Say what you like about Hitchens...

The posthumous intellectual reputation of Christopher Hitchens still comes under regular assault: sometimes ‘more in sorrow than anger’ blah blah, sometimes with the avowed intention of nailing some lasting badge of shame onto his collected writings. No-one can be surprised by this, since he was consistently repudiated by aggrieved ex-co-thinkers of the left while he was alive – a little bit at first because of his loathing for Clinton, then a lot on account of his advocacy for the ousting of Saddam.

Unlike some admirers of Hitchens’ writing I don’t find any of the attacks made on either side of his death to be outrageous, indecent etc. Hitchens could certainly dish it out, and didn’t tarry much if the target of his wrath was recently deceased or clearly en route to the terminus. He seemed to feel these things needed saying regardless, and that it was ‘important to have the right enemies’, which will tend to keep you speaking freely. (Also - does it need saying? - he wasn't right about every last thing, and not everything he wrote was end-to-end brilliant; and if you wrote as much as Hitchens did then there will, and must, be blood.)

Evidently his skin stayed thick and his wit keen during the cancer. Recently I watched an interview he gave to Laurie Taylor for Sky Arts in 2011, in which Taylor put the familiar question of whether Hitchens was bothered about the kind of intellectual company he kept post-Iraq (also, unspoken but clear, whether he missed the warm exchange of fraternal regards with Chomsky, Tariq Ali et al.) ‘It takes a lot to make me cry’, Hitchens shot back, confidently if a tad wearily, before Taylor could complete the thought.

A while back I was given and enjoyed reading Hitchens’ Mortality, the short book of thoughts and notes made as he neared the end. All of it is expressed so candidly, searchingly, elegantly that I would hope to read nothing else of cancer until the great history to come of how its cure was found... (That said, I do wish I could take a razorblade and chop out Mortality’s slack preface by Graydon Carter, who – perhaps imagining himself as generous as was Time to Paul Claudel – describes Hitchens’ opinions on Iraq as ‘curious’, twice in the space of a few pages.)

With Mortality I must also regretfully accept this is the final Hitchens. I have come to terms, too, with a longstanding feeling that after September 11 2001 it just wasn’t – couldn’t be – as much fun to read him as it had been Before. (One more reason to wish Osama Bin Laden a hot place in a dream Hades.) The retooling of Hitchens’ regular Slate column under the banner of 'Fighting Words' only confirmed that he now felt there was only one political issue worth writing (and voting) on. It was needful, and he did it well, though the fierceness of the disagreements on that single issue seemed always to be lagging behind actual conditions ‘on the ground’. After 2001 Hitchens did begin to write more about literature than before, which made for diversity, and was all highly erudite, but not really the thing that had made him a must-read in the journals where I first discovered his stuff...

That’s it, see. When I now sit and conjure up the pleasure of reading Hitchens it’s all from the 1990s: his Nation 'Minority Reports' warning and urging over Bosnia (‘for the last time...’), or even (lest we forget) welcoming a Labour leader he first thought ‘unbearably Lite.’ Or his long LRB essays, bashing Isaiah Berlin over Vietnam or hailing Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost. His interviewing Mailer, for that matter, in the New Left Review, and stressing the great man’s adherence to ‘an idea of the Left’ – an effort that now feels like less of the absolute essence.

I suppose what I hate most is starting to sound the slightest bit like George Galloway, who, in one of his attempts to debate Hitchens over Iraq, came out with a notably pathetic sorrow-over-anger spiel lamenting whatever befell the Hitchens he once loved - the guy who had such a store of snappy, quotable, unimprovably moralistic one-liners about (mostly American) political creeps, phonies and psychopaths?

It’s a mawkish tendency in myself, I know. You have to wipe your nose and move on (though not MoveOn.) There needs to be ‘a nuanced goodbye to all that.’

Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

Hitchens unbowed, never being boring

The other night I watched an interview posted online at the Charlie Rose talk-show website, wherein the masterful conversationalist Rose (we have no-one quite like him in this country, strangely) talks to Christopher Hitchens partly about his recent memoir but mainly about his recently diagnosed cancer of the oesophagus, for which he’s receiving chemotherapy, looking as drained by the ordeal as one would expect, but remaining as thoughtful, articulate and incisive as ever was. He's reading the letters of Saul Bellow, who once wrote that awareness of death is the dark backing a mirror needs in order that it truly reflect.
The interview is full of good meat, but I think many will find special interest, given Hitchens’ history of invective against phoney, cowardly, sinister and corrupt politicians, in his response to the question of which political figures, if any, he has admired. I daresay if Rosa Luxemburg had ever attained democratically-elected office he’d have talked about her, but in any case his pick was Tony Blair. The moment comes at 37:14 in the link above.
I remember once hearing Blair as PM, circa 2006, getting one of those famous ‘grillings’ from John Humphrys on the Today programme, and thinking to myself, ‘Christ, you need to pack this in...’ But Mr Humphrys is still in that job, and indeed several others, giving out in the amusedly irritable manner for which, clearly, he’s loved by many. It seems that Humphrys also writes a weekly-or-so column for YouGov on a big issue of the moment, and the other day it was Tony Blair’s donation to the British Legion. Weirdly Humphrys seems as keen as others in the BBC to quote in seriousness the risible views of those clapped-out old SWPers who believed that public opposition to the ousting of Saddam Hussein was the mass-radical 'anti-imperial' moment they'd waited all their lives for. The trope of these columns, which YouGov presumably asked for, is to conclude with a long list of opinion-poll style questions. These are those asked in respect of Blair:
“Do you think Mr Blair’s gesture is a genuinely selfless gift or do you think it is self-serving? Do you think the reputation he has gained since leaving office for being too interested in money is fair or not? Do you think he should feel guilty or not about the money he has made? Should he feel guilty or not about his decision to invade Iraq? Did he deceive the country or not? Do you think he has a criminal charge to answer or not? What do you make of the ‘blood money’ charge? Should the case of David Kelly’s death be reopened? And will you be buying Tony Blair’s memoirs?”
For what it’s worth, my answers are: Nothing in life is selfless, but it is a huge gift, likely given for complex motives, the merits of it obvious; He’s as interested in making money as the rest of us; As before; No feeling human escapes remorse over any part in the loss of innocent life; Blair clearly believed, like David Kelly, that some WMD capacity remained; No, can't see it; Bereaved parents of servicemen and women are, very obviously and profoundly, more than entitled to this opinion, though some hold it more impressively than others; No, still looks like suicide to me; and Yes, unless it's bought for me.

Living through ConDemNation (cont.)

Last week I was chatting to an old friend, one of the most brilliant men I know – a Communist in his youth, undoubtedly a man of the Left thereafter – and he couldn’t have been more pleased about the ConDemNation, essentially on the grounds of Ken Clarke letting out the prisoners, fixed-term parliaments, having a capable Old Etonian in Number 10, and (my friend fondly imagines) the prospect of Tony Blair in the Hague for having ordered David Kelly’s death. ‘All my friends voted Lib Dem’, he told me. ‘Don’t tell me you voted Labour…!?’

John Rentoul would think my friend a certain psychological type (‘Blair-Hater’), though there are issues on which the two of them would agree: ‘Labour’, my friend scoffed very accurately, ‘spend their last months writing cheques they knew would bounce’ – and so, goes the argument, Labour must be mindful of how they criticise those doing the harrowing now.
Still, Labour’s task is easier when George Osborne reneges on the pledge to preserve capital spending. The spiffy Michael Gove didn’t look too 'progressive' the other day, halting all those school builds and riposting to Labour, ‘What would you cut?’ Labour’s current mouthpieces famously don’t always have a ready answer, but I think they can be trusted for a sensible view on rotting Nissen huts that continue to serve as schoolhouses. (I’m more and more bewildered too as to why the NHS was ring-fenced. I don’t know 'what I would cut', was I President of Freedonia, but presumably a lot of it would be done line by line, and I’m pretty sure I'd know how to start there with the NHS.)
Labour have it easier still when the slavering Tory blogger Guido Fawkes freely derides Danny Alexander as 'Beaker' while cheering on 'Beaker''s doltish but concerted axe-wielding. Thus your actual ideological Tory: let’s cut now, hard as humanly possible, it’ll hurt all the right sorts and come 2015 we’ll have the world turned rightside up and a ‘proper’ tax-cutting Budget.
To this tumescence are the Lib Dems the soapy handmaidens. Veteran Commons sketch writer Simon Hoggart had some good sport with Clegg the other day, saying that he ‘often has the air of a schoolboy who has spent too long in his bedroom, working out plans for an imaginary country that exists only in his head.... an ideal state in which justice, fairness and sheer practicality fight each other for position.’

