Comments on: Hitchens on Wye

By: Barbara Deutsch

Barbara Deutsch — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:07:39 +0000

What I noticed first in reading this intriguing article, was an echo from a Browning poem (”I’ve hung on calling myself a socialist probably a little longer than I should have”) — Shirley Hazzard, in her memoir of Graham Greene, tells how, after hearing Greene at an adjacent table in a Capri restaurant unable to recall the line, she supplied it to him, setting in motion a long friendship.

I wonder if Hitchens, familiar with so much of English poetry, was aware of the echo — and imagine he’d wish such a friend.

His designation of present-day socialism as “Quixotic” also struck me; someone — and I can’t recall who — has referred to Hitchens as “the Don Quixote of the left,” suggesting that our failure to act on the dossier on Kissinger he provided, may have driven him insane. I remember him in San Francisco, touring with that book, attended by a small group of devotees (differing markedly from those who gather in the Green room at Hay) and, with admiration, telling of lawsuits brought against Kissinger by individual Chileans. People clapped. Hitchens quietly issued a reprimand that betrayed contempt for our readiness to consider it well that the challenge come from elsewhere, even from Chileans still not clear of the wreckage made of their “excessive” democracy by means of our taxes, and our careless inattention to what’s done with them.

By: Max Shields

Max Shields — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:34:48 +0000

Adam Lewinsky may be the second most brilliant, articulate man on the planet. It would take one to know one. No?

By: Adam Lewinsky

Adam Lewinsky — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:48:52 +0000

Hitchens may well be the single most brilliant, articulate man on the planet. Thank you for this somewhat nuanced piece. I am so tired of partisan vitriol masquerading as enlightened dialogue.

By: Max Shields

Max Shields — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:01:23 +0000

Hope DV isn’t getting all Charlie Rose on us with this piece!

Hitchens is a talker, full of incoherent bluster that he uses to explain and justify just about any thought that cross his cranium.

There is no point to wondering what he thinks. It is not important that he prefers to “care” about what Saddam did to the people of Iraq or whether he thinks getting the fucking oil is what it’s all about. Look at Iraq today, and contrast to what it was before March 2003. Look at the Middle East today and do a similar contrast. The words are just puff, he support with all the rankor he could muster and sustain the bloody invasion of aIraq; the mutilation and capitation of a people; millions of refugees, millions dead, and countless casualities. A genocide and failed state. This is what Hitchens represents with to the marrow. You can’t pretty that up by parading him into book festivals.

No this man represents a neo-colonial imperialism cloaked most recently in his diatribes on God and the heathens who believe. And yet there is nothing but belief that drips from this callow man’s mouth over and again. He is the biggest BELIEVER I’ve ever come across.