Roger Cohen on Christopher Hitchens

Roger Cohen

New York Times

Writing for the New York Times in an article titled "The American Hitch" (December 19, 2011), Roger Cohen, like many others this week, remembered Christopher Hitchens for his thoughtfulness and generosity, though he admits that he didn't know the man well:

I did not know Hitchens well. The last time I saw him was at a boozy Brooklyn lunch hosted by my friends Gully Wells and Peter Foges, the couple he stayed with on coming to the United States in 1981. "You've got Scotch, haven't you?” he inquired, to which the reply was non-affirmative, a crisis overcome by a foray to the corner store for a bottle of Black Label, followed by a second expedition for the Perrier to accompany it.

"The best blended Scotch in the world," Hitchens murmured as he began the almost single-handed demolition of the bottle. He could be wrong -- even if he was always wrong with panache and for the right reasons -- but he was right about whisky.

Hitchens was right about a lot of things, and wrong about many others, but he was authentic, or seemed to be, for one never knows, but he had a special gift in common with Steve Jobs. The creative Mr. Jobs had the ability to make you feel, when buying an Apple product, that you were receiving the device directly from him, as though he had personally developed it expressly for you to have as a gift from him. Hitchens had that ability in his writings. You could read anything he'd written and feel that he was addressing you personally. I did, anyway, and I hazard to suggest that others felt the same.

And he took risks. Despite Alexander Cockburn's attempted take-down, to wit:

Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de' Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being.

Really? In what part of the world? Well, maybe in Europe (though less so year by year!), but certainly not anywhere among Muslims! Nor in the States, either. On that, Cohen pointedly observes:

Of course, he took on God, a dangerous occupation in the United States, declaring him not great and religion the product of a time when nobody "had the smallest idea what was going on."

Why was he against religion? His chosen title, God Is Not Great, implies that the Islamic conception of God, expressed in its chant, "Allahu Akbar"("God is Great"), was particularly on his mind, yet the book -- which I've not read -- deals with more than that, arguing against religion generally. But as for why he was against religion in general, I've read too little of Hitchens on that issue to know for sure, though Cohen explains a bit:

Like Einstein, he viewed ethics as "an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it," a position that sparked conflict with his journalist brother, Peter, who has argued that, "For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself."

Were I to side with brilliance in this family dispute, I'd be firmly on the side of Christopher, in company with Cohen:

I'm with the atheist Christopher against the believer Peter. It's precisely the vesting of morality in a nonhuman source that's dangerous because how then can you apply reason to temper the God-given absolutes that may lead to fanaticism?

I understand this position quite well because so many theists think the way that Christopher and Cohen suspect that they do. Too many theists follow reason up to a limit -- an ill-defined limit -- and somehow turn to 'faith' as a refuge from critical thought, a quasi-fundamentalist appeal to what they feel is the hard evidence of things fervently hoped for, and they presume to have direct insight into the mind of God, doubting not the consubstantiation of God's thoughts with their beliefs, recognizing no hermeneutical distinction between the two.

I could mention my freshman roommate who believed, concerning the Bible, that "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." Not every theist of that ilk is quite so bold as to phrase the issue like that, but many theists seem to think that way.

But if God is God, then he is rational. Otherwise, he is irrational, and thus not God. Faith must therefore be rational to approach God with security against fanaticism.

Otherwise, one is left with the fideistic view: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." What then, except to fight over the 'truth' against those who think or believe differently, for if reason cannot serve as arbiter, then what is left but force? I suppose there's always indifference, but that unbespoke suit hardly fits the form of fervent belief.

To the extent that Cohen and Hitchens appeal to reason, I'm with these two atheists, but I disagree if they think this means there are no absolutes . . .

Barack Obama: The Black Candidate?

Barack Obama

Conway, South Carolina

August 23, 2007

(Image from Wikipedia)

All this time, I'd been thinking of Obama as representing more of a postracial America.

But -- if I may slip into my Arkansawyer dialect for a moment -- I reckon some folks are electioneering to change that.

I suppose that this next tidbit, from columnist Alan R. Hunt, falls into the category of hearsay evidence, but it conforms to my impression of what lengths the two Clintons running again for president are willing to go to win:

Bill Clinton, his denials notwithstanding, has played the race card. On Saturday, commenting on Obama's South Carolina victory, he likened it to the primary victories by Jesse Jackson two decades ago; there are few parallels. Ron Fournier, the chief political reporter for the Associated Press, describes a top Clinton adviser as bragging that they'd made Obama "the black candidate.'' (Albert R. Hunt, "Clinton Paying a Price for Duplicity on Obama," Bloomberg News, January 27, 2008)

The hearsay comes from Fournier's anecdote, which you can get more directly from Fournier himself:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has won in South Carolina . . . . What she has won in South Carolina is the larger campaign to polarize voters around race and marginalize Obama (in the insidious words of one of her top advisers) as "The Black Candidate." (Ron Fournier, "On Deadline: Hillary wins race on race," Associated Press, January 25, 2008)

I'd like to know more about the details on this "top advisor" to Hillary Clinton who reportedly spoke about marginalizing Obama as "The Black Candidate," but since he's not being identified, then he must have been speaking off the record.