I think Hoggart astutely skewers a certain sort of Lib Dem sanctimony, but misses the actual nastiness of Clegg, so evident in his snide grin – not the debating society nerd, rather the seemingly dull but straight-arrow chap who secretly fancied being the Bully of Upper Sixth. For the moment I can’t think of a more risible, self-impressed figure in high-level British politics within my lifetime than Nick Clegg – and yes, I’m including John Prescott in that. It’s just the appalling inverse ratio of votes to status that goes on offending.
During Clegg’s brief and imaginary ‘popularity’ prior to polling day, Christopher Hitchens (for whom Clegg once interned at The Nation, and who seemed to find him likeable) observed that ‘British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly.’ I think, though, that the coalition exposed that notion as folly. Steve Richards argued today that ‘[a]s some of Cameron's allies recognised long ago, there was no gap between them and Clegg on the central issue of the economy, public spending and the role of the state. On the other side of Clegg's party are those who are closer to being social democrats…’ But the lesson is: it’s a duopoly really, all that matters is to which wing the Lib Dems peel off on the big issues once they have to; and once Clegg had compared the unions to non-dom Tory potentates like Lord Ashcroft then we knew for sure what way he peeled.

Many a pundit has thrown back at Clegg his pre-power conviction that the AV voting system would be ‘miserable little compromise.’ In response Clegg usually offers a lecture on the duties of power and leadership, which often involve miserable little compromises (Nick in his own person happening to be one such...) But I’m interested to be having a vote on electoral reform next May, though I’ve never been a fan of the notion, and I’ll wait to see how the arguments by those wiser than me stack up.
The hopeless Mary Riddell wrote lately that for Labour ‘[to] vote No would be a move against progress and a sign that Labour is a disunited, foot-dragging party, committed to the broken, first past the post system for tactical reasons.’ Oh, the dishonour! Tactical reasons! Simon Jenkins, whom I generally like not one bit, calls it right when he says AV is no sort of ‘progress’, merely a redistribution of a man’s honest vote, ‘away from liking towards ‘not disliking’’. Jenkins continues:
‘Clegg is for AV because it helps his party, and Cameron and Labour will fight it at a referendum because it does not help them. The electorate is bored by the topic. Clegg is almost certain to lose, which will enrage his party and leave him with a bloodied nose and the coalition weakened.’
Good show. I can’t say I don’t like the sound of those tactics, or that imagined outcome. Presumably Mary Riddell thinks Labour need some more of that thrusting New Politics dynamism we’ve all heard so much of, until we vomited. Well, Mary, a week is plenty long in politics, and the time remaining before Labour elects a new leader still stretches in the distance, but the next election is still aeons away, during which time you and the rest of us should try to keep thinking. For now, Labour should attack the coalition partners whenever they see fit. Let’s see where we’ve got to in a few years.
And finally, what news of my man David Miliband? It’s rumoured the Unite union are working out who to back (which ‘Stop David’ candidate) expressly in order to frustrate the hopes of the ‘Blairite’ candidate. Elsewhere DM put his name to a fairly blah column about Englishness in the New Statesman and gave a not-bad Telegraph interview (to Mary Riddell…) wherein he properly regretted the Iraq war’s ‘toll in British and Iraqi life’, properly abhorred the prospect of the coalition’s ‘constitutional gerrymandering’ and reasonably marked his priorities as education, crime and anti-social behaviour. In short, it's like Blair were in the room, a little humbled by recent history, nonetheless feeling its hand on his shoulder...

