Christopher and his kind

Reading his memoir Hitch-22 and random essays, I find myself wondering what Christopher Hitchens would say about the pathetic state of his adopted country if cancer had not ended his life in 2011.  So I was eager to read Salman Rushdie's conversation with Martin Amis (perhaps the only person Hitchens ever really loved) in Interview magazine.  Amis's new novel Inside Story is apparently an account of his own life in the style of Rushdie's Joseph Anton (the story of a novelist who finds himself the object of a fatwa from a mad cleric); evidently fiction and autobiography have given up and joined hands.  

After some fascinating writer-chat, they get down to it:  what would their mutual friend, who despised both Clintons, have done in 2016?  Rushdie suggests he "would have had a problem" because he hated liars, and Amis recalls that Hitchens jumped on Hillary Clinton's claim to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary because the ascent of Everest occurred after she was born.  Rushdie points out that Trump is "a more outrageous liar," but they never quite get back to how (or if) their friend would have voted.  All they can agree on is that "Trump is anti-journalism.  And that's who Christopher was, apart from anything else.  He was a journalist."  

The topic they never discuss at all is Hitchens's clear problem with women.  Not that the author of "Why Women Aren't Funny" would have acknowledged it.   It's one thing to go from The New Statesman to palling around with Paul Wolfowitz but misogyny is a step too far.  Did Hillary lie?  Or did her parents tell her a story about her unusual name?  Parents do.  As Hitch's favorite poet memorably wrote, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad."  Elizabeth Warren's mother set her up for future embarrassment by exaggerating their Cherokee ancestry.  Patti LuPone was told she is descended from the famous soprano Adelina Patti.  Orson Welles may have been fictionalizing (he often did) or he may have believed his great-grandfather was Gideon Welles, Lincoln's secretary of the navy.   It's not like you're the Tichborne Claimant if you genuinely believe something dubious about yourself.   Had Bill Clinton ne Blythe claimed to be related to Maurice Barrymore (also ne Blythe), would he had earned the Wrath of Hitch?

Hitchens famously despised organized religion and all its proponents, but the only one who got a book-length diatribe was Mother Teresa -- not Graham, Wojtyla, Falwell or any of the other guys.  He was appalled at the outpouring of grief for Princess Diana ("the Spencer girl," as he contemptuously called her), though I can't recall any such problem with Elvis or Michael Jackson.  All these people losing their minds over a woman they never met!   Of course the Celebrity Death Ritual goes back at least as far as Rudolph Valentino in 1926.  Hitchens knew that.  In Hitch-22 he and Amis drunkenly agree that women ought to have their breasts and buttocks on the same side, the better to enhance male pleasure and convenience.  That's not how you talk about people you consider fully human.  That sounds like something Trump might say, if he had any imagination.

Also in Hitch-22 there's a report of his encounter with Margaret Thatcher that is downright creepy.  The heart wants what it wants, I guess, but being spanked by the prime minister with a magazine, in front of witnesses, and obsessing about it later...maybe it wasn't 9/11 that turned him into a neo-con.  Maybe Hillary Clinton just wasn't strict enough for him.  I can't imagine what it's like to travel to Athens to claim your mother's body after she and her lover have killed themselves  -- a woman you always called "Yvonne" because she was too glamorous for "Mummy" -- but I see what Larkin meant.  In his notorious yet playful essay Hitchens delved into "Why Women Aren't Funny."  Imagine him generalizing about any other group:  "Why Gay People Drink Too Much," say, or "Why Asians Drive Badly."  The mind won't go there.   

Here's what I think:  Hitchens would be eviscerating Trump on a daily basis, surpassing even Borowitz, Pierce and The Lincoln Project.  But he would never have voted for Clinton, and he'd be finding reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris.  As someone he never believed in remarked, it's hard to deal with the speck of dust in the other guy's eye when yours is occluded by a chunk of wood.