Latest Hitchens

murrayp4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEmKzZuBN3A

rccaulfield

He's gone downhill since the blair debate!!!

MagicMarker

How am I subscribed to this?

Is there a higher power? :eek:

Coriolanus

Oh inglip, praise thee lord for bestowing this unasked for bounty of subscribed Harris goodness upon me.

In other words, yeah Wtf.

Dave!

It's funny at the end, the interviewer says "we don't have alot of time", and Hitch says "Oh don't say that!"

Good interview, very honest

Marcus.Aurelius

Old news, I think this was on a thread a few weeks back. Sad stuff, the power of the man's voice is so reduced. Only the good die young I guess.

[-0-]

Definitely worth a read. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8388695/Godless-in-Tumourville-Christopher-Hitchens-interview.html

Apologies if this was already posted - I looked back to March 22nd (article is dated the 25th) and was unable to find it on here.

Enjoy.

Otacon

For mobile users:

Godless in Tumourville: Christopher Hitchens interview
The writer, polemicist and devout atheist Christopher Hitchens talks about his memoirs, Hitch-22, and his fight against cancer

By Mick Brown

Writing in his memoirs, Hitch-22, of the numerous perils that he has faced as a reporter around the globe in places as various as Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and Beirut, Christopher Hitchens reflects that a little danger or discomfort can be a salutary thing: 'I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.’

He could never have guessed how prescient those words would be. In June last year, while on a tour of America to promote the hardback publication of his book, Hitchens was taken ill in New York and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. Thus did he acquire his visa to a place where nothing can be taken for granted. Hitchens has christened it 'Tumourville’.

Until the publication three years ago of his book God Is Not Great Hitchens had been, in the words of his late friend the author Susan Sontag, 'a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas’ – but largely unknown outside it. He reviewed books for Atlantic magazine, wrote regular columns for Vanity Fair and Slate, and regularly appeared on cable news programmes in America. To those who follow not only politics but also the fortunes of those who commentate on politics, he was well-known for his perceived move from Left to Right over the war in Iraq.

God Is Not Great changed all, making him a champion of the so-called New Atheism, alongside such celebrated non-believers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (they have anointed themselves, with what in Hitchens’s case looks like grim defiance, 'the Four Horsemen’). His outspoken advocacy of atheism made Hitchens a very public figure, and has made his illness a very public one, casting him as some sort of antagonist in a battle with fate, the Almighty or, if you believe in neither, random and merciless bodily malfunction. As he has written, 'To the dumb question, “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, “Why not?”’

Hitchens, 61, lives with his second wife, Carol Blue, a writer, and their 17-year-old daughter, Antonia, in a handsome Beaux-Arts apartment block off Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. The sense of being at the heart of Washington life is palpable. Across the road is the Hilton hotel, where the assassination attempt was made on Ronald Reagan’s life. From Hitchens’s window you can look down on the vice-president’s mansion and various key embassies. Dwight D Eisenhower lived in an apartment downstairs before he became president.

The apartment (actually two, Hitchens bought the one next door) is a labyrinth of spacious rooms, white-walled with polished floorboards, but surprisingly sparsely furnished. There is a grand piano in the living-room, but the walls are mostly bare of art. Books cover every surface. It is an environment pared down to the essentials of his life – writing, reading, thinking – with a comfortable dining-room and a well-stocked drinks cabinet. Hitchens describes himself as 'compulsively social’, and the apartment serves as a salon for his extensive network of friendships, with writers, politicos, scientists and thinkers.

Hitchens has faced his illness with great courage. There was, he says, 'a very bad moment’ a couple of months ago when his bone marrow 'went into crisis’. At the same time, his gall bladder 'exploded’, necessitating an operation to have it removed.

'I think I was quite close to checking out,’ he says.

For now, there are good days and not such good ones. Today is one of the latter. When I arrive at the appointed hour of 1pm he has not long got up, and confesses to feeling extremely ropy. He has put on some of the weight he lost in his early stages of chemotherapy, and his hair has grown back. But he looks tired, and an ulcerated mouth is making it exceedingly difficult for him to eat and to talk. For a moment I expect the interview to be postponed, but he insists on pressing on. Conversation, one senses, helps to take his mind off things.

I have brought some deli food for lunch, but he waves it aside. Over the course of the next five hours he will fortify himself with nothing more substantial than a glass of whisky, cups of what he calls 'brown, Left-wing, working-class tea’ ('I think of herbal tea as right-wing,’ he adds) and a single banana. But if physically frail, his mental energy remains phenomenal.

Hitchens has always been a ferociously prolific and fastidious journalist. It is his proud boast that he has never missed a deadline, and he clearly has no intention of starting now. Since the onset of his illness he has continued to write his magazine columns and has managed to keep up all his religious debates, although he admits to finding them 'very draining’.

'There are days when I can’t write,’ he says. 'I can read, I can prepare and make the notes, but I don’t feel moved to write. It’s difficult to describe; it’s a kind of exhaustion, and in the trade it’s known as “chemobrain”. In other words, I can be perfectly articulate whilst talking, but I can’t make that happen on the page. It’s very worrying.’

His cancer, as he puts it starkly, is stage four. 'And the thing to note about stage four is that there is no stage five.’ His doctors have been understandably wary of making any firm prognosis, although he has been told that of 1,000 men of his age and in his condition, half could expect to be dead within a year.

But there is a very real ray of hope. A few weeks after his diagnosis he was asked if he would like to be a guinea pig in the new science of genome sequencing as a possible cure for cancer. Samples were taken from healthy tissue and from his tumour and on each of them six billion DNA matches were run, in order to catalogue any mutations found in the cancerous cells. He was warned to have no expectations. But in the New Year came the good news that there is a genetic mutation expressed by the tumour for which there already exists a drug. Having been on varying types and doses of chemotherapy, he is now on a regime of one chemo pill a day.

