As a means to force better understanding, I will be posting a short summary of each of the essays in the collection of Christopher Hitchens' essays Arguably. Here’s the first 11 (the entire first section - “All American”. I plan on adding ~one a day.
“Gods of Our Fathers”
Review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, by Brooke Adams. Defining quote, ”The connection between religious skepticism and political liberty may not be as absolute…, but there is no doubt that some such connection existing very vividly in the minds of those ‘men of the Enlightenment’ who adorned Philadelphia and Boston and New York and Washington as the eighteenth century evolved into the nineteenth.” 1/25/2012
New learning: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share a birthday. Not just the same calendar day but the same exact day in history, Februay 7th 1809. They were 17 when Jefferson and Adams died.
New word: Prefiguration~=foreshadowing
“The Private Jefferson”
Review of Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, by Andrew Burstein. Although an absorbing book, little is really a secret, instead, a testimonial to Jefferson as a true man on the Enlightenment including: a belief in neither excess nor repression in matters of exercise, diet and sex; a general belief in a deity but not religion; a solipsistic understanding of natural history. Interesting quotes, “Mens sana in corpore sana (healthy mind, healthy body)” and philosopher William Paley’s analogy, “Even a person who did not know what a clock was for would be able to tell that it was not a vegetable or a stone, that it had a maker.” 1/26/2012
New learning: Sally Hemmings was Martha Jefferson’s half sister. Jefferson likely fathered children with Sally as a widower.
New word: Manumit=to release from slavery
“Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates”
Review of Power, Failth and Fantasy: America in the Middle East , 1776 to Present by Michael Oren. Hitchenss focuses on the opening chapters on the Barbary Wars during Jefferson’s administration. Hitchens disagrees with historian Frank Lambert thesis that the Barbary wars were primarily one of trade. Instead believes, “Questions of nation building, regime change, of ‘mission creep’, of congressional versus presidential authority to make war, of negotiation versus confrontation, of ‘entangling alliances’ and of the ‘clash of civilizations…” Hitchens makes the case that the Barbary wars were a crucial formative period in the building of the American nation. Interesting quote ”It is settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute. The United States, while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none” from President James Madison and ”[The United States} has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christiandom have done for ages” from Pope Pius the VII. Notwithstanding his missed point that the USA was not a Christian nation, the Pope clearly saw the war as one of Religion. 1/27
New learning: The USA’s first military excursion into Libya was the Barbary Wars and the Battle of Tripoli in 1801 (and the rematch in 1805). Of course we’ve been back several times (the battle of Tobruk in WW2 and last year).
New word: opprobrium=infamy
“Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy”
Review of Benjamin Franklin: Unmasked by Jerry Weinberger. Premise is that everyone who took Franklin’s writing seriously (Autobiography, Poor Richard’s, etc.) missed the point. Good quotes, “A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss,” and “Franklin’s moral jujitsu…cannot have afforded him as much pleasure as the applause and income he received from people who didn’t know he was kidding.”
New leaning: Adriadne’s thread refers to Adriadne, daughter of King Minos in Greek mythology. It describes a logic for solving problems with many possible routes such as a maze, puzzle or dilemma.
New word: tautology=logical proposition all of whose instances are true as in “good or not good”.
"John Brown: The Man Who Ended Slavery”
Review of John Brown, Abolitionist by David S. Reynolds. Argues that John Brown was not a lunatic, but a thoughtful and strategic abolitionist who understood that direct action was needed to prompt the otherwise compromising Lincolnites to action. Best quote id from Reynold’s, “The officer who supervised the capture of Brown was Robert E. Lee…The Lieutenant who demanded Brown’s surrender was J.E.B. Stuart…Among the officers present at Brown’s hanging was [Stonewall] Jackson…among the soldiers at Brown’s execution was John Wilkes Booth.”
New learning: Parson (Mason Locke) Weems (1759-1825) is the author best known for creating the G. Washington cherry tree tale.
New word: hermeneutic=interpretive, explanatory
“Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child”
Review of Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame. Describes Lincoln as the first, real American president “from the very loam and marrow of the new country.” Whether or not Lincoln was a “man of destiny”, his views on slavery and the union were greatly informed by his experience and evolved over his life to the point where he “came as close to an egalitarian position as made almost no difference” whether or not he truly believed in the “black-white equality.” Best quote, “Before Gettysburg people would say ‘the United States are…’ After Gettysburg they began to say ‘the United States is…’ That they were able to employ the first three words at all was a tribute to the man who did more than anyone to make that hard transition himself, and them to secure it for others, and for posterity.”