Bookhugger column #4: On Christopher Hitchens

My column for Bookhugger this month is about Christopher Hitchens and his memoir Hitch-22; or at least about one aspect of the book and of Hitchens' life, which is the making and unmaking of friends as a consequence of one's political convictions. There are many other aspects of the book I would have happily addressed too, but then I hope one day I may find myself down the pub with someone else who's read it...
This photo from 1990 of Hitchens and his second wife Carol Blue is by Annie Liebovitz. Enough said.

Ratzinger: "the stench of evil"

Olenka Frenkiel's report for Newsnight last week on the general failure of Ireland's Garda Siochana - consequent to the findings of the Murphy Report into clerical abuse - to pursue and prosecute Catholic priests who raped children; and on the specific case of the paedophile ex-priest Bill Carney - who was paid off by the Church to make himself scarce, and still takes his holidays in the Canary Islands - was as upsetting as anything I've seen on television this decade. That this morass of turpitude, hypocrisy and lies is one to which Catholicism makes a distinctive contribution by dint of its own backward nature - its granting of near-divine authority on earth to human men made out of the paltriest and most rancid physical/moral material - is proven in the grim and creepy personage of the current Pope, who was propelled to office by the widespread feeling that what the Vatican really needed was 'a sound man', after years of presumably lackadaisical liberalism under the profoundly conservative Pole Karol Wojtyla. Christopher Hitchens, God bless him, says what needs saying about Ratzinger in Slate today:
"The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that."

Helmand/Panther’s Claw: Our Watches, Their Time?

And so Operation Panther's Claw, the five-week mission that cost the lives of ten British soldiers, has ended in Afghanistan, with our forces claiming success. An area 'the size of the Isle of Wight' has been cleared of insurgents ahead of the elections on August 20. The MoD says British troops will remain to secure the area won for three-to-six months. ‘I’m very proud’, Gordon Brown hads said, ‘of what our forces have achieved over the last few weeks – indeed for all the time they've been in Afghanistan.'

The funerals of those servicemen killed in Helmand have been a sombre fixture of our news so far this summer. There was something uncommonly grave in the coverage of the interring of Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe: the most senior British officer to die in action since the fighting on Goose Green during the Falklands War. That gravity was embodied in the deeply dignified bearing of the widow, Sally Thornloe (pictured above in Shaun Curry’s striking photograph), required to manage that unanswerable sorrow of which I suppose the greatest empathetic version we have is Andromache’s lament for Hector in The Iliad (‘… for you did not die in bed, and stretch your arms to me, nor tell me some last intimate word…’)

Currently we are having a passionate national debate about the worth of a soldier’s ultimate sacrifice in respect of ‘our mission in Afghanistan’: a phrase that came to made to sound either dutiful or scornful depending on from whose lips it issues – for instance, those who don’t want to see the recrudescence of a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, breeding and exporting global jihad in concert with a nuclear/jihadist Pakistan; or, alternatively, those who say that Afghanistan is merely a notorious graveyard of imperial hubris, now occupied merely for the sake of America’s longterm strategic interests in the region. (Whatever side one favours, it's possible to believe that the craggy ungovernable vastness of Afghanistan will devour more lives and efforts than are truly worthwhile - or as one Taliban commander supposedly said, 'They may have the watches, but we have the time.') Personally, I can see the case for both arguments, but if one has to state a preference (and one does) then I’m in the former camp, supportive of 'the mission', as dangerously stretched and implausible as it can often seem.

Last week Paddy Ashdown defined that 'mission’ as one that has migrated from ‘the limited military aim of driving out al-Qa’ida’ into ‘another full-scale attempt, in a far-away country, to create a state of which we in the West can feel proud.’ This analysis is echoed whenever General Stanley McChrystal, head of the NATO force, speaks of 'fighting for the population.' Today David Miliband has tried to confirm that sense of a worthy endeavour: 'In Helmand, we are working to help build schools, provide clean water and electricity, surface roads and support agriculture...'