'I’m an experiment,’ Hitchens says. 'These are early stages, but in theory it should attack the primary site of the tumour. If that does happen, it won’t just be good news for me, it will be very exciting in the general treatment of cancer.

At least it spares me some of the boredom of being a cancer patient because what I’m going through is very absorbing and positively inspiring. But if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what they could try next.’

One physician who is taking an active interest in Hitchens’s treatment is Francis Collins, the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which pioneered the treatment Hitchens is receiving. Collins is now the director of America’s National Institutes of Health. He is also an evangelical Christian, the author of a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He and Hitchens had actually debated religion publicly before Hitchens fell ill, and have become good friends. I’m not sure, I say, whether that constitutes irony.

'Well, take your time…’ he says.

'It is a rather wonderful relationship,’ he goes on. 'I won’t say he doesn’t pray for me, because I think he probably does; but he doesn’t discuss it with me.’ He pauses. 'He agrees that his medical experience does not include anything that could be described as a miracle cure – he’s never come across anything.’

Hitchens’s attitude to people praying for him could be described as a mixture of polite gratitude for their consideration, and a determined refusal to let it sway his opinions. A sort of thanks, but no thanks. There have been various studies, he says, on whether or not intercessionary prayer works. 'And one is not surprised to find they don’t.’ On the contrary, the most comprehensive study concluded that it could even have a detrimental effect, causing those who knew they were being prayed for to become depressed when they didn’t get better, 'because they thought they were letting the side down’.

'And I now realise in a secular way how that could be, in that I get a huge number of letters and emails every day, a lot of them from people I don’t know, and they quite often say things like, “If anyone can beat this, it’s you”, “Cancer is a fool to take you on”… Jaunty, upbeat stuff like that.

'A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.’

In this sense, it might be said that his illness has become something of a battlefield in which the forces of belief and non-belief are waging war. True up to a point, Hitchens says. Several Christians have made attempts to make him reconsider his views in light of his illness. 'I think that’s cheesy, even if it’s kindly meant or well done.’

Any suggestion that their efforts, or his malady, might have occasioned second thoughts about the existence of God – either as a dispenser of divine justice or of infinite mercy – are met with short shrift. 'Why should they?’ If such a thing were to happen, he says, it would be because his illness had rendered him demented. 'It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.’ His voice rises in indignation. 'They’re allowed to roam the wards. They tried it on me.

I know people old and young who’ve been terrified by attentions of this kind.’

He has been thinking of making a short speech along precisely these lines, to the effect that he, Harris and Dawkins may set up a secular equivalent of hospital visitors. 'We’d go round – “Hope you don’t mind, you said you were Catholic? Only three weeks to live? Well, listen, you don’t have to live them as a mental slave, you know; you could have three weeks of freedom from fear of the priest. Don’t be a mug all your life…” I don’t think it would be considered in very good taste.’

I don’t think it would be a kindness either, I say.

'I think it would,’ Hitchens says. 'Absolutely.’


Hitchens is often described as a contrarian. It is not a term he likes; nor, his friend the novelist Ian McEwan says, is it true: 'Christopher is a man of deep convictions; he has never been disputatious for the sake of it.’ But nor has he ever been one to shy away from an abrasive opinion or a bruising argument. In his public debates he oscillates between raffish charm and a finely measured line in contempt. (Once, debating Iraq with Charlton Heston, he urged the elderly, gun-toting actor to 'keep your hairpiece on’.)

Hitch-22 is an invigorating and supremely entertaining read, charting his development as a journalist and polemicist, his travels to Cuba, South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It is also beautifully written. Hitchens once said that 'I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.’

He describes Hitch-22 not as an autobiography but a memoir of the times and places when his life has intersected 'with something worth arguing about’. It deals more with the development of his intellectual than his emotional life. His first marriage, to Eleni Meleagrou, a lawyer, is not mentioned; his present one hardly at all. The casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that his greatest love affairs have been with his friends the poet and critic James Fenton and, in particular, the novelist Martin Amis. 'Well, I wouldn’t mind if people thought that, but I don’t think that they would. Because somehow the very fact that that could be true draws attention to the fact that it’s not.’ (In the book he describes his early friendship with Amis as 'the most heterosexual relationship that one young man could conceivably have with another’.)

He is most revealing about his lower-middle-class background, and his vexed relationship with his father, Eric, a Royal Navy officer, and his adoring one with his mother, Yvonne. She was clearly the animating force in his childhood – a chic, spirited and socially ambitious woman who was determined that Hitchens should get on in the world. One of his earliest memories is of sitting at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas, eavesdropping on a heated conversation between his parents over school fees, with his mother saying, 'If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.’

Yvonne killed herself in Greece when Hitchens was 24 in an apparent suicide pact with Timothy Bryan, a former Anglican minister turned devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, for whom she had left Hitchens’s father. (Anyone looking in Hitchens’s subconscious for a key to his hostility to the Church might start here.)

Eric, who died in 1987 – 'the Commander’, as he was known to Hitchens and his younger brother, Peter – was a man who described his wartime escorting convoys to Russia as 'the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing’, and whose life thereafter was a catalogue of disappointment and humiliation. He was 'a rather weak man, effaced by life’, as Hitchens describes him in the book, given to pronouncements of puzzling certainty: 'Socialism is founded on sand’ and 'Beware of girls with thin lips’.

'I felt sorry for him,’ Hitchens says now. 'He seemed like an innocent of some sort, bodyguarded by these Denis Thatcher-like opinions. Pessimistic, unlucky, badly treated by the Navy. He said to my mother once that she was the only luck he’d ever had. He was trying to stop her leaving. And it did make her pause for a bit.’

