At 02:46 PM 12/17/2011, davidchachere at yahoo.com wrote:
>alexander cockburn's eulogy of CH ________________________________
>Farewell to C.H. by ALEXANDER COCKBURN I can’t count the times, down the
>years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What
>happened to Christopher Hitchens?† the inquiry premiseed on some
>supposed change in Hitchens, often presumed to have started in the period
>he tried to put his close friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed
>perjury. My answer was that Christopher had been pretty much the same
>package since the beginning — always allowing for the ravvages of entropy
>as the years passed. As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a
>matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met
>him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and
>indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him asÂ
>at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest
>expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s
>director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical
>take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound
>belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an
>instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff
>in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples â€" Indians in the Americas
>— were inevitably going to bbe rolled over by the wheels of Progress and
>should not be mourned. On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties
>and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently
>obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The
>Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the
>“October surpriseâ€, denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release.
>He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about
>Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream
>that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill.
>Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire
> bother Hitchens so much? I’mm not sure. He used to hint that Clinton
>had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I
>think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he
>could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he sloshed
>his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via
>betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best
>to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.
>Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwaggerÂ
>for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was when he went to
>the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003
>invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he
>would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the
>Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more
>or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about
>“Islamo-fascism†like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch
>cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the
>early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother
>Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then
>kept asking ten years later, What happened? Anyway, between the two of
>them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in
>rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of
>soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with
>beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity. One
>awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack
>Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his
>obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem,
>Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt
>presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called
>Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attentionwhich fuelled
>his other attacks but this onne most starkly because of the absence of any
>high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former
>friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was
>intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight
>by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves,
>that was one of the worst.  He also rounded on Gore Vidal who had done
>so much to promote his career as dauphin of contrarianism. He courted the
>label “contrarianâ€, but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely
>must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote
>anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would
>never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big
>battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago
>when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A
>contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the
>existence of a Supreme Being. He was for America’s wars. I thought he
>was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The
>Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, noting that “despite
>his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of
>telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish†and
>noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic,
>also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to
>breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other
>researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens
>boys’ Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the definitions of
>the Nuremberg laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when
>Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From
>anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.â€) As a writer his prose
>was limited in range. In extempore speeches and arguments he was quick on
>his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago,
>in his early days at The Nation. I found the Hitchens cult of recent years
>entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained
>indomitably by his wife Carol.On Dec 17, 2011, at 10:02 AM, shag carpet
>bomb wrote: > I wondered. My bad for assuming the person who was a friend
>and needs > to mourn was you. I guess the only person is Doug? Beats me, I
>don't > read everyone on the list. I don't need to mourn. I am annoyed by
>people who cheered his death, of which I've seen several instances. I also
>don't like that people find nothing sad or tragic about what happened to
>him in the last 10 years of his life. But people can be as rude as they
>like. It's a free country, ha ha. Doug ___________________________________
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