While I usually find point-by-point refutation of the comments of others tedious, this column by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair is so dishonest, so slimy and so mind numbingly stupid that only a point-by-point rebuttal will do. On the plus side, Hitchens’ own psychological projection is displayed in lurid fashion in this flimsy attempt at a hit-job. Since I stopped reading Hitchens around the time his fixation on Bill Clinton’s tallywacker became a deranged obsession, I became aware of this most recent display of Hitchens’ character flaws thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s web site, and he in turn apparently got it from Jonah Goldberg at what the kind readers at Sadly No! have dubbed “America’s Shittiest Website”.
What has happened to Gore Vidal, the witty, tough-minded subversive of American letters, the 20th century’s only possible answer to Oscar Wilde? After 9/11, the author laments, Vidal’s writings took a graceless lurch toward the crackpot, surpassing even the wilder-eyed efforts of Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, and providing a miserable coda to his brilliant run.
Is there anything more hilarious than watching some fatuous blowhard who thinks he said something clever? This just in: Michael Moore and Oliver Stone were right about Iraq. If Vidal agreed with them, then good for him.
More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious rival.
Heroic old queen, eh? Nothing like a pot-shot at a homosexual is there? But why queen? Why not pickle-kisser, fag, homo or donut-puncher? I mean, if you’re going to take a swipe at a gay man, why be so lacking in creativity? But then, this is purely a matter of taste, and I’m the first to admit that my idea of wit is more Lisa Lampanelli than Oscar Wilde.
Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never “off”: his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.
Is this an obituary piece or what? I realize Vidal is an old man (about the same age as my grandfather when he died), but Hitchens writes about him in the past tense as though Vidal has already kicked the bucket.
I was fortunate enough to know Gore a bit in those days. The price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included his pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong.
Now we’re cooking! Here we have Christopher Hitchens libeling Gore Vidal (a man who lived with a Jewish common law spouse -for lack of a better term- named Howard Austen for fifty years) as an anti-Semite. Hitchens’ little shell game is the same one used by Monroe Friedman to slime Jimmy Carter: he claims to have heard the old man say things that are anti-Jewish. The question for Hitchens and Friedman is the same: “Why didn’t you mention it at the time?” It’s a rhetorical question, since it’s obvious that both Hitchens and Friedman are despicable liars, and neither Vidal nor Carter made any such remarks. Hitchens certainly had no crisis of conscience when it came to squealing about conversations he had with his old friend Sydney Blumenthal, so respect for confidentiality isn’t the issue.
One would think that Hitchens of all people would remember this same scummy tactic, since Edward J. Epstein made a similar claim about him. According to Epstein, Christopher Hitchens claimed that the Nazi Holocaust never happened. There is a difference, however. There’s no evidence of anti-Semitism in Vidal’s personal life, or in his writings –no matter how much effort his enemies have put into twisting his words to smear him as a Jew-hater. On the other hand, Hitchens’ status as Groupie-In-Chief for David Irving (who claims that more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz) makes Epstein’s claims much more believable.
One was made aware, too, that he suspected Franklin Roosevelt of playing a dark hand in bringing on Pearl Harbor and still nurtured an admiration in his breast for the dashing Charles Lindbergh, leader of the American isolationist right in the 1930s.
Most Americans admired Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s and for the record; FDR did in fact try to get the United States into the Second World War. Long-range bombers were deployed to the Philippines early in 1941 for the express purpose of heading off a Japanese naval attack and/or to retaliate if an attack on Hawaii were carried out. The ultimatum given to Japan to withdraw from China and Indo-China guaranteed a war with Japan. But then, bringing up things like facts to Hitchens, who considers David Irving a reliable source about what went on during World War Two, is like pulling out several cloves of garlic in front of Count Dracula, though vampires seem to handle the obvious discomfort in a more reserved, graceful and dignified manner.
But these tics and eccentricities, which I did criticize in print, seemed more or less under control, and meanwhile he kept on saying things one wished one had said oneself. Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.” Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” He once said to me of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.” Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”? In an interview, he told me that his life’s work was “making sentences.” It would have been more acute to say that he made a career out of pronouncing them.
Isn’t that special? First Hitchens smears the old man as a paranoid nut with a fixation on Jews, now he’s being complimentary about Vidal’s style. If this had been done with skill it might come across as genuinely passive-aggressive when it’s really just an extended wind-up for what the author thinks is a knockout punch. Unfortunately for David Irving’s favorite PR flack, his punches are about as damaging as being pelted with a handful of Q-tips.
However, if it’s true even to any degree that we were all changed by September 11, 2001, it’s probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant.