Hitchens says that one of the themes of the book is 'the divided self. Nobody is not a divided self, of course, but I think it’s rather strong in my case.’ He has always wanted to have it both ways, he says. 'English and American [he became an American citizen in 2007]; Left and Right, to some extent; Puritan and Cavalier.’ (Rather more of the latter, one thinks.) At Oxford, he was both Chris, a member of the International Socialists who stood outside the Cowley car plant selling the Socialist Worker and sprayed pro-Vietcong graffiti on the walls, and Christopher, who dined in restaurants 'which featured tasselled menus and wine-lists’, and happily availed himself of the vivid social life the university had to offer.

Through the 1970s and 80s he carried his arguments and his reporting from the hand-printed broadsheets of the revolutionary Left to the New Statesman and later to the liberal American weekly The Nation.

A central theme of the book is the falling away of his illusions about socialism – or, more accurately, his growing realisation, as he now puts it, that the evident failures of 'the socialist experiment’ could not only be attributed to the dire material or historical circumstances in which they had the chance to be tried, but were also there in the very founding texts. 'I came to realise that there is something innate in the Marxist-socialist concept that dooms it. And one thing is its utopianism, where people would not just be better or improved but so to speak renovated, made new.’

The terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 provided the defining moment. In an interview in 2003 he talked of how 9/11 had filled him with 'exhilaration’. 'Here we are then,’ he later recalled thinking, 'in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.’

Hitchens’s disgust was aimed equally at the terrorists and those on the Left whom he regarded as apologists for them. At a public meeting in New York a few weeks after the attacks, the filmmaker Oliver Stone referred to 'the revolt of September 11’. 'Excuse me,’ Hitchens shot back. 'Revolt? It was state-supported mass murder, using civilians as missiles.’ He resigned from The Nation and threw his support behind the war in Iraq. This has since been construed as his 'move to the Right’. Hitchens prefers the term 'post-ideological’.

He still sees Islamic fundamentalism as the embodiment of the two things he most loathes – a kind of nadir of the worst iniquities of religious belief and an ideology that is essentially fascist. We are engaged in 'a fight to the death’, he says. But the good news is that 'it’s impossible for them to win’.

'An ideology of that sort has shown itself incapable of running even as low-level a society as Afghan*istan. They deny themselves the talents of half the population. They believe that things like diseases and earthquakes are punishments. They have no self-criticism, so when things go wrong they have to look for the source in a Jewish-Crusader conspiracy, which is why they export their surplus young people to take their violence elsewhere. That’s why they’re an immediate menace to us. Their state won’t just fail on its own; they have to share their failure. Once you’ve established that, they can’t possibly win, our victory is a sure thing.’

When his publisher suggested that, having written books on Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Thomas Jefferson, it was time to go 'for something big’, it was only logical that Hitchens should turn his guns on the Almighty. It was a subject that, in a way, he had been waiting to write about all his life.

'I really do believe that criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism, as Marx put it. It’s our first of everything; the father and mother of all disputation. That’s why it never gets boring.’

Learning that Dawkins’s book The God Delusion had sold 180,000 in hardback only confirmed his hunch that the time was right, but even he was taken aback by the response that greeted the publication of God Is Not Great. Keen to avoid relying on the customary promotional round of bookshop readings – and determined to 'take the war to the other camp’ – Hitchens suggested that his publisher set up a series of debates with religious figures. He remembers arriving for the first, with a local Baptist minister in North Carolina. As he passed through the airport, four 'perfect strangers’ greeted him with 'Glad to see you’re in town. Give them hell.’

The bookshop where the event was to be held was hopelessly oversubscribed, so a local Unitarian church offered itself as the venue. 'The minister said, “I shouldn’t tell you this but I’ve never seen my church this full before.”’

He has now done hundreds of such debates with all manner of representatives from all varieties of faith, up to and including Tony Blair, with whom he debated in Toronto last November.

Talking with Hitchens about this, you sense not only an anger with the institutions, teaching and practices of religion, but also an exasperation and bemusement with the very fact of belief. Put simply, he just doesn’t get it. When he was on the Left, he says, he was good at debating with Tories because his family were Tory: 'I knew where they were coming from.’

Now, when he debates with opponents from the Left, it is in the knowledge that he is probably better acquainted with their ideas and history then they are. 'With religion, try as I may, I can’t think myself into the viewpoint of the faithful. I can’t think what it would be like to believe that somebody had died for my sins, for example. I don’t get it at all.’ So it is that people’s experiences of faith will always be 'delusions’; the consolations they may derive from it always 'false’ ones.

He recognises that the Church has a place for social ritual – and that sometimes you have to go with the flow. He and his first wife were married by the Archbishop of Cyprus in St John’s Cathedral in Nicosia, and their son, Alexander, was baptised in the Greek Ortho*dox Church. ('The things one does for one’s in-laws!’) His marriage to Carol Blue was officiated by a rabbi 'in somebody’s front room. But,’ he feels the need to add, 'he was a pretty atheist rabbi.’

He has a fondness for cathedrals – preferably Anglican ones. 'I’m a Protestant atheist.’ And he cites Philip Larkin’s Church Going – that melancholic reflection on the absence of faith in a place of faith – as the favourite poem of his 'set’ (Amis, Fenton, McEwan et al). 'I think it perfectly captures our attitude to religion, tradition, faith, architecture, Englishness, Larkin’s admirable stoicism. Larkin very much wanted to be a believer, and couldn’t do it. And he was petrified of death.’

Has he ever shared Larkin’s yearning for faith?

'No,’ he says. 'There isn’t the evidence and I don’t see why anyone would want it to be true. A permanent, invigilated, regulated dictatorship which you are told is for your own good. I can’t think of anything worse.’