In this context the grisly fight in Helmand was part of a clear military strategy known as ‘Clear, Hold and Build’: that is, to take ground into which constructors and committed democrats can move and start to work peacefully. Today that clearing of Helmand is supposedly done, ground taken from the Taliban in the area between the economic hub of Gereshk and the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. This was an intense fight with, inevitably, a high risk of casualties. Alan Mallinson described it as ‘very like the ‘break-in’ phase of any offensive battle in conventional war.’ And so British soldiers were killed, at a rate that I suppose would be commensurate with losses sustained during the Falklands campaign.

But people of conservative instincts contend that in the Falklands there were material British interests at stake, it wasn't in the name of ‘good projects’ or ‘nation building’ or humanitarian windiness. Moreover, in both liberal and conservative media alike you can now read the charge that our forces in Afghanistan are lions led by donkeys, armed for the task by a lying miserly government.

As far as I can see, what really matters right now is what the Army thinks: lose the morale of the troops and you’ve lost the war. The British Army seems to be holding its course, though its commanders would - to say only the least - like more helicopters. Clearly helicopters allow faster action or response, they aid force protection, assist supply lines, evacuate casualties quicker. Our options would be enlarged if we had more. And yet Paddy Ashdown (one of the few politicians the general public respect on military matters) believes the real issue is ‘having enough ‘boots on the ground’ to do the job.’ Allan Mallinson agrees, citing ‘a bluff saying in conventional warfare: the more you use, the less you lose.’

It's hard, though, to be sanguine about such 'losses.' And clearly a significant swathe of the British public are fed up with it and want us either to do the job by remote control or get Our Boys out of it altogether. Of the former party, those who simply call for more choppers must surely be aware that helicopters too can be shot down in spectacular and deadly fashion by forms of ordnance available even to cave-dwelling mujaheddin. Some people believe our mission can be accomplished better by safe removal of ground troops and occasional bursts of heavy ordnance, laser-guided aerial bombing. If they seriously believe that, they must be ready for the accidents: the collateral-damage annihilation of wedding parties.

Those who want us to wash our hands of The Mission altogether are never going to be convinced by the argument that we are doing Good Works out there, and so the Government has a tough case to make. Miliband is clearly trying his best when he says, ‘We are not fighting in Afghanistan because girls were not allowed to go to school, but helping them do so will lead to a better future for Afghans.’ Paddy Ashdown too stressed the element of self-help: 'The key principle through all this should be not to seek to do things 'for' Afghanistan, but to increase Afghan capacity, especially at the local level, to do things for themselves.' As such it's no surprise that the UK is subtly and carefully shifting the focus to whether or not the Afghan Army has the will and calibre and capacity to do the 'holding' stuff, and whether Afghan people and their politicians will 'build'. (One notes the care with which the text of Miliband’s speech has been entitled, ‘How to help Afghans defeat the insurgency.’)

The hope is that the main way Afghans will be helped is by legitimate local politics. It’s hard to be dewy-eyed about Afghan democracy when the main choice on offer is the compromised and placeman-packed Karzai government. And one can’t shoot one’s mouth about a renaissance of women’s rights when the young female Afghan politician Malalai Joya makes clear she thinks things are no better in that respect. Joya wants the West to clear off, and her voice clearly rhymes with the message of any Stop The War platform: ‘The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination.’

Well and good, but I just can't see that there's any prelapsarian choice available here. Our fortunes are all tied together now: we are the world. When it comes to the rights and wrongs of one’s country at war I try not to mouth off too confidently from the comfort of my swivel-chair when it’s not my backside that’s getting shot at. But I'm on the side of 'good projects' and against the Taliban. And as Christopher Hitchens puts it, ‘Might we not be able to shape events in Afghanistan nearer to our heart's desire without making ourselves responsible for the running of the whole nation and society?’

On Digging That Cat Bob Dylan...