Let’s talk about crackpots for a moment, shall we? It wasn’t Gore Vidal who was pushing the crank conspiracy theory about Saddam Hussein being allied with Al Qaeda. It was Hitchens. It wasn’t Gore Vidal pimping the fairy tale about Iraq having tons of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that it could and would use against other countries. That was also Christopher Hitchens. While most crackpot conspiracy theories are harmless foolishness, the ones Hitchens coughed up like so many furballs have led to the deaths of over a million people in Iraq, with torture, rape, mutilation and ethnic cleansing galore. Hitchens’ furballs have also caused 5000 American troops to lose their lives with many more wounded and disfigured for life.
If you look at his writings from that time, thrown together in a couple of cheap paperbacks entitled Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, you will find the more crass notions of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone being expressed in language that falls some distance short of the Wildean ideal. “Meanwhile, Media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind.” To that “sentence,” abysmal as it is in so many ways, Vidal put his name in November 2002.
Projection in action again: If you want to discuss paperback pamphlets, you can’t find any more ridiculous than Hitchens’ The Long Short War, where the author shows his own wit (more like half of it) by calling anti-war demonstrators “potluckistas”.
A small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington
Only crackpots insinuate or assert that the administration knew in advance of attacks from Al Qaeda, right? So what does that make this person, who brings up the fact that CIA Director George Tenet, when informed of the 9-11 attacks said something to the effect that he hoped it wasn’t the guys taking flying lessons in the Midwest. Let’s see this particular crackpot in action (20:39):
What kind of nutjob would claim that the CIA knew in advance about Mohammed Atta and his men?
and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan. (Not much sign of that, incidentally, not that the luckless Afghans mightn’t welcome it.) For academic authority in this Grassy Knoll enterprise, Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced “the best, most balanced report” on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called “a small but reputable homeland publisher.” Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his “Institute” a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called “Media Monitors Network” in association with “Tree of Life,” whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing. And to think that there was once a time when Gore Vidal could summon Lincoln to the pages of a novel or dispute points of strategy with Henry Cabot Lodge …
So the size of the publisher is the best way to tell if the book’s content is true? I guess that means everything Hitchens wrote that was published by Verso can be dismissed out of hand as well.
Notice how Hitchens never supplies any examples of why Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a crank. I guess we’re supposed to take his word for it. Then again, Hitchens’ word is worth less than Jack Shit, so I think not.
It became more and more difficult to speak to Vidal after this (and less fun too), but then I noticed something about his last volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, which brought his life story up to 2006. Though it contained a good ration of abuse directed at Bush and Cheney, it didn’t make even a gesture to the wild-eyed and croaking stuff that Mr. Ahmed had been purveying. This meant one of two things: either Vidal didn’t believe it any longer or he wasn’t prepared to put such sorry, silly, sinister stuff in a volume published by Doubleday, read by his literary and intellectual peers, and dedicated to the late Barbara Epstein. The second interpretation, while slightly contemptible, would be better than nothing and certainly a good deal better than the first.
Given Hitchens’ track record of lying about friends and comrades, small wonder Vidal didn’t want to talk to him. Again, Hitchens’ paranoid mind comes to front of the class. If Vidal, while writing his own biography, doesn’t include every source he used from a pamphlet he put out years before, it can mean only that Vidal has backed away from what he wrote before or that he’s covering it up. Or it could mean that he was sticking to the subject of the autobiography. But then, the third option isn’t useful for a weasel out to smear Gore Vidal, now is it?
However the real turd in the punchbowl is the fact that Hitchens would bring up Barbara Epstein. Alexander Cockburn, another ex-friend, describes Hitchens as he stoops even lower:
The recent memorial for long-term New York Review co-editor Barbara Epstein, sadly felled by cancer on June 15, was disfigured by an unseemly outbursts from Christopher Hitchens. There was a list of invitees for the private ceremony and C. Hitchens — a sometime NYT contributor ¬ was not on the list. He implored to be admitted, and some misguidedly decent soul gave him the green light.
Visibly taken with drink, in the estimate of at least one observer, Hitchens showed up and soon made his way to Jean Stein, a close friend of Barbara Epstein, also editor of Grand Street in recent years. Hitchens spared Stein the habitual presentation of his hairy cheek but made a low, facetious bow and offered his hand.
Stein icily declined, saying she had no desire to shake hands with him for many reasons, not least the fact that Hitchens had attacked one of her best friends, Edward Said, while he was on his death bed.
As Hitchens retreated, someone remarked to him, “So your glorious war has turned out to be a total disaster, hasn’t it?”
“It is glorious,” the sodden scrivener blared, “and it IS my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war.”
