Of the many political books released these days, few do much
more than jostle some brain cells around and give readers the warm
fuzzy feeling of being unassailably right. Not that this is
necessarily a criticism, but the work of any number of bestselling
pundits on the left and right is not intended to surprise anyone.
The point is to reprocess and build on basic broad ideas that are
clung to with a certain degree of political religiosity. Why else
does one side or the other consider it a victory when a particular
red or blue literary soldier tops the New York Times
bestseller list?
It is this milieu that makes the recent success of Christopher
Hitchens seem utterly improbable. The targets in this Brit writer’s
latest collection of essays Love, Poverty, and War (Nation
Books, 496 pages, $16.95) are so eclectic and the sacred cows slain
so varied, it is impossible to imagine any other human being aside
from Mr. Hitchens reading this collection without taking offense at
one comment or another. Nevertheless, as Hitchens himself notes of
his own reading habits in one essay, “I’m a big boy and can bear
the thought of being offended.” So should his readers.
Granted, the collection may not be appropriate gift for the
uncle who loves The O’Reilly Factor or the college-aged
cousin who cannot stop jabbering about Zinn’s A People’s
History of the United States. It will, however, make you
laugh, scoff, shake and nod your head in agreement and disagreement
at turns, and dazzle you even when you believe the author could not
be more wrong. Better still, from essay to essay you’ll never know
what’s coming next. How many other political essayists alive today
would be willing to mix explorations of the work of Aldous Huxley
and James Joyce with treatises on Islamofascism, smoking laws, and
terrorism? And how many of that small number could do so as agilely
as Hitchens?
One can only imagine the shock of a conservative who picks up
the book purely on the basis of Hitchens’ vocal pro-Iraq war
punditry and finds it kicks off with a debunking of some of the
most honored moments in the career of Winston Churchill, not to
mention Hitchens’ subsequent blasts at instant hero Mel Gibson,
Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa. Likewise, a liberal familiar
only with Hitchens’ Orwell book or his association with The
Nation will likely be taken aback by eviscerations of Noam
Chomsky, John F. Kennedy apologists (“an applauding chorus
demanding that the flickering Tinkerbell not be allowed to
expire.”), and a certain ex-Arkansas governor: In the aftermath of
the missile strike on the Sudanese aspirin factory, Hitchens
writes, “I look at Bill Clinton’s face — when I can bring myself
to do it — and ask: ‘People were put to death to save that?’”
Hitchens also provides the single most useful deconstruction of
Fahrenheit 9/11, labeling the film “a sinister exercise in
moral frivolity” and, further, “a possible fusion between the
turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not
exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni
Riefenstahl.”
Whether any one of these figures is a hero or a villain to a
particular reader is really of little consequence. There is no
universal law demanding that we agree with every written line of
every book we read. (Hitchens, you may have noticed, has little
interest in Gospel Truth.) But how strong are our heroes if they
cannot endure a bit of literary needling? It is in the challenge
that the true mettle is tested. It is only when we fear the
vulnerability of our heroes that we cling to the officially
sanctioned version of events and close our eyes and ears to any
contrarian evidence. Neither my brain nor my bookshelf is being
remodeled based solely on the words of Christopher Hitchens, but,
by the same token, thinking people have to be willing to entertain
new arguments and change their minds if necessary.
Love, Poverty, and War is, however, much more than a
simple polemic by a clever, angry man sitting in a comfortable
office. It is a travel narrative that takes us to the hot spots of
the last decade — Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, Cuba,
Pakistan — and describes them in vivid detail. For example, in one
heart-breaking passage, Hitchens stops at a Pyongyang snack cart to
find that the only delicacies served are warm water and stale
bread. On a lighter note, Hitchens visits with Civil War
re-enactors, takes a romantic drive down Route 66, and pens a
hilarious piece in which he goes to New York with the specific
intent of breaking all the stupid laws that have been put in place
by the “micro-megalomaniac” Mayor Michael Bloomberg, i.e. sitting
on milk crates, smoking under awnings, riding a bicycle without
both feet on the pedals, etc.
The book ends with several of Hitchens most eloquent
post-September 11 articles, as well as his defenses of military
action against Afghanistan and Iraq, views that transformed him
from a visionary to a pariah in the eyes of many of his former
allies on the left.
“I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there
was no other ‘profession’ that would have me,” Hitchens writes in
the introduction. “I became a journalist because I did not want to
rely on newspapers for information.”
And so he has not. Love, Poverty, and War may not offer
constant warm and fuzzy feelings, but it is nonetheless an
expansive, educated, above all, challenging take on the complicated
world we find ourselves in.