It was my friend the massively erudite and prolific author/journalist Kevin Jackson who first introduced me to the technical term 'BobCat', maybe 2-3 years ago now? As I recall, it was while we were dining with the polymathic filmmaker Paul Schrader, a hero to this Blog, and himself a conspicuous BobCat. But the very fact that the whole BobCat business was all news to me as recently as then is testimony to the truth that I'm only a very amateur and third-rate sort of a Bob Dylan Fan.
I do have most of his long-playing records, and I dabble on the fringes of Dylan scholarship, albeit far removed (even alienated) from the serious esoterica and apocrypha. Moreover, like a whole bunch of practising novelists, be they good, bad, or mediocre, I often write with music on for the purpose of mood and glancing inspiration; and so I can say that a fair bit of Crusaders was written to the soundtrack of Dylan's so-called 'Christian' albums (Slow Train Coming, admittedly, much the favourite of these.) But that's about the size of my Bobcatness. (Actually, hang on, for what it's worth there are a few hommages to Dylan lyrics in my The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, which were astutely spotted and thrown back to me by the Copenhagen-based scholar and Bobcat Carsten Jensen.)
So why are these selective Visions of Bob now keeping me up past the dawn? Well, for one thing, the aforementioned K. Jackson recently dropped me a line to let me know he was ploughing 'through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books', and I was slow enough to ask him why... It so happens that Kevin is writing another of his daunting scholarly works, this one on the modernist literature of the 1920s. But still, honestly... No BobCat, I, to have missed that glaring reference. Nonetheless, however weakly, I managed to shoot back to Kevin that I 'couldn't even touch the books he'd read', in point of numbers at least... And we had a good exchange about the particularly Dylanesque love/hate of lists of learned reading, a matter on which Bob expounded further in the little-read Tarantula, which is as near as I get to his esoterica.
Furthermore, me and this Blog are pleased to have received another commendation from the excellent and previously cited The Story and The Truth maintained by Anna French and Dan Hartland; and while rooting round that site I just read this fine essay by Hartland on the 'great late trilogy' formed by Dylan's most recently released trio of albums. Again, like a heretic, I must admit that of the three in question only Time Out of Mind gets much play round my house. But then I played it just the other day, during novel-writing hours... See, I'm tryin' to get to heaven, before they close the door...
On which topic, I must just squeeze in this morsel from Ian Parker's assiduous observational New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, published back in 2006 - one of those journalistic snapshots that just sticks with you, both the story and the telling of it:
"Hitchens went into the house and put on Bob Dylan's 'Tryin' to Get to Heaven'; he stood in the doorway and sung quietly along. He quoted Philip Larkin on Dylan: a 'cawing, derisive voice.' He repeated Larkin's words a few times, approvingly. His daughter got out of the pool, and said, pleasantly, 'Can we close this door, so nobody else has to hear this?'... She went back to her friends. 'Look,' Hitchens said happily. 'They're waiting for us to die.'"

Hillary Rodham Clinton: she was right all along...

... as it turns out Barack Obama doesn't know what he was talking about on the great matter of foreign policy, and so has appointed Mrs Clinton as his Secretary of State. This irony is not entirely at the President-Elect's expense. But on the mundane personal level, sad to say, all the mental energy I (and many others?) expended in willing Mr Obama to the Democrat nomination - thus (I, or we, imagined) to break the Clintonian dynastic hold over this unprincipled shambles of a Party - was a waste, and a culpably naive one at that. I don't know who Obama thought he was fooling in welcoming his 'dear friend' HRC to the microphone today, and I hope he knew how silly and calculating he looked. The biggest problem to start considering as of now is exactly how practically ill-qualified is the self-proclaimed Superwoman of the 3AM Phonecall for the job in front of her. On a level beyond argument, in his thorough and consistent trashing of her application at Slate, Christopher Hitchens argues that 'it's difficult to see Sen. Clinton achieving confirmation unless our elected representatives are ready to ask a few questions about conflict of interest.' But then Reuters simply reports that 'all the nominees are expected to win quick confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate.' This the end of that, then?

Hitchens: the kind of endorsement of which Obama will see more

Round about this time four years ago, with America poised once again to Decide, Christopher Hitchens bade a decisive farewell to one more segment of his former fan club when he declared that he 'slightly preferred' the idea of the re-election of the incumbent, and on an essentially single-issue stand, which was the prosecution of the war in Iraq in particular, and on what had come to be known as Islamofascism in general.

