Jackie Danicki

That’s how Christopher Hitchens describes global capitalism, and I am happy to say that I agree with him (though he is probably less pleased about this state of affairs than I am).

I passed some time on my first flight yesterday by reading Alexander Linklater’s lengthy Hitchens profile in Prospect (thanks for the printout, Nancy). It’s full of good stuff.

Hitchens is one with whom I disagree as often as I agree, but even when he is wrong, he is wrong in an admirably forceful, eloquent, often witty fashion that is rivaled by few others. According to him, that’s no fluke:

The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can’t get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them.

Stefan Collini seemed to get it right about Hitch in the London Review of Books, as quoted by Linklater:

With Hitchens’s work, one gets the… sense of how much it matters to prove that one is and always has been right: right about which side to be on, right that there are sides and one has to be on one of them; right about which way the world… is going… and right when so many others, especially well-regarded or well-placed others, are demonstrably wrong.

Hitchens has a lot invested in knowing everything, and knowing it before everybody else. I like the way he describes his reaction to what happened on September 11, 2001:

As soon as I saw the impact of those planes, I realised what was going to happen. I knew it would be something apocalyptic from Islam. It was the flash that illuminates the whole scene, a way of thinking from the days of the old left. And I also knew what all the comrades would say, and what I would have to say about that.

That last sentence just kills me, in a very satisfying way. Hitchens is good at last sentences. On the Iraq war and whether he regrets favoring it from his stance as a human rights hawk:

Iraq was the property of a fascist and sadist who was butchering his people, squandering the resources of the country, preparing to hand over to his unbelievably nasty sons, who would probably have had an inter-dauphin fratricide of their own. And instead we have a humorous Kurdish socialist as the president of Iraq, and I’m supposed to apologise. Well, fuck that.

Like I said, I disagree with Hitch as often as I agree (a socialist in power is nothing to celebrate, though at least this one isn’t a tyrant), but he does have a way with words.

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