Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

“If you mean,” said Martin, “that the guys round here seem to style their hair by shoving their dicks into the light-socket…”

He was so much the picture of different kinds of assimilation that it was almost a case of multiple personalities.

scurrilous

Living in the Islamic Republic,” Azar Nafisi was later to say in her Reading Lolita in Tehran, one of the many books that demonstrate the superiority of literature over religion as a source of morality and ethics, “is like having sex with someone you loathe.”

ad hominem

boulevardier—would

Edward and those others who had left the land of pre-1947 Israel now in effect gave up their ancestral claim to it, in order that the generations dispossessed or expelled or occupied after 1967 could have a chance to build a state of their own in at least a portion of “the land.” This self-denying renunciation had a quality of nobility to it.

It was almost as if the intimation of mortality had emancipated him from the everyday requirements of party-mindedness and tribal loyalty.

riposte

mendacious.

It’s family, in other words, and friends are family to me.

I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe.

But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and “normality” are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: “Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.” I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that “security” and “normality,” rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

certain individuals will in fact alter their opinions, while often pretending to themselves and others for quite a long time that they have not “really” done so.

pulchritudinous

(As the French say, if your aunt had wheels she still wouldn’t be a bus.)

I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.

Physical courage is in some part the outcome of sheer circumstance. You can’t actually stay hidden forever on that corner at which the snipers are taking aim. You will starve to death, for one thing. So make the dash that you were going to have to make anyway, and you will have crushed your own cowardice for a moment, which is a tremendous feeling.

carcinoma

not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.”

it is always how people think that counts for much more than what they think.

I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of myself, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful. One reason, then, that I would not relive my life is that one cannot be born knowing such things, but must find them out, even when they then seem bloody obvious, for oneself. If I had set out to put this on paper so as to spare you some or even any of the effort, I would be doing you an injustice.

The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time, and I feel absurdly honored to be grouped in the public mind with great teachers and scholars such as Richard Dawkins (a true Balliol man if ever there was one), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.

Sam Harris wooooo

To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded.” It is, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that’s my Hitch-22.

I sometimes like to think that I could have been one of those I praise in this book, who, like Victor Serge, had the intestinal fortitude to write “for the bottom drawer, and for history.” But I know damn well that without certain editors and publishers I would have drooped like a wet sock. Undying and moist thanks,

encomium.

Yossarian, confronted by Major Danby’s version of the old official trick-question “Suppose everybody felt that way?” replied “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”