A Thousand Shards of Glass

3 November, 2010

University of California Medical Center

San Francisco, California

I’m in room 805 where Kris is resting after undergoing her third brain operation in eight months for what started out as a brain tumor.

Over the last few days I have been reading Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch 22, which is moving, substantive and, as always with Hitchens, well written.

As I watch my wife sleeping, I am well aware that Hitchens, too, is struggling for his life and it makes me sad for I like the man’s spirit and intelligence as he stands up for those who get pushed around. It is not all roses however, for even though I have learned much from this intelligent man, I also have a serious quarrel with his conduct leading up to the Iraq war and afterwards.

This self-described Marxist poses in one photograph in the book holding a gun with ‘Saddam’s enemies’ in Kurdistan and in another with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz in Iraq. I find it disturbing that this man of sizable talents used his intellect and powerful words to enable a lie. After reading his memoir, I can see how it happened but still cannot find a satisfying rationale or excuse for such decisions.

At one time I thought Hitchens just a ‘celebrity adventurer’ or a solipsistic opportunist but he is much deeper, more moral and brave than that. His heroes, if I can call them that, are also mine: Orwell, Sassoon and Owen among others and, based on what he has written, men from England like his father, who fought in WWII with stoicism and humility only to be betrayed by his country when he was no longer of any use. Being an American I am well acquainted with betrayal and understand completely what he is referring to. I have come to believe that his morality is based upon a certain time that is perceived by him as a moral time, or more accurately, a time of actionable morality (really the only kind).

I have always despised and share Hitchens’ great aversion to the bully. Unfortunately, I also share what I perceive as his romantic bent toward the adventurer type, the type that wishes to fight in noble battles and die for a just cause. He has said as much in a recent interview on National Public Radio. It is because of those very views and traits that I believe he was pulled into the ‘great con’ that so many of our shared heroes warned us about. And this is what is so odd. Hitchens writes so movingly about his father being betrayed by a new British government but also by a new ethic, or lack of one, where more and more of England was being privatized and the hills and countryside were being cut up for those contemptuous people who ‘made’ money rather than ‘earned’ it. In other words he and his father were watching not merely the breaking up of their country but the destruction of an ethic that had sustained the country through its most difficult days. Why he did not see that the Bush people and others, like the private war contractors who fucked and killed and made bushels of money, were the very same kinds of people, only more rapacious, who had betrayed his father years before, I do not know. What will always remain a mystery to me is how such a brilliant individual could not see how the bully was being replaced by the bullies. Of course, the most unthinkable but highly plausible possibility is that Hitchens did know and took it upon himself to choose what he thought was a lesser of two evils. If so, I wonder what he thought when the atrocities and torture at the hands of Americans at Abu Ghraib was made public.

With that possibility aside, I believe, his Byronesque romanticism blinded him to the fact that the Bush people (who were concerned with a number of matters but certainly not morality and truth) hated Saddam more than they loved the Iraqi people as I’m sure Hitchens realized when the Iraq museum was looted in front of US troops, and Rumsfeld, when asked about it, dispassionately responded, ‘Stuff happens.’ Did that sicken Hitchens? I don’t know. What I do know is that he did not change course. Indeed ‘stuff happens’ and it just goes to show that even a ‘clever Oxford boy’ can be suckered and then become a partisan in dubious causes.

And now, when Thanatos hovers, I wonder if a whiff of doubt or regret seeps in.

Not to fear, for when Thanatos puts his arm around Christopher one last time, his famous literary friends will begin to weave tales of grand causes and passionate nights of conversation, women and good scotch, and I for one will look forward to those tales for I love a good story. However, after all of the stories have been told with the exception of one, we shall all forget that this remarkable man once composed powerful words that promoted a lie that assisted in the killing of tens of thousands of people. This is sad for I wish Hitchens well and hope one day to walk across a room, shake his hand and say, ‘So, you are victorious over Thanatos, at least for a time, and I for one am glad of it.’

I like the world with Christopher Hitchens in it but I want all of Hitchens, and I hope, when words are put to paper, that his literary friends will tell it straight minus the hagiography. The man deserves nothing less.