“Let Them Eat Pork Rinds”

Hitchens’ commentary on the response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina as a part of the long social history of classes. There are many funny stories recounted in the essay like this English joke,” Two extremely rich men are sitting in companionable silence in their overstuffed armchairs in the upstairs window of the Carlton Club, in London. The silence is broken when the first man calls attention to the situation outside and says, ‘It’s raining.’ ‘Good,’ replies the second man without looking up from his newspaper. ‘It’ll wet the people.’ ”

…or the explanation of the term “beyond the salt” to refer to the lowly section of the table where the salt was not to be passed….or the Queen Mother’s (of England) comment, “I see no point at all in being por.”

He wraps the essay with this:

And then there came a day in New Orleans, a town named for a scion of French feudalism, when the saltwater rose up and didn’t just wet the people but drowned them, and nobody was above that salt except those who could fly over it and look down de haut en bas, while a lot of lowly people were suddenly well below it. Whatever is that distant rumble that I dimly hear?

New learning: Barbara Bush’s comments about the refugees in the Super Bowl during Hurricane Katrina, “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas…and so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.”

New word: tumbril = cart used to take prisoners to the guillotine in the French Revolution.

Tumbril, Hurricane Katrina Style:

Words’ Worth

Starting the last section!

“When the King Saved God”

Hitchens’ commentary on the many translations of the bible. He takes some time to show his support for the Tyndale/King James version for its thoughtful and impactful language. A good comparison he offers is from Tyndale (and read by Hitchens at his father’s funeral):

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. [Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians]

…vs. the “Contemporary English Version”:

Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.

…which Hitchens call “Pancake-flat.”

Throughout the essay, there is a strong undertone of Hitchens belief that all of this is completely man-made and not the ‘word of God” at all. He ends by saying as much,

“Its [Tyndale Bible] abandonment by the Church of England establishment, which hoped to refill its churches and ended up denuding them, is yet another demonstration that religion is man-made, with inky human fingerprints all over its supposedly inspired and unalterable texts.” 

Tyndale Bible:

New learning: Quote attributed (with little evidence) to the first female governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson in 1924 as her argument for why Spanish should not be used in Texas schools,  “If the King’s English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.”

New word: ensamples = 1611 English for “examples”

“W.G. Sebald: Requiem for Germany”

Hitchens’ review of On the Natural History of Destruction, by W.G. Sebald. Sebold’s book looks at the conundrum of Germans who understand that “obviously understood that their late Führer…brought this devastation on them” and the feeling that they were treated badly as well (Dresden fire bombing, rape of civilians by invading Soviet troops, etc.).

Dresden after the bombing:

Hitchens has some criticism of Sebald’s approach but ultimately concludes that they (Germans)  “…do not want their country to humiliate or murder others, and neither do they wish their country to be humiliated or destroyed…Germany suffered both those disgraces to the fullest possible extent, and Sebald registers that contradiction to the limit of his ability.”

New learning: Interesting irony, “Indeed, it is possible to imagine that if anti-Jewish paranoia had not deprived the Third Reich of so many gifted physicists, the unthinkable might have occurred.”

New word: extirpation = root out and destroy completely

“Just Give Peace a Chance?”

Hitchens’ review of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke. The title of the book is a reference to the smoke from the crematoriums of the Nazi death camps. To be a little lazy, here’s a quote that pretty much sums up Baker’s argument:

Follow Baker’s logic...and it becomes possible to imply that the war might actually have helped facilitate the Holocaust. This…would help make all participants in the Second World War into morally equivalent forces. And that in fact is Baker’s view, as is the view not just that all wars are essentially the same, but that they are also all essentially part of the same war. What we call the Second World War was only an extension of the long struggle for mastery between the various European powers, all of which were all the time also wreaking indiscriminate cruelty on colonial peoples.

Hitchens goes on to systematically and clearly debunk each of Bakers assertions. With a final frequently Hitchens comment about baker’s thesis, “This will not do.”

Great essay, definitely will not read the book.

General Franz Halder with Hitler in 1942. Halder was the German Chief of Staff but spent the last year of the war in Dachau (and several other camps) for being dis-loyal to Hitler. He used the term "Human Smoke" in his memoirs:

New Learning: In an open letter to the British people on July 3, 1940, Gandhi wrote: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

Hitchens rightly comments, “This is not the book’s only reminder of how fatuous the pacifist position can sound, or indeed can be.”

New word: none!...a first!

Missed yesterday (let's say in honor of May Day, given the theme of this section of essays), so here are two for today.

“Victor Klemperer: Survivor”

The essay is noted as a review of Victor Klemperer’s The Lesser Evil: Diaries 1945-1959 about his life in East Germany. It is also, by default, a review of the earlier two volume set I Will Bear Witness, a diary of Klemperer’s life from 1933-1945 as a Jew, converted to Protestantism and married to a Protestant. It sounds fascinating, particularly because you read along through his day-by-day discovery as things progress in war time Germany.

Hitchens calls it “…a nonfiction event that quite eclipsed the journals of Anne Frank,” and later “… a firsthand and intimate account by somebody who ‘survived’ both versions of ideological dictatorship at close quarters, and who was in an unusually strong position to take, and to compare, notes.”

Sounds very interesting. Adding to my “to read” list.

Klemperer's other book, a glossary of terminology of the Third Reich:

New learning: As Germany progressed through the establishment of restrictions on the Jewish population, they instituted a policy that Jews could not own pets. Jewish households had to euthanize their pets themselves or give them up to the government for extermination.

New phrase: un homme moyen sensuel = French for an average non-intellectual man (who, by the way, would be unlikely to know what un homme moyen sensuel means)

“A War Worth Fighting For”

Hitchens’ review of Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. Yes, that Pat Buchanan…the former Republican Presidential candidate. To start with Hitchens’ ending, he writes, “History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility [of the war] was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.”

He obviously doesn’t like the book. Here’s why, his summary of Pat’s arguments:

·      That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

·      Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

·      That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.

·      The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.

·      That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

·      That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

He goes on to say that Buchanan argues that the “…West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he destroyed the Soviet Union.” Really, Pat?

New learning: Douglas McArthur was said that all military defeats can be summarized in two words, “Too late.”

New word: Spenglerian = referring to Oswald Spengler, pre-WW II German historian best known for the book, The Decline of the West. You don’t run into that phrase often.