And does he share Larkin’s fear of death?

He cannot pretend that he hasn’t been giving this some thought lately. But he approaches the matter elliptically. The philosopher David Hume, he says, said you are not afraid of the time before you were born when there was nothingness, so why should you be any more concerned afterwards? 'Lucretius put it more simply, saying you’re not going to know you’re dead so there’s nothing to be afraid of. What Larkin was saying was, you bloody fools; that’s exactly what I’m afraid of – annihilation.’ He pauses. 'It is a disagreeable thought.’

Discussing mortality, Hitchens and a friend used to muse that there would come a day when the newspapers would come out and they wouldn’t be there to read them. 'And on that day, I’ve realised recently, I’ll probably be in the newspapers, or quite a lot of them. And etiquette being what it is, generally speaking, rather nice things being said about me.’ He shrugs. 'Just typical that will be the edition I miss. But it’s not so much that; it’s more that you’re at the party and you’re tapped on the shoulder and told you have to leave. The party is still going on, but it’s going on without you. And even people who swear to remember you are not really going to do so.

'However, put the contrary case. You get tapped on the shoulder, but guess what? The party’s going on for ever; you have to stay. And not only that, but you have to have a good time – the boss says so.’

He gives a slight shudder.

'Anything eternal is probably intolerable. One thing that makes the atheist position intellectually, and in some ways morally, superior is that we accept conclusions on the basis of reason and evidence that are not welcome to us. We don’t want to be annihilated. We just think the overall likelihood is that we will rejoin the molecular cycle when we die. We don’t wish it to be true, but we face it.’

Does he think he has been a good person?

'No, not particularly. Not as the world counts these things, because the world expects, for that definition to apply, a good deal of selflessness. And while no one scores very high on that, I score lower than most. I don’t do much living for others, I really don’t.’

He has spent much of his adult life, he says, trying to make up for the boredom and limitations of his childhood. 'I was possessed quite strongly by the feeling that I was owed a few good things because I’d been deprived of them when I was young, so don’t miss a chance to give yourself a treat now and then.’

What does he wish he’d done more of?

'Everything. I’m very greedy.’ He reaches for his drink. 'I wish more people had said yes.’

To what?

'To whatever it was I was proposing. Or more people had not even waited to be asked.’

Ah, sex then. He writes in his book that Gore Vidal had once advised him never to miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television: 'My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV.’

'With men, that’s always what it is,’ he says now with a sigh. 'They brood over missed opportunities or wasted chances. Martin’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, has done the hard thinking, you might say, about that.’

Thinking of his damning critique of Mother Teresa in his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, I say, rather unkindly perhaps, that it would be unfortunate if he were to be remembered not as the person who had fed the poor and comforted the dying, but the person who had given a good kicking to the woman who did.

He looks at me. 'I don’t think the contingency comes up. Those who do feed the poor and comfort the dying are safe from me. Mother Teresa did neither. She was a fraud.’

He takes satisfaction from the fact that it was probably because of him that at least some of her obituaries were a little less adulatory than they might have been, and 'managed to mention one or two of her smaller crimes. So it wasn’t all for nothing.’ Similarly, he is happy to have changed Henry Kissinger’s life 'a little bit for the worse’.

It is a source of some bemusement and discomfort that he nowadays gets mobbed at debates. 'Hitch’, the deshabillé intellectual maverick, scourge of the Right, the Left and the religious, has become a celebrity – 'a persona, a brand, or whatever you want to call it’.

He doesn’t use YouTube himself, but he is told that it contains a 'best of’ archive. People stop him on the street and tell him they are fans. 'I always say, don’t be a fan, be a critical reader. It does get to the point where one has, and should have, feelings of unworthiness – not masochistically or self-abasing, but “don’t try and make me live up to more than I’m capable of”, because then one would start to feel a fraud.’

People have even started to ask him to officiate at their weddings. 'It started a couple of years ago. It’s something I shall have to resist if I survive, and even if I don’t – this very slightly cultish stuff starts to happen. You get letters from people you can hardly remember meeting: “I shall never forget the kindness…” Unbelievably trivial stuff, but they’ve made it into a thing in their minds.’

So, I joke, he is now being deified. He smiles bleakly. 'I’m sure it’s kindly meant.’


The following day I call on Hitchens again. It is mid-afternoon. He has slept for more than 12 hours – what he describes as a 'coma’ – but awoken feeling as if he hasn’t slept at all.

He is waiting on a prescription to alleviate the trouble in his mouth. He is feeling pretty rough, but just as yesterday he is an unfailingly obliging host, eager to converse.

Carol Blue is in the kitchen, making tea. Her attitude to his illness has been matter-of-fact, pragmatic. She tells me that when they met, Hitchens struck her as 'a cross between Cary Grant and [the historian] EP Thompson. Although,’ she jokes, 'you wouldn’t know it to look at him now.’

Hitchens and I talk a little about his children, Alexander, 26, and Sophia, 21, from his first marriage, and Antonia by his second. Hitchens moved to America in 1981 with his first wife, Eleni. The couple separated in 1989, not long after Hitchens had met Blue, and Eleni and their two children eventually moved back to London.

Hitchens says little of fatherhood in his book, although he does provide one meltingly brilliant aside about what it is to be the father of daughters. Nothing, he writes, can make one so 'happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realise that your heart is running around in somebody else’s body.’

When I ask whether he thinks he should have been a better parent, he nods. 'I guess everybody should say that, but certainly me. Especially early on. I always thought I was abnormally incompetent with infancy, while the mothers of my child*ren seemed to be amazingly omnicompetent.’

He doesn’t know whether he would have had a better relationship with his elder children if he hadn’t divorced their mother. 'I’m pretty sure not. I think if they’d grown up with us it might have been much less agreeable than what we did have. But I certainly did miss a good deal of their lives.’

