... the barstool warrior Christopher Hitchens ... recently hailed G. Bush as his hero and ... devotes his column in the current Vanity Fair to the beneficial properties of booze – citing his own superb mental powers and physical condition as irrefutable evidence.
I offer the following commentary as a public service for impressionable youth, who otherwise might take Hitchens at his word and assume that one can drink like a fish and still row safely to journalistic fortune with mind and body unimpaired. At least in the old Bohemian days, as I saw them in Dublin and London in the late 50s, many writers were drunks. They didn’t maintain the illusion that booze would carry them into clear-eyed, keen-brained old age or that they weren’t often a burden to their loved ones.
The nature of his relationship to alcoholic beverages has clearly been preying on Hitchens. Not long ago, he accused me in an email of putting about stories that he’s a drunk. I responded that given his tempestuous appearances on tv, the matter of his drinking hadn’t required my agency to become known to the American people.
In Vanity Fair, he triumphantly refers to a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine that asserts that downing a glass of wine, beer or other booze daily can prevent a future heart attack.
Thus buttressed, Hitchens says that his own rigorous regime of drinking, begun at the age of 15 and continuing to his present age of 53, has enabled him to work prodigiously "while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike physique which is the envy of many of my juniors."
He offers tips on how to make drink your servant, not your master. "On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis–and all gin drinks–that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few and three is one too many… When you get the shudders, even slightly, it’s definitely time to seek help."
Let me pass lightly over the portly scribbler whom I observed a little more than a year ago experiencing some difficulty bringing a lighted match and the first cigarette of the morning into productive contact, also over the math about the gins. As far as dry martinis go, there’s been sound evidence in the past to take him as a six-breast guy.
The more troubling thing I’ve noted in recent years is Hitchens’ odd excursions from reality. I refer here not to the nonsense he quite often writes, but to what is quite simply a level of fantasy in his perceptions and recollections.
Not so long ago, I received a peremptory email from him, written late at night, demanding I rescind a vile slur made against him on the CounterPunch website (edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and myself).
I wrote back, pointing out that a retraction was unnecessary because no such slur had been made. After a few days, during which I assumed he’d re-read my item and realized his mistake, he sent another email, demanding a retraction once again.
An acquaintance of mine, no fan of Hitchens, remarked to me last week that he reckons the man to be a victim of early Korsakoff’s Syndrome. "What’s that?" I asked.
Back came his answer promptly: "Korsakoff’s Syndrome (from Korsakoff, a Russian neurologist) is an organic brain psychosis. A severe neurological disorder brought on by years of heavy alcohol abuse, compounded in turn, by vitamin deficiencies caused by self-neglect. It’s characterized by disorientation, a variety of neuro deficits and complaints and, most significantly, a memory loss of a unique kind which is the signal feature of the disease: sufferers tend to confabulate. That is, when asked a question they cannot answer based on memory, they just ad lib stories to fill in the gaps–often at great and garrulous length–providing detailed information the patient genuinely believes to be true but is wholly fictitious."
The exact quality of Hitchens’ memory will become highly germane sometime in the not-so-distant future. Sidney Blumenthal is scheduled to publish his memoir of the Clinton years, and he is devoting some pages to the manner in which his erstwhile buddy Hitchens tried to get him put away for lying to Congress.
At issue is precisely what Hitchens remembers Blumenthal saying over their notorious lunch at the Occidental Grill in downtown DC about Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey. Last year, Hitchens told an English interviewer that he is ready to remember even more inconvenient material from that lunch, in the event Blumenthal takes after him in the upcoming memoir. Some might call this Tactical Korsakoffism.
Alas, Korsakoff is not available for comment on Hitchens as a possible advertisement of his diagnosis. He died in 1900, at the age of 46.
<http://www.nypress.com/16/8/news&columns/wildjustice.cfm>
Carl
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