As mourners digested this megalomanic outburst, Hitchens continued, “And we are going to kill every Al Qaida terrist and Baathist in the country and that’s a good thing. They need to be killed and we will kill them.”
Not since Jack the Ripper’s letters to Scotland Yard has an Englishman shown such a combination of poor taste and lack of shame. Here’s a hint: when you invite yourself to a funeral and show up drunk and make an ass of yourself, the best course of action in the future is to avoid bringing up the name of one ex-friend (whose funeral you crashed), after attacking another ex-friend (whom you smeared on his death bed), in order to slime another ex-friend (who is near the end his rope). Vultures, maggots and the flesh-eating ghouls from H.P. Lovecraft show more respect for the dead and dying.
None of this should be a surprise to anyone familiar with Hitchens’ m.o. After all this is the same ghoulish character who used a forged e-mail to accuse Cindy Sheehan (who lost a son fighting in Hitchens’ “glorious” war) of being –you guessed it!- an anti-Semite and a crank conspiracy theorist like Lyndon LaRouche.
But I have now just finished reading a long interview conducted by Johann Hari of the London Independent (Hari being a fairly consecrated admirer of his) in which Vidal decides to go slumming again and to indulge the lowest in himself and in his followers. He openly says that the Bush administration was “probably” in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.
Hari’s article was published October 6, 2009 which means Hitchens has been brooding over it for three months and this is the best he can do? Notice that neither Hari nor Hitchens can be bothered to produce a full quote of what Vidal said which is odd since Vidal is famous for being so quotable. Instead, Hari pulls one word out of context, which should cause any reader to smell a rat. Given Hari’s own track record as an all-around bullshit artist (just like Hitchens), I’d wager that this is more of Johann Hari’s dishonesty at work.
As far as Patton and Eisenhower are concerned, Hitchens might want to use Google and look up ‘Canicatti Massacre” and “Biscari Massacre”, acts of cold-blooded murder carried out under General Patton’s orders. I could go into war crimes authorized by Eisenhower, but that would be gilding gold and painting lilies since Hitchens, shortly after the 9-11 attacks, used his Vanity Fair column to accuse the Allies of killing 100,000 people in Dresden in 1945. The wildly inflated death toll (three times the number used by historians), as it turns out, was the work of Hitchens’ hero (guess who!) David Irving!
Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage—broken by “the madhouse”—after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.”
Well, what would you call it when a President can start a war, abduct, torture and kill anyone he wants to, a healthy republic? I’d call it a failed system very much like the juntas of South America, so Vidal is right on that score. Now that China just passed Germany as the world’s leading exporter, Vidal apparently is better informed on trade and economic matters, too.
Asian subjects never seem to bring out the finest in Vidal: he used to say it was Japan that was dominating the world economy, and that in the face of that other peril “there is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union.” That was in 1986—not perhaps the ideal year to have proposed an embrace of Moscow, and certainly not as good a year as 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt did join forces with the U.S.S.R., against Japan and Nazi Germany, in a war that Vidal never ceases to say was (a) America’s fault and (b) not worth fighting.
Ah, the Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy. Where would a dishonest hack like Hitchens be without it? The idea of opening up full trade and friendly relations with Russia 3-4 years before the Soviet system collapsed (or earlier) was actually a good idea, more so since the EU formed and expanded (and are now Russia’s main trade partner) and since China is industrializing along with the rest of East Asia. I could point out the crazed stupidity of the rest of this part (Russia entered the war against Japan in 1942?) but I realize this is of zero interest to Hitchens, who at this point is, like a hyperactive monkey in a zoo, groping for any handy piece of crap to sling at his betters.
Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.” One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second.
This is just what the world needs: full-bore clutch-the-pearls concern-trolling from Christopher Hitchens about grace and generosity. What’s next, John Yoo complaining about the mistreatment of prisoners?
Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Good grief.
Truth hurts, doesn’t it?
For some years now, the old boy’s stock-in-trade has been that of the last Roman: the stoic eminence who with unclouded eyes foresees the coming end of the noble republic. Such an act doesn’t require a toga, but it does demand a bit of dignity. Vidal’s phrasings sometimes used to have a certain rotundity and extravagance, but now he has descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit. What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?
This is rich, coming from someone whose idea of wit is the lyrics of 2 Live Crew. I wonder what Oscar Wilde would make of Me So Horny, don’t you?