They are very close now, he says. 'I’m very lucky. They’re all very nice, very humorous, quite smart.’ He pauses. 'It certainly is the worst aspect of this… malady that I’m going through. The thought that I may not see much more of them is by far the most painful, just at that moment when all signals were set fair on that front. Of course, there’s never a good time to get mortally sick. But that’s the most poignant bit of it.’

I feel the urge to say – realising that one is beholden to say it, but none the less believing it to be true – that such is his spirit that I am sure he will make it.

'It’s funny you say so,’ he says. 'I hope you’re a person of hidden intuition. I actually don’t feel that. I can’t tell you why. It’s almost as hard for me to imagine being around in the next 10 years as not being, strangely enough.’ He pauses. 'But it’s not in my hands, fortunately.’

He reaches for his tea.

'My greatest enemy is boredom. It’s really physical. There are times when you really do realise that you are a body, and there’s a point of depletion to which you can sink where it doesn’t seem worth it. And I’ve been close to that. But then I can cheer myself up. I’m not a great blessings counter, but I can quite instantly summons lots of reasons why it’s worth making the effort.’

What one must avoid, he says, is despair. He gives a slight smile. 'It’s a mortal sin, of course.’

HemmingSay

Interesting as ever, but unfortunately this:

"Hitchens has always been a ferociously prolific and fastidious journalist. It is his proud boast that he has never missed a deadline, and he clearly has no intention of starting now."

can no longer said to be true: http://www.slate.com/id/2289137/.

But on the bright side, his column seems to be back this week.


edit: Obviously the stuff about him not missing deadlines, he's still a fastidious journalist!

[-0-]

Hitchens is often described as a contrarian. It is not a term he likes; nor, his friend the novelist Ian McEwan says, is it true.

That's inaccurate. He has often referred to himself as one.

MagicMarker

Thanks for that, a great article.

robindch

Here's Laurie Taylor interviewing the Hitch in a broadcast from last week:

http://youtu.be/

Part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiWMrEEl9Y

Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deICEQIL8gs

Part 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfWfw8Nanlc

Part 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uuNXMRn8v8

Part 5:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlTsZtaOovA

Part 6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IVuBAMT3zU

Dave!

He looks and sounds very healthy there!

davef1000

Thanks for posting that debate. I'm posting so I can find this later. Nothing to see here.

Zillah

Dave! wrote: »

He looks and sounds very healthy there!

He sounds better, but he looks like he's in his eighties! Granted its the chemo rather than the illness itself.

Anyway, good to see he's still kicking around. I would really be happy if he was one of the rare few who kicked it into remission and is still living happily five years from now. I don't think it's the kind of cancer you can ever really get rid of properly, but if he can get another decade or two that'd be cool.

Amtmann

Great interview. Thanks for the link.

robindch

Hitchens was to have appeared at the American Atheist Convention, but his voice is out of action at the moment, so he cancelled it and sent this ballsy letter instead:

Christopher Hitchens wrote:

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.

Sincerely

Christopher Hitchens

robindch

Martin Amis on Hitchens:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/amis-hitchens-world

MagicMarker

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so ... considerate.

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. And at times it threatened, and now threatens daily, to disappear altogether. I had just returned from giving a couple of speeches in California, where with the help of morphine and adrenaline I could still successfully “project” my utterances, when I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home—and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at 30 paces. I could also, without the help of a microphone, reach the back row and gallery of a crowded debating hall. And it may be nothing to boast about, but people tell me that if their radio or television was on, even in the next room, they could always pick out my tones and know that I was “on,” too.

Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs. In common with everybody else, I have played versions of the youthful “Which would you rather?” game, in which most usually it’s debated whether blindness or deafness would be the most oppressive. But I don’t ever recall speculating much about being struck dumb. (In the American vernacular, to say “I’d really hate to be dumb” might in any case draw another snicker.) Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen. So I have recently learned a song, entitled “If It Be Your Will.” It’s a tiny bit saccharine, but it’s beautifully rendered and it opens like this:

If it be your will,
That I speak no more:
And my voice be still,
As it was before ...

I find it’s best not to listen to this late at night. Leonard Cohen is unimaginable without, and indissoluble from, his voice. (I now doubt that I could be bothered, or bear, to hear that song done by anybody else.) In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page. I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence.

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

Very sad, Hitchens without a voice is like Da Vinci without a brush.

Zillah

Why God, why!?

Why couldn't it have been Ken Ham?

amacachi

robindch

Zillah wrote: »

Why couldn't it have been Ken Ham?

I'm sure Jesus is preparing something very special for (diploma-mill-doctor) Ham.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.

robindch

^^^ New thread moved, just to keep the Hitch's stuff in one place.

mewso

Page 2 of the Unspoken Truths article:-

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.

More solemnly: “All I have is a voice,” wrote W. H. Auden in “September 1, 1939,” his agonized attempt to comprehend, and oppose, the triumph of radical evil. “Who can reach the deaf?” he asked despairingly. “Who can speak for the dumb?” At about the same time, the German-Jewish future Nobelist Nelly Sachs found that the apparition of Hitler had caused her to become literally speechless: robbed of her very voice by the stark negation of all values. Our own everyday idiom preserves the idea, however mildly: when a devoted public servant dies, the obituaries will often say that he was “a voice” for the unheard.

