HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Yarker
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2002 12:47 AM
Subject: Hitchens: New Amazing Claim
Hitchens: New Amazing
Claim Wild
Justice Bumping along like a
rickety caboose in the wake of all these disjunctures, we find Ron Rosenbaum
claiming at interminable length in The New York Observer that the spirit of
Orwell lives on in the corporeal envelopes of Andrew Sullivan and Christopher
Hitchens, hailed by the fervent Rosenbaum as "the most forceful, eloquent and
influential voices in the American debate over the Sept. 11 attacks and their
meaning." I’ve managed to avoid
almost all of Sullivan’s outpourings, though I do recall one piece of comical
nonsense about America’s "fifth column" deployed on the East and West Coasts,
held apart by the great "red" (i.e., pro-Bush) interior states. Hitchens’ prime
contribution has been to supply a disgusting one-liner, delightedly seized upon
by the press, to the effect that Noam Chomsky is "soft on fascism" and that the
heroism displayed by the passengers on AA Flight 93 is "worth all the writings
of Noam Chomsky." Rosenbaum claims that
Hitchens "succeeded in turning around the Left, or a large segment of it (aside
from the Chomskyites). Turning around those who saw America as somehow to blame,
who sought to portray our power as the real culprit." It’s a sweeping claim,
marred only by the fact that Rosenbaum furnishes not one single example of who
or what in the left spectrum Hitchens managed to lead from error into
bright-eyed belief in the efficacy of B-52s. I doubt he could. The importance of
Hitchens these days is not his supposed persuasive power among the left, but the
fact that he can be cited by the non-left as an example of how refreshingly
sensible a "leftist" can be. If Hitchens were labeled "a rightist" his fungible
value as a self-proclaimed contrarian would dwindle abruptly, since his views
are mostly identical to the usual bluster of the broad right. To judge from the
comments of the audience on a recent Nation cruise, those lefties who still
have regard for Hitchens don’t actually listen to what he says, or read what he
writes. They just enjoy the act. After one cruise seminar in which Hitchens had
lauded the West’s great crusade and denounced the left, several oldsters
remarked to me that they assumed he had been speaking ironically, or was merely
jesting. To me, these days, he recalls George Gale, rendered immortal in
Private Eye as one of the echoes
of that archetypal sodden Fleet Street hack, Lunchtime O’Booze.
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