New learning: Abraham Lincoln was born in Sinking Spring Farm, KY.
New word: scatology=preoccupation with excrement
“Mark Twain: American Radical”
A not very rosy review of Fred Kaplan’s, The Singular Mark Twain. Hitchens pans the book that he says, “is terse when it ought to be expansive , and expansive when it could well do with being more terse.” Best quote, and good summary of Hitchens’ review of the entire book, referring to a passage in the biography about a Twain address to the Paris Stomach Club in 1879 about masturbation, “The solemnity of this is near terminal. And the stone of the non sequitur is laid upon the grave of the joke. It is altogether wrong that a book about Mark Twain should be boring.”
New learning: The Stomach Club was a social club of American writers and articts that included Augustus Saint Gaudens.
New word: bowdlerize=to remove or modify parts of a passage considered objectionable
“Upton Sinclair: Capitalist Primer”
Hitchens’ review of Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle. Hitchens describes Sinclair, and his approach in The Jungle, as part journalist (“…there to make radical fiction out of brute reality”) and ideologist (“His novel is the most successful attempt to fictionalize the central passages of…Das Kapiltal”) in his socialist realism depiction of the fictional Chicago working neighborhood of Packingtown. Best quote: “Sinclair’s realism, indeed, got in the way of his socialism…his intention was to direct the conscience of America to inhuman conditions…however, so graphic and detailed were the depictions of the filthy way in which food was produced that his book sparked a revolution among consumers instead.” The Jungle had at least some impact on the later passage of the Food and Drug Act.
New learning: “…the cultural and literary standards of Commissar Zhdanov” refers to Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s cultural commissar.
New word: abattoir = slaughterhouse
“JFK: In Sickness and In Health”
A review of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek. A fan of neither the book or of Kennedy Hitchens excoriates both in this essay. Great quotes. From Gore Vidal that Ted Kennedy resembles “three hundred pounds of condemned veal”. Hitchens points out that there is really nothing original in this book (beyond the “macabre extent of disclosure” of JFKs medical issues) by saying “This is not to say that hair and nails do not continue to sprout on the corpse. Professor Dallek’s title, itself portentious and platitudinous at the same time, is part of the late growth.” On JFK himself, Hitchens says “…anyone scanning this or…similar accounts would have to be astonished, not that the man’s career was cut short, but that it lasted so long. In addition to being a moral defective and a political disaster, John Kennedy was a physical and probably mental also ran for most of his presidency.”
New learning: It is very unlikely that JFK wrote (“let alone read”) Profiles in Courage.
New word: meretricious=tawdry (interestingly, also pertaining to the characteristic of a prostitute)
“Saul Bellow: The Great Assimilator”
Review of a collections of Bellow’s Novels 1944-1953 and Novels 1956-1964. Hitchens follows Bellow’s evolution from the left (Trotskyite) to right (defender of Allan Bloom) but always founded in his experience in the Canadian and American Jewish ghettos and a personal philosophy that seemed to be “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to”.
New learning: When he wasn’t busy winning a Pulitzer, Nobel and three national Book Awards, Bellow translated Isaac Bashevis Singer into English and Eliot’s Prufrock into Yiddish.
New word: Shtetl= eastern European Jewish village
“Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita”
A review of Nabokov’s Lolita and The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. I believe Hitchens is taking the tact Nabokov did not have “the smallest intention of titillating his audience” with Lolita but of implicating them. The book is filled with puns, humor (as it were) and literary references that create , if the reader slows down so as not to be “ravished and caught up”, a literary tragicomedy on the scale of Joyce’s Ulysses. Best quote is where Hitchens points out one of Humbert’s thoughts, “Since (as psychotherapist, as well as the rapist, will tell you) the limits and the rules of such girlish games are fluid…” A quote that SNL writers would appreciate.
New learning: The novel was written in English but later translated to Russion by Nabokov. By the way, Lolita in Russian is Додита
New word: Lepidopterist=a person who study’s butterflies and moths. Nabokov was a lepidopterist himself.