From the human throat terrible banes can also emerge: bawling, droning, whining, yelling, inciting (“the windiest militant trash,” as Auden phrased it in the same poem), and even snickering. It’s the chance to pitch still, small voices against this torrent of babble and noise, the voices of wit and understatement, for which one yearns. All of the best recollections of wisdom and friendship, from Plato’s “Apology” for Socrates to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, resound with the spoken, unscripted moments of interplay and reason and speculation. It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one. That was the way that Callimachus chose to remember his beloved Heraclitus (as adapted into English by William Cory):

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

Indeed, he rests his claim for his friend’s immortality on the sweetness of his tones:

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Perhaps a little too much uplift in that closing line …

In the medical literature, the vocal “cord” is a mere “fold,” a piece of gristle that strives to reach out and touch its twin, thus producing the possibility of sound effects. But I feel that there must be a deep relationship with the word “chord”: the resonant vibration that can stir memory, produce music, evoke love, bring tears, move crowds to pity and mobs to passion. We may not be, as we used to boast, the only animals capable of speech. But we are the only ones who can deploy vocal communication for sheer pleasure and recreation, combining it with our two other boasts of reason and humor to produce higher syntheses. To lose this ability is to be deprived of an entire range of faculty: it is assuredly to die more than a little.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

MagicMarker

Ooop, sorry about that! Didn't even realise there was a second page.

mewso

MagicMarker wrote: »

Ooop, sorry about that! Didn't even realise there was a second page.

I was curious and checked the site as I thought thats a bit short for a Hitchen's article

Coriolanus

MagicMarker wrote: »

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106



Very sad, Hitchens without a voice is like Da Vinci without a brush.

It's horrific, but I can't help but be heartened by the fact that as miserable as he must be, he is still able to make me laugh aloud.

Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

[-0-]

robindch wrote: »

Martin Amis on Hitchens:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/amis-hitchens-world

This content has been removed as our copyright has expired.

Damnit!

sponsoredwalk

I don't know if anyone read Hitch's recent (in my view, embarrassing)
article on Chomsky's response to Bin Laden's death but in the comments
section of one rebuttal of Hitchens by some guy this classic response
was given that just has to be shared:

Very cogent article Abid Qureshi, and extremely well written I might add.
I fully agree with your observation on Hitchens’ excessive flair for verbal
acrobatics and loquacious prose. He is a extremely gifted polemicist that
can express even the most superficial ideas via oratory that would make
Francis Bacon weep with joy, yet his arguments sometimes fall quite
short from the mark, as you have demonstrated.

I find that the easiest way to filter the underlying syllogisms out of a
Hitchen’s article is to copy the article into notepad, remove all the
adjectives, simplify the nouns, and then re-read the whole thing; typing
down each proposition that you find in a separate notepad window. I did
this with the Chomsky article and only managed to fish out approximately
3 or 4 arguments, all of them soggy, easily refutable ones at that.
link

CiaranMT

sponsoredwalk wrote: »

I don't know if anyone read Hitch's recent (in my view, embarrassing)
article on Chomsky's response to Bin Laden's death but in the comments
section of one rebuttal of Hitchens by some guy this classic response
was given that just has to be shared:

I meant to post that article at the time, but I found the same.

MagicMarker

This was in June apparently but only uploaded in the last few days... Haven't watched it myself yet so can't comment.

''Religion has been a positive force in culture''

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfVJCmkchwc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FxVHc_UBY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igwq1q_5cM4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7LnhR2Kt4c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_1P4ZADZLQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86G114Zuhag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NuObyURgeA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfPAffHErXg

Apparently he's also due to appear at the ''Atheist Alliance of America/Texas Freethought Convention'' with Richard Dawkins in October.

He's also written an essay on the death penalty...

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/christopher-hitchens-staking-a-life.php?page=all

Staking a Life

Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the flavor and relish of the business of judicially inflicted death.

The last hanging in Britain occurred in 1964. Across the channel in France, the peine de mort was done away with by the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s. So the two great historic homelands of theatrical capital punishment—conservative Britain with its “bloody code” and exemplary gibbetings described by Dickens and Thackeray, and Jacobin France with its humanely utilitarian instrument of swift justice for feudalism promoted by the good Doctor Guillotin—have both dispensed with the ultimate penalty. The reasoning was somewhat different in each case. In Britain there had been considerable queasiness as a consequence of a number of miscarriages of justice that had led to the hanging of the innocent. In France, in the memorable words of Mitterrand’s Minister of Justice, M. Robert Badinter, the scaffold had come to symbolize “a totalitarian concept of the relationship between the citizen and the state.”

Since then no country has been allowed to apply for membership or association with the European Union without, as a precondition, dismantling its apparatus of execution. This has led states like Turkey to forego what was once a sort of national staple. The United Nations condemns capital punishment—especially for those who have not yet reached adulthood—and the Vatican has come close to forbidding if not actually anathematizing the business. This leaves the United States of America as the only nation in what one might call the West, that does not just continue with the infliction of the death penalty but has in the recent past expanded its reach. More American states have restored it in theory and carried it out in practice, and the last time the Supreme Court heard argument on the question it was to determine whether capital punishment should be inflicted for a crime other than first-degree murder (the rape of a child being the suggested pretext for extension).

To be in the company of Iran and China and Sudan as a leader among states conducting execution—and to have pioneered the medicalized or euthanized form of it that is now added to the panoply of gassing, hanging, shooting, and electrocution and known as “lethal injection”—is to have invited the question why. Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty? I have heard a number of suggested answers: two in particular have some superficial plausibility. The first is an old connection between executions and racism, and the second is the relatively short distance in time that separates the modern U.S. from the days of frontier justice.

