Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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and not just political decrepitude. In the figure of Hitler was a target, a quack, a charlatan, ‘a crank to end all quacks’, Hitchens declared. ‘Such a target! And from the pen that had flayed and punctured the “booboisie”, there came little or nothing.’36 It would be nonsensical to compare to Hitler a petty, duplicitous fraud like Irving, to say nothing of comparing Hitchens to Mencken. But at least we can say that Hitchens knew what a flunk it was to be remiss on the issue of fascist quackery. To make himself an ally of Irving just when the latter’s worth as an historian was being mercilessly divested surely immolated Hitchens’s probity at the shrine of opportunism. As was often the case with Hitchens, however, rather than recant or express contrition, he rationalised and revised, such that he painted himself mainly as a defender of free speech rather than someone hoping to stir controversy about the Holocaust.37
But what to make of this episode, given Hitchens’s own statement that ‘a Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer’?38 It might be true, if finger-wagging, to suggest that the author of the ‘Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs’ was trivial about his recently acquired Jewishness, that it meant as much to him as it can mean to someone who is capable of making a week’s reputation out of the paradoxical assertion that a Holocaust affirmer is actually on to something. More prosaically, it suggests that Hitchens was capable of rationalising any absurdity without its affecting his amour propre, provided there were indeed the requisite reputation miles to be earned in the process.
There would be far worse, far more wholesale quackery on Hitchens’s part, in the years to come. As I mentioned, quite often in those years he would find himself standing up for the ‘Jewish people’, whether their foe was real or imaginary. On these occasions Hitchens would freely dispense the trivialising innuendo, implying anti-Semitism on the part of his opponents, an accusation to which he had himself once been subject, and from which the discovery of his Jewishness only partially screened him. Hitchens’s Jewish descent thus formed first a protective carapace, then a weapon, but it also arguably formed part of a compound Anglo-American-Jewish identity that distinguished him among his peers.
HATING CLINTON, LOVING BUSH
Hitchens could be unforgiving of slights. When his friend Guttenplan tried to get Hitchens to work at Vanity Fair, he was rebuffed by the editor. Guttenplan dealt with this by treating Hitchens to an expensive lunch on the expense account each time he was in town. Hitchens, before eating, routinely checked: ‘This is on Fuckface, right?’39 Similarly, his long-standing hatred for the Clintons may have owed at least in part to a rebuff by Hillary Clinton. Soon after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Hitchens approached his friend Tariq Ali with some news. ‘I need to discuss something with you,’ Hitchens said.
I’ve got Jessica Mitford and her husband coming round to dinner in a few weeks’ time. You know that Hillary Clinton worked in his law practice as an intern and then as a young lawyer? Well, I’ve invited Hillary along to my dinner, and this will be a big test for her, whether she comes or not.
How might it have been had the Clintons decided to entertain Hitchens and taken him into their confidence? Ali’s answer: ‘He would have been completely playing ball with them.’40
If that had happened, Hitchens would not have been the only one to be charmed by the Clintons. ‘Clinton did have this capacity to seduce journalists who had until then seemed like outsiders and happy with it,’ Guttenplan recalled.
There was a way in which Clinton seemed, I think mistakenly, to be ‘one of us’ … I remember people thinking that because this guy worked for McGovern, he demonstrated against the war, so when he gets to be president, he’ll be great. I remember thinking, ‘This guy comes from Arkansas and he’s not a racist, that’s such a big thing and it’s worth voting for.’41
However, it is not obvious that Hitchens was ready to be seduced even before Hillary’s rebuff. As soon as the governor of Arkansas appeared as a serious presidential candidate, Hitchens set out to prove to liberals that Clinton was not their man and did so at first primarily by demonstrating that Clinton was, if not a racist himself, quite happy to play to Southern racist traditions.
Exhibit A in this charge was the execution of Rickey Ray Rector. Here was a man against whom punishment was futile, and not merely cruel, as he had already destroyed his frontal lobe with a self-administered gunshot. Hitchens went about showing that not only was death by lethal injection an uncivilised horror, and not only racist in its application, but even by the usual standards of America’s barbaric criminal justice system a gross affront to normal standards of clemency. As such the person who authorised this execution – William Jefferson Clinton – could be shown to have ‘opted to maintain the foulest traditions and for the meanest purposes’, even where no poll-driven exigency was involved.
As to the idea that Clinton was ‘one of us’, having demonstrated against the Vietnam War, Hitchens pointed out early on that this was something of an embarrassment to Clinton, and he was outflanking the senior Bush to the right on foreign policy.42
Once Clinton was elected, he provided material in abundance for Hitchens to continue his assault. The burden of much of what Hitchens would write during the next eight years was straightforwardly leftist. He assailed the Clintons for selling out their voters on health care, showing that they had systematically aligned themselves with the largest health maintenance organisations, devising a policy to suit them while feigning operatic chagrin at the opposition mounted by the smaller and medium-sized health-care companies. (Again, a great deal of this was taken from Sam Husseini, initially without credit.) Hitchens charged Clinton with colluding with the most reactionary forces in American politics to destroy the welfare system and encourage racist scapegoating as the despair piled up.43 All this was very much the bread and meat of the radical left to which Hitchens remained affiliated.
Yet Hitchens’s assault on Clinton, aside from an unexceptionable and unexceptional critique of Clintonite ‘triangulation’, workfare, and war crimes, was highly personalised. Clinton’s character, before his policies, was the subject of Hitchens’s prosecution. An element of this had been present from the very beginning of the contretemps. Indeed, Hitchens had always had a tendency to revile the personnel of American statecraft without a great deal of emphasis on the structures of power. Moreover, he coupled this with a tendency to seek feuds, individuals with whom to spark off controversy, the better to remain noticed and noticeable. It is true that there was a rape allegation against Clinton, which Hitchens found credible. But he did not even like Clinton’s having consensual sex, as this made him the ‘boss who uses subordinates as masturbatory dolls’.44
This reached an extraordinary zenith, or nadir, when Hitchens went after Clinton by selling out his friend Sidney Blumenthal. The affair arose over something Blumenthal is alleged to have said during a dinner with Hitchens and his wife, Carol Blue. Blumenthal is supposed to have described Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Clinton had become the basis of an impeachment of the president, as a stalker. This was at a time when Blumenthal was denying before Congress that he or anyone else in the White House had issued such rumours. Hitchens swore an affidavit that could have put his friend and cousin inside for perjury.
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