If Vidal ever reads this, I suppose I know what he will say. Asked about our differences a short while ago at a public meeting in New York, he replied, “You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn’t die. I just kept going on and on and on.” (One report of the event said that this not-so-rapier-like reply had the audience in “stitches”: Vidal in his decline has fans like David Letterman’s, who laugh in all the wrong places lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time.) But his first sentence precisely inverts the truth. Many years ago he wrote to me unprompted—I have the correspondence—and freely offered to nominate me as his living successor, dauphin, or, as the Italians put it, delfino. He very kindly inscribed a number of his own books to me in this way, and I asked him for permission to use his original letter on the jacket of one of mine. I stopped making use of the endorsement after 9/11, as he well knows. I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.
Again Hitchens is clutching at straws. Whether Vidal named him as his literary heir in a letter doesn’t change the fact that Hitchens spent several years trying to be Mini-Me to Vidal’s Dr. Evil. One does not write letters entitled Caro Maestro to just any correspondent, and certainly not letters meant to be published.
I don’t in the least mind his clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history with me, but I find I do object to the crank-revisionist and denialist history he is now peddling about everything else, as well as to the awful, spiteful, miserable way—“going on and on and on,” indeed—in which he has finished up by doing it. Oscar Wilde was never mean-spirited, and never became an Ancient Mariner, either.
More projection from this pathetic has been. The one trying to re-write history is Hitchens himself, who once ridiculed Paul Johnson for making a “much advertised stagger from left to right”, a textbook example of the pot calling the kettle black if there ever was one. What does that make someone like Hitchens, who used to savage neo-cons and imperialists, then joined them after 9-11, then contracted an acute case of buyer’s remorse once it was clear the war was not only lost, but that it led to numerous atrocities by those who waged it? That’s what his waterboarding stunt was all about: self-flagellation to prove he’s a reformed sinner.
It’s not surprising that Sullivan, Goldberg and Hitchens would engage in an anti-Vidal circle-jerk. Jonah Goldberg admits in his lively, yet moronic little book Liberal Fascism that he just hasn’t gotten over the debates between Gore Vidal and William Buckley in 1968, where Vidal PWNED (as the kids say nowadays) Buckley, who was not only Jonah Goldberg’s hero, but his employer as well. In a perverse kind of way, I find Goldberg’s terrier-like loyalty rather touching, as well as pathetic.
For Sullivan and Hitchens, it’s a matter of revising their own sordid histories. They would have you believe that they only wanted the War on Terror for the noblest of reasons and that they shilled for it in an honest, forthright manner. They would also have you believe that they changed their tune because they were flabbergasted by the incompetence and bad faith of the men in charge, and were shocked by the atrocities and other prices that were paid for the war. For someone trying to pull this sleight-of-hand, a high-profile figure like Gore Vidal, who opposed the war from the beginning and smelled the neo-con horseshit from a mile away, is a rather embarrassing Exhibit A, proving that Hitchens and Sullivan are really just warmongers with buyer’s remorse who resent the hell out of those who were right all along. One gets the impression that had the wars gone more smoothly, with less stealing and fewer atrocities that they would still be on the war wagon.
There is a difference between Sullivan and Hitchens. Sullivan seems genuinely repentant, and has done a kind of blogger’s community service when it comes to documenting the torture and murder of the Bush regime. Admirable though that may be, it doesn’t change his despicable behavior before the war in Iraq went sour, when he accused those who opposed the war in Afghanistan of being a Fifth Column –in other words, traitors who would willingly serve Al Qaeda and who deserve to be killed.
Hitchens on the other hand, does his penance purely for show. He gives less than half a flying fuck about torture, let alone other war crimes, which is why he wrote a piece for Slate claiming that the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib rested with the low-level flunkies who actually did the dirty work and not the officers and contractors who ordered and encouraged them. Like Sullivan, he too was fond of lying about those who opposed the War on Terror. While rescue workers were still trying to recover the bodies from the World Trade Center’s ruins, Hitchens accused Harold Pinter and John Pilger of giving moral support to Al Qaeda and suggesting that the victims (according to Pilger and Pinter) got what was coming to them. I have already covered the disgusting lies Hitchens told about Cindy Sheehan, using a forged e-mail to call her an anti-Semite and to lump her in with Lyndon LaRouche, a credit card thief and holocaust denier. But using forged documents to smear a person is nothing new for Hitchens, who tried the same thing with British MP George Galloway, only to have it blow up in his face when it turned out that the documents Hitchens used were not only fake, but were proved to be forgeries before Hitchens ever got hold of them!
Not that it matters. Whether it’s Pilger, Pinter, Sheehan, Galloway or most recently Vidal, Christopher Hitchens will gleefully scrape the bottom of the filthiest sewers in search of something to smear them with. What he doesn’t realize is that the only tangible result of his efforts is that his hands end up covered in shit.
Honest! Shackled prisoners hang themselves all the time!
You gotta be shitting me!