Horizon

Yes, you could say he is more interested in the person and their actions than in their literary work, just as he's more interested in a person's position on a topic (and the morality of that position, as he percieves it) than he is in their reasoning.

You know, I can't really say I evaluate authors any differently. Not being any sort of writer myself, the models I hope to emulate are an author's reasoning, perception, or moral sense, rather than his prose. I enjoy a good turn of phrase — Melville's "those two orchard thieves" had me laughing over lunch — but I appreciate literature in the same way I do painting, as a spectator, rather than as a colleague.

I notice he is resurrecting the "buried centrifuge components" in his latest Slate article.

One of the (many) tiresome things about the Hitch is his presumption that Iraq is All About Him. Does anyone else much care about Ahmad Chalabi any more? Why does he keep returning to the issue again and again? Wounded vanity, that's all - Chalabi suckered him with flattery (as so many political writers have been suckered with flattery before), and now he's determined to prove that this faded snake-oil salesman was, and remains, the man of vision that Hitchens was foolish enough to proclaim him as.

Speak of the devil: I was probably too nice to him in the comments section of this thread at Echidne's yesterday.

Hmm. There's a lot of rather naive chat about people like George Galloway over there, isn't there?

I rather enjoyed the comment about how The Nation had moved right. May even be true, for all I know.

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with CH, as I didn’t know much about him until 2003 when I stumbled onto the Scottish newsgroup; and I’m not terribly inspired to catch up knowing what I do about Hitchens 2.0. I’m sure his post 9/11 comments have been overplayed, but they bear one more turn:

On the morning of September 11, I had in common with a lot of people a number of emotions: anger, disgust, solidarity. But there was another one that I couldn't quite place, and I hope I can say this without risk of indecency: it was exhilaration. Here is the enemy, in as plain and clear a view as it could possibly be: theocratic fascism, disclosed in its most horrific form. If that's the battle, if they want a clash of civilizations, they can have one, and I will never get bored with prosecuting it.

9/11 wasn’t just a horrifying, shocking event; for some it was the defining moment of their lives. Suddenly they understood why they were born: to don armor in the name of civilization, to throw oneself into that epic clash between good and evil. One’s personal movie went from It Happened One Night to The Lord of the Rings. 9/11 wasn’t just a revelation, it was a sanctification.

And out of that came infatuation, the most destructive of ideologies.

Infatuation is a good explanation for many of the flaws in Hitchens' work lately. I've mentioned here before that I'm uneasy with the suspicion that I'd be a subtrahend in his utopia.

That said, Hitchens really did a wonderful job in the weeks following 9/11. Those of us paying attention to the left were looking for a moral response from other than self-abasement, and Hitchens was the first person to articulate that. Somebody had to expose the Chomskies of the world, and maybe it took the illusion of shining armor to do that.

Just cruised around Echidne's site a bit. Martha, it's nice to see that I don't have the lock on associating with paranoid loons.

I don't know what "those of you" were reading then.

Salon and The New Republic, mainly, with a splash of The Nation thrown in. I was also a regular reader of the Weekly Standard at the time, but wouldn't form impressions of the center-left from that.

I frequently wonder if I simply don't belong to what you consider to be "the left"

Martha Bridegam != Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky is widely considered to be a member of "the left", though that category is fuzzy enough to include Bill Clinton as well, and likely Martha Bridegam too if she so chooses.

With that out of the way, there were two themes that occurred not infrequently in writing from the left that you didn't find in the same form on the right: the notion that the attacks were an understandable reaction to American foreign policy, and the dread of a response by American citizens or the U.S. Government.

Looking at Salon's archives from that first week, I count

• Stories on threats of violence against Americans of Middle Eastern descent: 3
• Stories analyzing the attacks as justifiable responses to U.S. policy: 2
• Stories warning of dire consequences of any U.S. military response: 5

There's also, of course, a tremendous amount of compassion and patriotic feeling, but there seems to be an absense of the awareness that American power could be a force for good in the world: always the Gulf of Tonkin, never Pearl Harbor. That's what Hitchens changed, for better or worse.

Regarding Echidne, I thought this item today was spot on.

I don't actually see where you get the idea that advocates of, for example, the Geneva Convention are therefore self-hating. The only way to have any self-respect at all is to make a practice of hitting only above the belt. What I saw among more politically left/liberal writers after 9/11 was a tragically correct anticipation that anger at our own injuries would lead many members of the U.S. political and military classes to fight cruelly, not honorably, and to substitute the massive imposition of guilt by association for the reasoned investigation of a grim crime. They, and I, knew right away that we were in for another dark time in American history and sadly we were proven right.

