Vauban Inc.

There are nothing but words between us. Words are nothing between us. Between us, words are nothing.

R.I.P. Hitch

This morning, after a week of cold rain, it snowed here for the first time. It’s finally starting to feel like winter. I put on Gregory Alan Isakov’s That Sea, The Gambler and I am back in Massachusetts. There’s a foot and a half of fresh snow on the ground and I’m shivering in the kitchen, smoking the day’s first cigarette, hungover. There’s nothing left of the night before except empty bottles and full ashtrays. I am home.

Christopher Hitchens died the other day and the world is worse off without him. My first introduction to Hitch came through a debate between him and George Galloway concerning the merits of the war in Iraq, which coincidentally has also found its official end. When the debate started, I knew who to root for. I was about as anti-war as a non-pacifist could be. The reasons for going to war were poor. There was no exit strategy. Thousands of civilian deaths. 

I went to an anti-war protest at my community college organized by the American Friends Service Committee. They had shoes from dead Iraqi citizens and boots from dead American soldiers. They wanted to show the cost of war, but they had people there from the military. It quickly became a story about the sacrifice of American servicemen and women. They played “Taps.” They solemnly read off names of dead soldiers. I couldn’t help but wonder about the Iraqi civilians. What were their names? I left before the program was over, disgusted. The Americans knew what they were getting into when they joined the Armed Forces. Please forget this lunacy about how only uneducated people from poor backgrounds join up. If you join the Armed Forces, then you know at the very least that you could be asked to put your life on the line and fire weapons at other people (or support the firing of weapons against others, which amounts to the same thing morally). The Iraqi people didn’t choose to be invaded.

In Western Massachusetts, it’s easy to get stuck in left-liberal groupthink. Hitchens made some compelling arguments for the war. The kind of arguments one might expect from someone who believed that freedom was better than tyranny. The kind of arguments that are difficult to disagree with, if you listen with open ears. I didn’t shed any tears for Saddam Hussein or the Baathists. If the question is between freedom and tyranny, then I am on the side of freedom. But we all know that’s too easy. Freedom for who to do what? Hopefully the Iraqi people will be able to settle their sectarian squabbles and build a democracy out of the mess we have left them. If nothing else positive can be said about the war, it gave them this chance. What they do next is up to them. Well, as “up to them” as things can be in a world political economy. But let’s not trick ourselves into thinking that some cabal of (American) capitalists has total control over worldwide events. That’s the cheapest kind of leftist thinking there is. And it’s foolish. And it shuts out the possibility for change. Nothing to do here people. Capital runs the world. 

Go back to watching the Kardashians.

The world needs people like Hitchens to hold contrary positions. It is too easy to adopt a position that you didn’t come up with and then reject everything outside of it. It makes you feel like you are part of a group, and in the case of political correctness, it makes you feel like one of the “good guys” fighting injustice at all costs. If the world were only that simple. If only linguistic prohibitions could bring about social justice. In honor of Hitchens’s memory, we could all stand to give the person with a different opinion a chance. Listen before we think of a response. Not repeat responses we learned from television like automatons.

One thing that bothered me about the obituaries was their focus on Hitchens’s relationship with alcohol. Finally, a few brave souls were able to admit that he did in fact become drunk after drinking epic amounts of scotch, but most stuck to the tradition of Hitchens-as-superhuman-drinker/writer. I don’t doubt that he could drink well, but the insistence on this drinker/writer paradigm is dumb. No one becomes an alcoholic out of a pure love of drinking and/or the romantic ideal of the alcoholic writer. People become addicted to alcohol because they hurt, because they are frustrated, because they are human. Let’s not encourage this drinker/writer myth any longer, even if Hitchens himself was particularly attached to it. If alcoholics are better writers, it is not because of the alcohol, but rather despite it. 

At the end of the Hitchens/Galloway debate, I didn’t find myself believing in the War in Iraq and more than I did at the beginning. But I certainly examined the arguments the anti-war community was offering more thoroughly. If the argument is shit, then get rid of it. Even if it supports a cause you believe in. A group of such saggy arguments centers on the idea that we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. There were no WMDs. There was faulty intelligence. If we topple Saddam, that means we have to stop working with/topple every tyrannical government in the world. These arguments are weak, but I don’t want to go into the specifics of that now. Other people have done that sufficiently. The problem is more with the context than the arguments themselves. After it was decided that the US military (and friends) were going to Iraq, the moment the boots were on the ground, the context changed. I found it dispiriting how much the anti-war movement focused on why we shouldn’t be there in the first place, rather than what to do now. There was a failure of leadership at that decisive moment when the context changed. 

God is Not Great is not the kind of book that I imagine won a lot of converts to atheism. Religious people as such are resistant to reason. That said, it provided some great arguments against religion in all its forms. I never saw Hitchens debate religion and not destroy his opponent. Atheists had their coming out party. Hitchens supported a group of people who largely kept their opinions to themselves for fear of personal/professional reprisal and encouraged them to show themselves, to challenge religious communities. For that alone, all atheists should be grateful.