This year he's for Obama, albeit in about the most lukewarm tones one could imagine. I know of this because I read Hitchens' stuff now with more or less the same keenness I've always felt, tempered only by the appreciation that we all get older and more disappointed as the world seems forever to get worse.

Hitchens, who evidently admires McCain in several important ways, nevertheless speaks now in pitying fashion of a man 'suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical... the train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds.' And Hitchens is utterly scathing of the Republican VP candidate as someone propelled far beyond her abilities for 'the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing.'

What, then, of the Democrat hope? 'Overrated' is probably Hitchens' most felt adjective. And yet, his revisiting of the Iraq war vote notwithstanding, Obama has passed Hitchens' single-issue test, and that should give pause to those who are on the side of Change because it suits their self-image and they believe Change to mean whatever they fancy it means, rather than something related to anything Obama has actually said on the stump.

As Hitchens puts it, 'The Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.' I take 'experience' to mean Obama's wish to take the War into Pakistan and to continue to hunt and kill The Terrorists, a cause to which John Kerry cottoned rather too late in 2004. Kerry must be wishing he'd had a chunk of Obama's luck.

Russia, and a fresh fight for the anti-imperialists

Having lured Georgia’s foolish President into a little war he couldn’t afford, Russia are now playing Stage II of this great game and recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with its plucky 70,000 populace. ‘If you hate us’, Russia says (in effect) to the UN, the US and EU, ‘we’re glad, and we don’t care. What are you going to do about it?’ Well, I hear Bush is sending Vice-President Cheney to the region, so that will doubtless raise the tone of the debate…
You will have seen/heard that Russia currently does have some really angry is-anyone-listening?-type Western apologists, who didn’t like the Kosovo war of 1999 and didn’t think Milosevic was unusually despicable, and do think that NATO sewed dragon’s teeth with that military action. An FT leader makes what I think is a (perhaps ‘the’) salient distinction: “The Abkhaz and Ossetian populations have not been threatened with anything remotely approaching “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” by the Georgians. If anything, the danger is in the other direction, with ethnic Georgians fleeing both regions to escape the Russians and the Russian-armed secessionists.”
As the FT suggests, this flawed and dishonest logic of Russia’s might yet bite her back or otherwise embarrass her, encoraging “the restive republics of the north Caucasus, such as Ingushetia and Dagestan, as well as Chechnya, to determine their own destiny.” As books by Bob Woodward and Alistair Campbell have shown us, it was over his attempted crushing of Chechnya that Putin really reached out to the Western powers, in search of common cause against what he called as an Islamic menace; then after 9/11 Putin shook his head, reckoned he’d told ‘em so, and decided to focus his efforts entirely on never having to seek common cause with anyone ever again. As Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate, “overt Russian imperialism is back, after a very short absence from the scene, and it is no more amiable or benign from the many toxic resentments it acquired during its period of decline and impotence and eclipse.” Any statesman who quite fancies being a hated pariah - would indeed wear such status like a crown - is a tough opponent to weather.

RTK Newcastle article in new Prospect (May 2008)

"London to Newcastle isn't rated among the world's great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits..."
The new issue of the excellent Prospect magazine is now on the stands and includes an essay by myself in the 'Witness' strand which somebody has wittily entitled In Search of Lost Tyne. Yes, it's a series of snap-shots of the current state of Newcastle upon Tyne - socially, economically, politically, and culturally. In a sense, because the plot of Crusaders concludes in 1997, this piece of reportage brings the novel's story up to date, and with rather more of a debt to the actualite.
Needless to say there's a great deal more to enjoy in the magazine, including an essay by the South Shields-born historian Robert Colls on the neglected novels of Melvyn Bragg; quite a bit about the 40-year anniversary of May '68; and a long interview with Christopher Hitchens by Alex Linklater, in which it is casually noted that Hitchens enjoys friendly relations with the 'independent-minded' Sean Penn. Any sane/civilised person would want to be the proverbial fly on the wall when those two meet for cocktails.

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?