Acephalous

In praise of Hitchens

Perhaps because I teach in one of the reddest counties in the country — Orange — but every quarter, I make it clear to my students that I’m not interested in indoctrinating them. I’m left of liberal in my politics, but when I’m in the classroom, I’m interested in one thing and one thing alone: teaching these students how to construct a stronger argument. When I argue with conservatives online, I’m arguing with people who don’t know how to argue (or whose idea of arguing involves suing people who disagree with them). I tell my students I’m looking to create a better class of opponents. That I’d rather disagree with people who can state their beliefs forcefully, so that I didn’t always feel like I’m beating candy from a baby.

Since 2001, in the back of my mind, I always imagined I wanted to train my conservative students into being a wee Hitchens.

I know I’ll take flack for this, but honestly, the reason the left reviled Hitchens as strongly as it did was because it realized that it had a formidable opponent. For the most part, the left argues with the likes of Grover Norquist, whose influence is undeniable but whose skills are very much comparable.

To everybody.

Who argues.

About anything.

Hitchens was different. We can turn a phrase, but he could cant and pirouette it. As I wrote after learning he died:

He’s basically our generation’s G.K. Chesterton: wrong about it all, but beautifully so.

I stand by it. He attacked Mother Teresa, and justifiably so, when he felt it necessary. And he embraced an unjust war, unjustifiably so, when he felt it necessary. But he also waterboarded himself, to justify himself, because he felt it was necessary, and he backed down. He was the opposition we should hate, because he makes his case so strongly; but he was also the opposition we should love, because he challenged us to make our argument in its strongest form and changed his mind to fit the facts.

Would that we always had opponents so eloquent and wrong.

UPDATE: Because it was brought up in the comments, I thought I'd at least shed a little light on how I deal with other "leading thinkers" in the conservative movement. I just don't want anybody confused about the issue here, which is argumentative integrity, not correctness.

UPDATE II: Because someone brought up that I'd said it better before, here's "Liberal Fascism: Two Words Next To Each Other."

I keep giving conservative cultural criticism a chance, and I keep getting burned.

This post is about a book review I do not understand, but as it appeals to conservatives and I've committed myself to trying to understand conservatives, I'm going to try to make sense of it.

Those who are familiar with [Stephen Hunter] will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

The man carves his books? A little Old Testament for my taste, but to each his own.

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence.

If I wrote that the author of this review would number me among the terrorists. That said, the fact that he puts quotation marks around the title can only mean he aspires to write for the New Yorker, which is fortuitous given his obvious hatred of America. (He doesn't even mention Jesus among America's favorite things, which means he's obviously at war with Christmas.)

Ray Cruz is Hunter’s new John Wayne ... The novel fleshes out so many characters and tells the story in such a thorough way that Tarantino would be jealous.

The best advice about what books to read comes from people who only watch movies.

Hunter’s greatest gift is his style, his prose. He’s been called the “populist Faulkner” and for good reason.

I have no idea what that means. Perhaps the sentences that follow that one will illuminate.

He’s no Vince Flynn and he’s no Tom Clancy. His characters inhabit a harsh world that is unforgiving and follows no set code of good wins over evil. His characters inhabit a place called reality where Hunter’s simple yet delicate and violent prose comes alive. His heroes are not perfect and his villains are never black and white.

Nothing about prose there. Maybe further on in the review?

Hunter’s novels also appeal because of their visual style, and this one is no different ... He feeds us the exact images and verbs our inner beasts need to gobble up in order to be completely consumed by the story. Hunter has perfected the craft of the thriller by keeping his prose simple a la Hemingway and giving us the details other writers shy away from, all while providing these in the context of a visually striking world only a man who reviewed films for decades could give us.

This book is like a movie! You should watch it in your brain! It's like Hemingway only also Faulknerian! They were both writers I am name-dropping!

Lying by example.

