humor: “It could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals.”
On YouTube: “I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What’s ‘You’ about this? It’s a MeTube, for me.”
Bill Clinton and sex: “One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton’s prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.”
On the Clinton Administration: “Mr. Nixon went down for actions committed by his ghastly aides. Mr. Clinton’s aides are going down because of things done by their ghastly president.”
On children: “Nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.”
On God: “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fraticide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.”
On the religious right: “Our indictment of the religious right is not that it is heartless, but that it is brainless.
On oratory: “When a charge against me of ‘incitement to riot’ was eventually dropped, I was slightly crestfallen because I had thought it a back-handed tribute to my abilities as an orator.”
And another: “If you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone.”
On pornography: “There will always appear to be something bizarre about those who campaign against [it]. Something, if you like, a little too interested.”
On Pope Benedict: “Mentally remove his papal vestments and imagine him in a suit, and Joseph Ratzinger becomes just a Bavarian bureaucrat who has failed in the only task he was ever set – that of damage control.”
Upon learning the news, Salman Rushdie tweeted: “Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops.”
Sadly, indeed. But the words – and the wisdom – beat on.
THE WOODMAN COMETH
…and playeth at the Gleason Tuesday evening. And the audience enjoyeth.
That would be Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band. It was a night of toe-tapping, head-bobbing jazz as rendered by clarinetist Woody and his six fellow musicians: a trombonist, a drummer, a trumpeter, a bass cellist, a pianist, and a banjo strummer (“the leader of the band, really,” as introduced by Woody.)
For 90 minutes straight, they transformed the Gleason into something resembling the sounds of the Big Easy (old-time spirituals and “whorehouse music,” too, as Woody put it). And we were treated to three – count ‘em, 3 – encores. So accomplished is he as a musician that if he ever considered doing so, I think he actually could give up that day job of his. Although I don’t think he’s ever considered it.
And some say there’s nothing going on at the Gleason, that it should be demolished. They weren’t there Tuesday night.
THE ASS-WIPE TROPHY
It must be some sort of sales gimmick, I figure.
Every year, I go to the post office to purchase Christmas stamps for the few holiday cards I send out. Last week, I asked to buy some and was told they had sold out that day’s batch. Sold out!? How can a post office sell out of Christmas stamps? That’s like a gas station running out of gas. Or a shoe store running out of shoes
This week, when I returned, they had the stamps. But when I asked for two, I was told they now sell them only in books of 20. WTF!?
Never in all my life have I heard of such a thing. So it must be a sales gimmick the Postal Service has hatched in this year of drastic cost-cutting for the beleaguered agency. A new scheme to try to boost flagging revenue: Force customers to buy in bulk, never mind that I wanted only TWO stamps, NOT 20!
The Postal Service deserves a lump of coal in its stocking, put there by that other package delivery service, Santa Claus Inc.
And from me? Bah, humbug! I’m gifting them this week’s roll of t.p. Have yourselves a shitty little Christmas.
SUCH A SHAME…
…about Kim Jong Il, ain’t it?
A shame he didn’t live long enough for his downtrodden, long-suffering people to rise up in an Arab Spring-like fury, topple the little shit – weird pompadour and all – and rope a noose around his neck ala Saddam, or pull him out of a drain pipe and drive a bullet into him, ala Gaddafi.
Speaking of the Hermit Kingdom, Hitch wrote of a visit he once made there:
“One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy – they wouldn’t tell be the breed – but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. (In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.)”