Actually, I don't think that the Clintons have succeeded in portraying Obama as the black candidate. Race is doubtless an issue, just as ethnic identity is an issue everywhere in the world, but Obama the candidate -- like Obama the person -- is more complex than that, as are his supporters.

Roger Cohen, who always has something intelligent and interesting to say, has written a recent column, "Obama's youth-driven movement," for the International Herald Tribune (January 27, 2008) and picked up on Obama's own words to argue that the Obama "is not about black versus white but about the past versus the future." Cohen writes of the many young white supporters who find Obama enormously appealing and who have made the campaign into a movement, which means that it is not so much directed from above as driven from below. Cohen thinks that Obama's ability to draw this kind of support means that his campaign is "beyond race."

I think that Cohen is largely correct, but the Clintons seem to believe that Obama is vulnerable on the racial issue. Like Hunt above, Cohen has noted Bill Clinton's remark about Jesse Jackson's earlier victories in South Carolina back when he campaigned for the Democratic nomination:

Certainly, Bill Clinton lost no opportunity to inject race, alluding to Jesse Jackson's victories here in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries, as if to minimize the significance of Obama's win and clothe him in Jackson's marginal mantle. Candidates, he said earlier, were getting votes "because of their race or gender," suggesting black-versus-white might be his wife's undoing [in South Carolina]. (Cohen, "Obama's youth-driven movement")

Bill is nothing if not astute, and Hillary did pick up gender support in New Hampshire when she revealed a softer side. She even impressed me by that, especially because she didn't break down but maintained an ability to speak articulately despite her emotions.

But her campaign in South Carolina has returned our attention to her hard face, the face that not many people, women included, seem to like. I think that Hillary's gender support is weak, and unlike Obama's campaign, her own campaign is more narrowly based and directed entirely top-down. It's no movement.

Here's my opinion on what has happened. By trying to 'blacken' Obama, the Clinton have not merely increased his support among black voters without damaging his support among non-black voters, they've made themselves look cynical and calculating about the one issue that most of us had thought that they truly cared about, their civil rights legacy.

Barack Obama recently spoke in Martin Luther King's old Atlanta church, and an African-American friend of mine sent me a link to the video, which she had seen on the plezWorld blog. At the time, I was inundated by other responsibilities and so put off watching the video, which I knew would take some 20 minutes of my time, but I finally clicked the link two days ago to watch Obama give his speech:

I finally had some time to check the link and watch Obama give his speech (though the video froze halfway through, so I had to read the more emotive part near the end).

It was interesting to listen and compare him to King, whose rhetorical voice I can still hear from my childhood after all these years.

Where King was hot, Obama is cool, and his appeal is more to our minds than to our hearts, which is not to say that he does not stir, for he can, but more to note the contrast.

I like Obama even though I suspect that his politics is a bit more to the left than I'm comfortable with, and I've come to like him more lately as I like the Clintons less. Being from Arkansas, I'd always had an instinctive comfort with [Bill] Clinton even while I recognized him as a slippery rascal. A rascal, certainly, but our Arkansan rascal.

But the Clintons are so intent on getting elected that they've turned their identity politics of division against their own civil-rights legacy! The one thing that Bill Clinton seemed truly to care about, that legacy, he's been willing to jeopardize in the hopes of casting Barack Obama as unelectable due to the color of his skin. And in recognizing that Obama would win and probably win big in South Carolina, Bill Clinton pushed the line that Obama would only do so because blacks were going to be voting overwhelmingly for Obama as a black candidate . . . implying that whites would not support him.

I don't think that it worked because young white voters ignored the Clinton-speak as irrelevant.

I had considered blogging about this issue, but the Clintons are slippery enough in their political statements to maintain plausible deniability, and I hate to play j'accuse unless I've got the smoking gun.

I think that Obama will get the Democratic nomination and may very well win the election, depending upon whom the Republicans nominate. John McCain would be a strong contender, but the other Republicans don't look good next to Obama.

But a campaign can wither like a whim, and there's still a lot of time...

The upshot of all this is not that I'm planning to vote for Obama. I don't yet know who I'd be willing to cast my vote for. To be frank, I'll likely never announce that on this blog -- and I usually regret my vote later, anyway. I'll only say that foreign policy plays a big role in my political thinking, probably because I live overseas.

The upshot, rather, is that the Clintons have weakened their campaign and strengthened Obama's, doubtless much to their chagrin.

Not that I would entirely write off Bill Clinton when he's campaigning, but he's no longer the 'comeback kid,' for he's lost a lot of his innocent rogue's charm and reminds me less of the Kennedy that he always wanted to be and more of Faubus that he once rejected...