I have just been reading this Human Rights Watch report on torture in Iraq and since you, too, believe in hitting above the belt, I think you, too, will find it repulsive.

And I fail to see how anything contemporary is proven by the fact that sixty years ago we managed to take the right side in a war. Regarding our current conduct in the current war, handsome is as handsome does.

And I fail to see how anything contemporary is proven by the fact that sixty years ago we managed to take the right side in a war.

I don't really think this was Ben's point. I think what he saying was that the Echidne crew don't seem open to possibility that the US today could ever act as a force for good in the world. Even someone like myself, who has been consistently skeptical of the Iraq project, finds that narrow-mindedness striking and depressing.

And I'm sorry Martha, but some of the posters on that site are patently barking mad.

Lots of people are barking mad. Hasn't ever stopped me from reading a newsgroup or weblog before now.

They, and I, knew right away that we were in for another dark time in American history and sadly we were proven right.

While I think that many of the shameful aspects of the conduct of the War on Terror are attributable to leadership not responsive to such argument, I do wonder how much the people whose first reaction was public denunciation of whatever the US might do ended up discrediting themselves and worthier causes by association. Looking back over private emails written in the two weeks following the attack, I see a great deal of umbrage at the calls for restraint from Europe and parts of the American left. This umbrage was due to the inappropriateness of such pleas when we hadn't taken any action at all yet. It was a bit like following a man down the street with a megaphone, yelling "Please don't beat your children tonight!"

What's odd about the post 9/11 reactions was that there were as many reprehensible statements made on the right as the left. It is perhaps fortunate that those judgements (the US deserved it because of its domestic policy, the calls for racial profiling, or Ann Coulter's firable comments about invasion and conversion) were less synthesizable into a coherent policy.

I think what he saying was that the Echidne crew don't seem open to possibility that the US today could ever act as a force for good in the world.

Well, that was what I was saying about "the left", but not Echidne et alia (whose post 9/11 reaction I know nothing about.) The source of my comments on Echidne was the thread on the administrations brewing anti-pornography campaign, which is nutty enough by itself without people who talk about "the patriarchy" in the same way that militia nuts talk about ZOG.

But then I've quoted Claton Craymer on this site within the last week, so the old glass houses rule should apply.

Hasn't ever stopped me from reading a newsgroup or weblog before now.

And good on you for it. Back during a slack time at a previous employer, an officemate and I declared Tuesdays "Loon Tuesday". We'd spend the morning websurfing for the nutties fringers we could find, swap recommendations during lunch, then tally up and decide who'd won. Do Serbian Orthodox Nationalists trump the guy who thinks Satan created the asteroid belt? How would you rate Edo Nyland versus that church in Waxahachie?

Sometimes I miss those days.

I do wonder how much the people whose first reaction was public denunciation of whatever the US might do ended up discrediting themselves and worthier causes by association.

So are you saying that the U.S. official response was morally and legally irreproachable, or are you saying that it was unpatriotic to make correct advance predictions of the abuses that did, unfortunately, take place?

Perhaps the problem (illustrated by exaggerated phrases like 'irreproachable' and 'unpatriotic') is that America is run by neither angels nor demons - yet those seem to be the only models of interest to the Right and Left.

I don't think either side does a good job of communicating its ideas to the other, at all. And it's hard to argue honestly with someone who you see as (to some degree justifiably) dishonest on account of some of the tactics which have gained favor in US politics lately.

So are you saying that the U.S. official response was morally and legally irreproachable, or are you saying that it was unpatriotic to make correct advance predictions of the abuses that did, unfortunately, take place?

Neither, of course. I'm saying that those whose warnings were based on the conviction that the U.S. was some monstrous reverse-Midas, and that absolutely no action it took short of bending over with a "kick me" sign attached to its belt ended up crying wolf. Remember the "silent genocide" we were creating by asking Pakistan to close the Afghan border? Remember the Dread Afghan Winter? There was a lot of crying "wolf" going around in 2001.

The shame of this is that they tarnished other, more sensible critics of specific U.S. actions, and (so far as I recall) drowned them out. More rational critics have had to work very hard indeed to avoid wolf-by-association, even now that it has become plain that wolves do indeed abound.