“John Updike, Part One: No Way”
A review of Updike’s novel Terrorist about a NJ High School boy who decides to bomb the Lincoln Tunnel. I get the impression that Hitchens does not much like the book and sees it as a clumsy and poorly written (even jingoistic) attempt to dash off a provocative novel with an uplifting ending five years after witnessing the 9/11 attacks from his place in Brooklyn Heights. His last line of he review, “Given some admittedly stiff competition, Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon.” I like how he uses “grown-up” instead of “adult.”
New learning: Updike wrote a (apparently much better) novel about Islamic fanaticism in 1978 called The Coup.
New Latin phrase: radix malorum=the root of evil.
“John Updike, Part Two: Mr. Geniality”
A review of Updike’s collection Due Consideration: Essays and Criticism. While we are informed that Updike, the “highly affable preface”, worries if he has been fairly critical in his reviews, Hitchens has no such reservations in his review of Updike’s collection. He lauds Updike’s treatment of Larkin’s collected Poems (“ Updike seems almost to know what we are thinking”) while he calls the review of Gunter Grass’s Crabwalk as “evenhandedness taken almost to the point of masochism.” Best quote is from Updike’s review of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, “the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens.”
New learning: the pre-history of the character Coalhouse Walker from E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime shows up in Doctorow’s later novel The March, written 30 years later. Both books won the National Book Critics Award.
New word: feuilletons=the section of European newspapers devoted to light pieces of general entertainment.
“Vidal Loco”
A reaction to Johann Hari’s interview with Gore Vidal in the LondonIndependent. Hitchen’s laments that Vidal, once the true “Oscar Wilde for our day”, somehow fell off a chair and became a mean spirited conspiracy theorist post 9/11. A great example of Vidal’s early penetrating wit is a quote about the works of Isries Shah, “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.” Another is his description of Ted Kennedy in his post Chappaquiddick days as having “all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal”…sort of a Wildean version of SNL’s “Ted Kennedy is a big, fat drunk.” Vidal’s fall into insanity is well illuminated in the Hari interview. Hitchens recounts Vidal as saying “that the Bush administration was ‘probably’ in on the 9/11 attacks and that the American experiment can now be described as a ‘failure’.” He describes Vidal as having the “crass notions of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone” and entered into a “Grassy Knoll enterprise.”
New learning: Vidal also believed that FDR purposefully incited the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.
New word: delfino is Italian for dauphin=heir to the throne of France (as in the prince of France that Henry V defeats at Agincourt in Shakespeare’s play…although the Daufin was not actually at the battle in reality)…both words translated literally mean dolphin.
“America the Banana Republic”
Hitchens' commentary on the state of the American republic through the lens of the financial bailout. He correctly describes the USA as a “kleptocracy, whereby those in a position of influence use their time in office to maximize their own gains.” A system where, “the profits can be privatized and debts conveniently socialized…a ‘banana republic’.” He asks the reader, in response to the financial system meltdown to ask the question, “has anybody resigned from either the public or private sector?” and responds, “to ask the question is to answer it.” I also happen to be reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. Silver makes an interesting and supporting point about Deven Sharma’s (head of S&P) assertion to congress that’ “virtually no one…anticipated what (financial crisis) was coming.” Silver writes, “But Sharma’s statement was a lie, in the grand congressional tradition of ‘ I did not have sexual relations with that women’.” Best quote from Hitchen’s article, “Am I the only one who finds it distinctly weird that the last head of the Federal reserve and the current head of the Treasury…should be respectively the votaries of the cults of Ayn Rand and Mary Baker Eddy, two of the battiest females ever to have infested the American scene?”
New learning: After the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, a survey of the USA’s 600,000 bridges found 12 % to be structurally unsound.
New word: panjandrum = a person who has or claims to have a great deal of influence or authority.
“An Anglosphere Future”
A review of Andrew Robert’s book A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900. Hitchens takes Robert’s to task for his attempts to justify several British colonial atrocities (e.g. the 1919 massacre of Indian protesters in the city of Amritsar depicted in the movie Gandhi). At the same time, he reaches a similar conclusion to Roberts that the spread of Anglo influence around the world (at the tip of an English sword) has created what should be a natural coalition of common interests (supported by a common language) against some of the great threats of our day (e.g. “jidad-ism”). He reminds us that India (united by the English and the English language) has been fighting this issue much longer than the US. This is certainly a better legacy than what Hitchens quotes from the last British governor of Yemen that, “the British Empire would be remembered for only two things, ‘the game of soccer and the expression fuck-off’”…clearly the best quote from the piece.