Now it is true that you are very much more likely to be put to death by the state if you are a black person who has murdered a white person than you are if that condition is stated in reverse. Indeed, it was this disparity among others that led to the practice being suspended so widely for so long. And it is also true that the business of execution is carried on more enthusiastically and more systematically in the states of the former Confederacy. On both the occasions when I myself have visited death row, once in Mississippi and once in Missouri, the historic Dixie stench that surrounded the proceedings was absolutely unmistakable. Bill Clinton’s 1992 execution of the mentally disabled black man Ricky Ray Rector—at a strategic moment in the evolution of the red-faced governor of Arkansas into the trustworthy figure of an “electable” neoliberal— was the closest thing to a straight-out lynching that has been seen in the past generation. But traditional bigotries do not explain why the penalty has lately been restored in New York and California, and why a Federal execution “facility” has been built in Terre Haute, Indiana, birthplace of Eugene Debs (and used as a launching pad from which to kick the ultrawhite Timothy McVeigh off the planet).

Our historic proximity to the wild-and-woolly days of yore won’t quite elucidate the phenomenon either. Europe in the last few decades saw a very great deal more violence and chaos on its own soil than any American has ever had to witness on home turf, even at Antietam or in the Wilderness campaign; yet there isn’t a gallows left between Lisbon and the Urals. “Terrorism”—the gravamen of the charge against McVeigh and the excuse for Clinton’s post-Oklahoma City “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act”—doesn’t quite cut it either. Israel is much more frequently and savagely hit by indiscriminate attacks on its civilians, and it does not have resort to the death penalty.

It took me some time to notice where this process of elimination was leading me. For example, as I once found myself arguing, the state of Michigan has a provision in its founding constitution that forbids capital punishment. Yet high as the rate of violent crime is in Michigan, it is not noticeably worse than in neighboring and somewhat comparable Illinois (where former Governor George Ryan was not long ago compelled to impose a moratorium on execution, it having been discovered that there were more innocent than guilty people on the state’s death row. You know how that can upset people….) Thus, as I was going on to argue, there is no reason to suppose that the death penalty is a deterrent. And then it hit me. I had been hammering on an open door. Nobody had been bothering to argue that the rope or the firing squad, or the gas chamber, or “Old Sparky” the bristle-making chair, or the deadly catheter were a deterrent. The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.) I used to debate these questions with the late Professor Ernest van den Haag, a legal scholar of the William Buckley National Review school. He was always admirably blunt and concise. In the case of an execution of an innocent person, he once said to me, the necessary point had nonetheless been made: the state and the community had shown that they were prepared to kill. It did not especially matter if they had or had not taken the “right” life: the demonstration had nonetheless been forcibly made. (You might remember the scene in Doctor Zhivago when Strelnikov says that the peasants understand who is boss once their village has been burned, whether they had been harboring the enemy or not. “Your point: their village,” is Zhivago’s sickly and bleeding-heart reply.)

I found, and find, van den Haag’s position to be entirely repellent, and I am not alone. At an execution I attended in 1987 at the Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi, the guilt of the condemned man was so uncertain that the warden later resigned from his job in horror and disgust. But if one is to lay stress on such cases, then one is morally obliged to consider the approximate equivalents. How might you feel if a friend or loved one was to be murdered by a criminal who had killed before but who had been released prematurely? How might you feel if an inmate or a guard was slain by someone who had been sentenced to life without parole? In these cases, a crisp and swift application of the death penalty would have saved lives. Finally, what about the family whose infant daughter is first raped and then beaten and maimed and then buried alive (as the disturbed earth at her gravesite and the filth under her fingernails dismally proves, and as actually happened recently)? The beast-man is then apprehended. Never mind deterrence for an instant—does not all nature shriek aloud that he cannot be kept alive while she is dead, and that no peace is possible for her family until the rapist and torturer and murderer is no more?

Here, I think, we come up against the old problem of perfectibility and predictability. We cannot know in advance which malefactor, pre-emptively terminated, might have become a repeat offender. Nor can we know, until we set up a “pre-crime” system of detection, which pedophile might in other ways turn out to be a psychopath. So it isn’t in our power to save the second category of lives unless we agree to execute all murderers and child rapists. But it is possible to eliminate the execution of the innocent, simply by joining the association of countries that have dispensed with the death penalty.

One might be asked: What about the Nuremberg verdicts or the execution of a war criminal and mass murderer like Saddam Hussein? In both cases certain people had to leave the planet before their surviving victims—and their maimed countries and societies—had a chance of feeling normal again. I think that without undue casuistry one could argue that the hanging of the Nazi commanders was an extension of war by other means: it constituted the closing act of the war, as the hanging of Saddam Hussein constituted the conclusion or consummation of regime change in Iraq. That said, in both cases there were ugly aspects of the trials and the hangings, and there are many in Israel to argue that the Jewish state’s only-ever execution (of Adolf Eichmann) contributed to the coarsening of Israeli society. Certainly a country that makes a habit of the practice is running the risk of brutalization, which is why it can be a mistake to argue from exceptional cases. Once you institute the penalty, the bureaucratic machinery of death develops its own logic, and the system can be relied on to spare the beast-man, say, on a technicality of insanity, while executing the hapless Texan indigent who wasn’t able to find a conscientious attorney.

“The machinery of death,” indeed, was the phrase employed by Justice Harry Blackmun in stating his reasons for believing that the system of capital punishment was essentially beyond reform, and needed to be ended, not mended. In a primitive society or a theocratic state based on moral absolutism, there may be a certain “rough” justice in hauling the condemned man straight from his “trial” to the place of stoning, where at least the aggrieved relatives of his victim can have their moment of cruel catharsis. But in a modern state that allows for appeals, judicial review, and the admission of new evidence, the death sentence is only the beginning of a protracted and tortuous process to which we give—and I apologize for using the expression myself—the apotropaic name of “Death Row.” At once too random and too institutional and systematic, this dire business has now become an offense both to law and to justice.