According to Leon Cooperman, in his widely circulated open letter to Obama, Wall Street complaints about Obama concern not the substance of his response to the financial crisis these complainers created — and from which they continue to profit — but “the divisive, polarizing tone of [the President's] rhetoric.” Color me skeptical, but I don’t think Wall Street much cares about the rhetoric being directed at it, given its embrace of characterizations intended to vilify it. (“Greed is good,” anybody?) The most galling aspect of Cooperman’s letter, however, isn’t its tone-deafness to the larger political climate so much as its utter lack of understanding of what the President has done.

Cooperman begins by setting the tone: “It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this.” So, from the first, readers know that the author considers himself qualified to pass judgment on the President. Fair enough, but the next sentence shows that he clearly isn’t: “I hoped your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country[.]” That undefined “salutary” hangs Damocles-like over the rest of the essay. He thought things would change for the better, but he can’t be bothered to define what those “things” are or how they might be “bettered.” That he follows this by admonishing the President for his rhetoric isn’t unsurprising — it’s all he’s got. “Just to be clear,” he writes, when he’s been nothing of the sort. He’s written a template upon which any reader can foist any objection they have to Obama’s management of anything. How clueless is he?

He contends that he’s been “richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck),” but like most powerful people who appeal to their humble roots, that luck matters less than the hard work. They take to heart the cliché about making your own luck, so this perfunctory invocation of the humility trope is even more perfunctory than most. It’s evident in the way he later extols the virtues of capitalists who, for him, function as benevolent overlords whose sole purpose is to “fill store shelves at Christmas.” The actual people who fill those shelves — not to mention those who make the products placed upon them — may work hard, but they’ve been terribly unlucky. Of course, Cooperman doesn’t say that. Instead, after praising the virtues of he and his, he chastises the President for doing exactly what he’s been doing all this time:

Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who musts be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle.

See what he did there? He and his are “people of good will,” and if the President would only stop describing their behavior in a factual manner and start pretending that they’re other than they are, they would be more than happy to continue doing what they were going to do anyway. Because this “middle” of which Cooperman speaks? Obama’s been there for quite some time, but Cooperman would rather the rest of us not know that.

He’d much rather Obama stop talking about his past compromises, because it’s going to make future ones much more difficult.

 

The [Impossible] Conservatism of [the Flirtatious] Pauline Kael…

…can only exist in Ron Capshaw’s head, and only then because he really wants it to. Case in point:

Kael herself had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it because of her lifelong aversion to dogma. She tried its leftist alternative of Trotskyism but this, too, failed her.

Just substitute “Kael” with “Obama”:

[Obama himself] had briefly flirted with Stalinism while in college, but soon rejected it because of [his] lifelong aversion to dogma. [He] tried its leftist alternative of Trotskyism but this, too, failed [him].

By the logic of contemporary conservative thought, the next sentence now becomes an impossibility:

In the new biography, close friends are quoted as seeing her as an “Adlai Stevenson liberal,” in love with the establishment.

Sorry, Ron, but that’s not how it works now. She once “flirted with Stalinism,” which means her ideology forever bears the stain of this early “flirtation.” Consider the language there: say you “flirt” with someone at a party in 1996 and, years later, this person develops a mental illness that convinces him or her to commit an act of domestic terrorism. Should your current political ideology be determined on the basis of that two-decade-old “flirtation”? Unless I’m so old that “flirtation” doesn’t just signify a home run, but a thirteen-year-long career as a slugger for the same team, I don’t think so.

Then again, I’m not a conservative, so I don’t think Obama’s “flirtation” with Bill Ayers is all that significant to his career as a slightly-if-even-and-not-even-anymore-left-of-center politician. For conservatives, you are who you once — no matter how many years ago — flirted with. In other words, Ron, leave Kael alone. She’s ours, and unless you’re willing to ditch the foundational logic of contemporary conservatism, you can’t have her.*

*If you are, though, by all means please do so. Start a movement and you can have her and, let me think, I’ll throw in Rosenbaum too.