New learning: Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem “The White Man’s Burden” to influence the vote in the US Senate on the annexation of the Philippines during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. The poem’s subtitle is “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”
New word: antipodes = for any place on earth, the place that is diametrically opposed to it. Australia and New Zealand are sometimes referred to as the antipodes of England and Ireland.
“Political Animals”
A review of Matthew Scully’s book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Hitchens whole heartedly supports the notion that when it comes to “food, sport and experiment” there is great rationality behind the humanism of animal rights activists that cannot be casually written off as anthropomorphic ranting of the animal rights lobby. Modern methods of producing meat from livestock (e.g. including animal renderings in feed) are injurious to the food supply. Hunting species to extinction would be “impoverishing for us.” Experimentation of drugs and consumer products on animals is rarely predictive of results on humans or, conversely, are so self evident as to preclude the need for the testing. Best quote, “When my turn comes to get a heart valve…from a pig…, I don’t want the pig to have been rotted or wretched…when it was alive.” Second best quote is about Scully, who worked in the Bush II White House before writing this book, “Who can speak for the dumb? A man who has had to answer this question for the President himself…” I don’t think he means to imply that “dumb” = “President”, but it’s funny how he wrote that line.
New learning: David Frum, who is Canadian Jewish and coined the term “axis of evil”, was asked to write the welcome for the first White House Ramadan dinner.
New word: hermeneutics = the art and science of test interpretation.
“Old Enough to Die”
A 1999 commentary on US laws governing age limits the death penalty starts with the line, “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA executes its own children.” Hitchens goes on to make a strong case against the death penalty for anyone under the age of 18. This is in violation of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of Children of which the US has signed the first two. The US is one of only 2 countries that have not ratified the third. The other non-signatory is Somalia. His case is primarily based on the facts that most teenage murderers are, (1) suffering from some form of mental or physical disorder usually including a very low IQ, child abuse and brain trauma and, (2) are rarely given the legal support to uncover these issues during trial. Despite this, 73 children (below the age of 18) were on death row in 1999.
New learning: The Rehnquist Court’s ruling in Herrera v. Collins determined that the execution of an innocent person is not necessarily a violation of federal constitutional protections. WTF?
New word: Albion = oldest known name for the isle of Great Britain.
“In Defense of Foxhole Atheists”
A commentary on the growing overt and aggressive missionary tactics of Air Force and other Armed Forces Chaplains and commanders. Hitchens argues that this trend puts us in danger of, “…directly financing the subversion of our own constitution and inviting a ‘holy war’ where we will not be able to say that only the other side is dogmatic and fanaticized.” Best quote from James Madison who wrote that the appointment of Chaplains in the military is “inconsistent with the Constitution and with the principles of religious freedom.”
New learning: Former USAFA head football coach Fisher Deberry hung a banner in Academy the locker room that said “Team Jesus.”
New word: souk = Arab market, baksheesh = tips or charitable giving.
“In Search of the Washington Novel”
A commentary on the lack of literary novels about Washington, D.C.. Hitche’s doesn’t deny that there are good novels about the capitol, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and Gore Vidal’s series with the exception of The Golden Age where Vidal sinks to Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories as his theme. He asks, “Can one imagine a Dickens without London or a Flaubert with out Paris?” and wonders where Washington is in the works of “Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Bellow.” He posits that it may be due to the separation of the United State’s cultural center from it’s political center when Hamilton agreed with Jefferson to move the capital from New York to Virginia as long as he could get his federal reserve bank established.
New learning: Best quote is about the infamous Bill Clinton cigar that was kept in evidence as part of the Impeachment proceedings. The Starr report calls out in a footnote that “smoking materials were forbidden in the executive mansion.” Was he hoping for conviction on a lesser charge?
New word: Parnassus = a mountain in Greece sacred to Apollo, the Corycian Nymphs, the Dorians and home to the muses. See: Marie Ponsot, “Drunk and Disorderly, Big Hair.” http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/ponsot/poem.html
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