Now it is true that you are very much more likely to be put to death by the state if you are a black person who has murdered a white person than you are if that condition is stated in reverse. Indeed, it was this disparity among others that led to the practice being suspended so widely for so long. And it is also true that the business of execution is carried on more enthusiastically and more systematically in the states of the former Confederacy. On both the occasions when I myself have visited death row, once in Mississippi and once in Missouri, the historic Dixie stench that surrounded the proceedings was absolutely unmistakable. Bill Clinton’s 1992 execution of the mentally disabled black man Ricky Ray Rector—at a strategic moment in the evolution of the red-faced governor of Arkansas into the trustworthy figure of an “electable” neoliberal— was the closest thing to a straight-out lynching that has been seen in the past generation. But traditional bigotries do not explain why the penalty has lately been restored in New York and California, and why a Federal execution “facility” has been built in Terre Haute, Indiana, birthplace of Eugene Debs (and used as a launching pad from which to kick the ultrawhite Timothy McVeigh off the planet).

Our historic proximity to the wild-and-woolly days of yore won’t quite elucidate the phenomenon either. Europe in the last few decades saw a very great deal more violence and chaos on its own soil than any American has ever had to witness on home turf, even at Antietam or in the Wilderness campaign; yet there isn’t a gallows left between Lisbon and the Urals. “Terrorism”—the gravamen of the charge against McVeigh and the excuse for Clinton’s post-Oklahoma City “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act”—doesn’t quite cut it either. Israel is much more frequently and savagely hit by indiscriminate attacks on its civilians, and it does not have resort to the death penalty.

It took me some time to notice where this process of elimination was leading me. For example, as I once found myself arguing, the state of Michigan has a provision in its founding constitution that forbids capital punishment. Yet high as the rate of violent crime is in Michigan, it is not noticeably worse than in neighboring and somewhat comparable Illinois (where former Governor George Ryan was not long ago compelled to impose a moratorium on execution, it having been discovered that there were more innocent than guilty people on the state’s death row. You know how that can upset people….) Thus, as I was going on to argue, there is no reason to suppose that the death penalty is a deterrent. And then it hit me. I had been hammering on an open door. Nobody had been bothering to argue that the rope or the firing squad, or the gas chamber, or “Old Sparky” the bristle-making chair, or the deadly catheter were a deterrent. The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.) I used to debate these questions with the late Professor Ernest van den Haag, a legal scholar of the William Buckley National Review school. He was always admirably blunt and concise. In the case of an execution of an innocent person, he once said to me, the necessary point had nonetheless been made: the state and the community had shown that they were prepared to kill. It did not especially matter if they had or had not taken the “right” life: the demonstration had nonetheless been forcibly made. (You might remember the scene in Doctor Zhivago when Strelnikov says that the peasants understand who is boss once their village has been burned, whether they had been harboring the enemy or not. “Your point: their village,” is Zhivago’s sickly and bleeding-heart reply.)

I found, and find, van den Haag’s position to be entirely repellent, and I am not alone. At an execution I attended in 1987 at the Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi, the guilt of the condemned man was so uncertain that the warden later resigned from his job in horror and disgust. But if one is to lay stress on such cases, then one is morally obliged to consider the approximate equivalents. How might you feel if a friend or loved one was to be murdered by a criminal who had killed before but who had been released prematurely? How might you feel if an inmate or a guard was slain by someone who had been sentenced to life without parole? In these cases, a crisp and swift application of the death penalty would have saved lives. Finally, what about the family whose infant daughter is first raped and then beaten and maimed and then buried alive (as the disturbed earth at her gravesite and the filth under her fingernails dismally proves, and as actually happened recently)? The beast-man is then apprehended. Never mind deterrence for an instant—does not all nature shriek aloud that he cannot be kept alive while she is dead, and that no peace is possible for her family until the rapist and torturer and murderer is no more?

Here, I think, we come up against the old problem of perfectibility and predictability. We cannot know in advance which malefactor, pre-emptively terminated, might have become a repeat offender. Nor can we know, until we set up a “pre-crime” system of detection, which pedophile might in other ways turn out to be a psychopath. So it isn’t in our power to save the second category of lives unless we agree to execute all murderers and child rapists. But it is possible to eliminate the execution of the innocent, simply by joining the association of countries that have dispensed with the death penalty.

One might be asked: What about the Nuremberg verdicts or the execution of a war criminal and mass murderer like Saddam Hussein? In both cases certain people had to leave the planet before their surviving victims—and their maimed countries and societies—had a chance of feeling normal again. I think that without undue casuistry one could argue that the hanging of the Nazi commanders was an extension of war by other means: it constituted the closing act of the war, as the hanging of Saddam Hussein constituted the conclusion or consummation of regime change in Iraq. That said, in both cases there were ugly aspects of the trials and the hangings, and there are many in Israel to argue that the Jewish state’s only-ever execution (of Adolf Eichmann) contributed to the coarsening of Israeli society. Certainly a country that makes a habit of the practice is running the risk of brutalization, which is why it can be a mistake to argue from exceptional cases. Once you institute the penalty, the bureaucratic machinery of death develops its own logic, and the system can be relied on to spare the beast-man, say, on a technicality of insanity, while executing the hapless Texan indigent who wasn’t able to find a conscientious attorney.

“The machinery of death,” indeed, was the phrase employed by Justice Harry Blackmun in stating his reasons for believing that the system of capital punishment was essentially beyond reform, and needed to be ended, not mended. In a primitive society or a theocratic state based on moral absolutism, there may be a certain “rough” justice in hauling the condemned man straight from his “trial” to the place of stoning, where at least the aggrieved relatives of his victim can have their moment of cruel catharsis. But in a modern state that allows for appeals, judicial review, and the admission of new evidence, the death sentence is only the beginning of a protracted and tortuous process to which we give—and I apologize for using the expression myself—the apotropaic name of “Death Row.” At once too random and too institutional and systematic, this dire business has now become an offense both to law and to justice.