RosieBell

Slippery Slyboots

This is an addition to Jim Denham's excellent post over at Shiraz Socialist.

Why doesn't Terry Eagleton come out as a Catholic?  It's not like coming out as a Jehovah's Witness or a Scientologist or even a Mormon. Roman Catholicism is an ancient religion which has spread throughout the world, and so is not seen as weird or cultish.   Also, a literary critic like Eagleton could consider the twentieth century writers in English who were Catholics – Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark just for starters.  It's a creditable list of talents.  And although Catholics have historically been in the majority in Western Europe – and an oppressive majority at that – in Britain post Reformation they were a minority and often persecuted.  So he would have all the pleasures of being anti-establishment, and none of the dangers of earlier ages, which should satisfy a revolutionary spirit like his.

When I came across his piece ridiculing Alain de Botton's ideas of a genteel atheism I was firmly on Eagleton's side. It is a repulsive idea, that the elite should promote religion because it's good for the masses. Honest Christians don't think like that. C S Lewis frequently expressed his disgust at the idea that an educated caste of priests would keep one set of beliefs for themselves and another for their flock.  Lewis himself went the whole supernatural hog.

I hate being on Eagleton's side, as he's a slippery slyboots, so like Jim I pounced on this paragraph:-

Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

As Jim, and de Botton himself pointed out, this really is a hint at the sympathies of the writer and where his beliefs are heading.  Imagine a sentence like this:-

The late Osama Bin Laden, who some people think is now enjoying 72 virgins. . .

The "some people" aren't the credulous or superstitious that are being ridiculed. Though Eagleton isn't straight enough to say, "I believe in an afterlife where souls are judged" - he has to do the jokey wiggle that shimmers through his writing and makes it both dishonest and irritating- you can guess he'd like there to be such a place for his adversaries to admit how very wrong their wrongness was.

(As an aside, Eagleton obliquely and George Galloway openly do show relish at the thought Hitchens may be burning in hell for eternity.  I don't like either of them, but if I wouldn't them to suffer that fate for– not more than a week, anyway. )

The other Eagleton-trope in that quoted paragraph is:- Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

Shame we're still not united by an enforced Christendom complete with burnings of heretics or a cult of the Great Leader Stalin.   Also, is this being divided and contentious a distinction of "liberal-capitalist societies"?   Ancient Rome, say, could be very divided and contentious, including a plethora of religions and peoples, but it kept itself together for quite a long time with an idea of Roman citizenship, which I suppose can be called "communitarian".   But "liberal-capitalist" would not describe it in the slightest.

However this is typical Eagleton rhetoric.  Do a diatribe against atheism or what have you and then garnish it with something vaguely Marxist sounding, so it appears as weighty analysis and not a run of the mill critique. You can see it here in after a incoherent and dodgy piece about multi-culturalism (we're all the same really and isn't that great! no we're not, and isn't that great!!) 

Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies.

That is a dubious statement, but it sounds like political analysis so gives more gravity to what could be instead mere cultural observation.

I don't know why Eagleton won't come clean vis-a-vis  his own Catholicism.  Is it because among the British academics and intellectuals who are his peers atheism and liberalism are the norm and religion a little backward (he would be better off in the USA)? Is it because, for all the talk of revolutionary priests "and the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice", it's associated with social conservatism?  Does he fear seeming less like the impartial analyst and more the partisan on religious matters?   Perhaps he doesn't really know himself - but if religion is attacked he reacts to the "twitch upon the thread"  and arises, thrashing and gasping. 

Burning Issues

Patrick Hayes over at Spiked (12th April) had a closer look at that Observer story:-

Something very odd happened at the weekend. A 40-year-old member of the far-right British National Party (BNP) was arrested for burning a copy of the Koran in his own back garden. Yes, it is apparently now a crime to express your disdain for a certain religious faith in the privacy of your own home. But that’s not the end of it. What makes this case especially odd is that the man in question - Sion Owens - was reported to the police by a broadsheet newspaper that claims to be liberal: the Observer. Since when has it been the job of the respectable, left-leaning press to grass people up to the cops for alleged speech crimes?

It’s worth reading the whole article.  Henry Porter, the freedom of speech campaigner who writes for the Observer, had this to say:-

On the face of it, though, it would seem a doubtful decision because handing over the video, which appears to have been made for private use and was in a sense a private expression of this individual’s views, is likely to inflame feelings more than if the matter was simply ignored. That is the practical aspect.
….

‘If there is evidence that the individual was about to publish the video, then I think there is perhaps cause for police action because of what happened a few days ago in Afghanistan where several people lost their lives. It is a delicate issue and by no means clear cut. However, it is the case that prohibition of an act, whether in public or private, often makes that act more likely to occur. That is why I am against the ban on the burqa in France.’

Spiked is predictably robust on this matter:-

Unlike Porter, I believe that Sion Owens should also have had the freedom to release the film into the public domain, if he so chose. Freedom of speech, the cornerstone of all our freedoms, is too often compromised on the grounds that people might be harmed as a result of it. But people should be trusted to make up their own minds about whether to act upon footage of some idiot burning the Koran, rather than prevented by the state from seeing such footage in case it drives them crazy. To censor is to treat the public as a pogrom-in-waiting, whose eyes must be protected from offensive words and imagery. It is an updated, perhaps slightly more PC version of the same patronising assumptions that were exposed in the Lady Chatterley Trial: ‘Would you let your wife or servant read it?’ The question some are implicitly asking in relation to the BNP Koran video is: ‘Would you let the white working classes watch it?’ or ‘Would you let angry Muslims watch it?’. Perhaps that is what Townsend was getting at when he said the video could have ‘serious violent repercussions’.

Spiked does love leaping on liberals for their patronising assumptions about the violent tendencies of the canaille.  But in this case it’s a reasonable assumption after the reaction to Terry Jones’s burning of the Qu’ran.   These incidents are opportunities that are ramped up by religious and state leaders and violence and deaths are the result.

Arresting people though for acts which if publicised are likely to cause violence and harm somewhere in the world is untenable.  There’s nothing much we can do about it.  The lynch mobs led by the witch denouncers are going to have their days of rampage in the global village. 

McLuhan coined the phrase “global village” to describe the hyper-networked world that was already taking shape. He had no illusions, though, about the nobility of village life. Our newly TV-, telephone-, and radio-enwebbed multiverse could just as easily be ruled by “panic terrors … befitting a world of tribal drums” as by any bright pastoral harmony. And so it was and is.

The latest news I could find about the case against the Qu’ran burner was (12th April):-

Sion Owens, aged 41, was charged with a public order offence on Saturday.

When he appeared at Swansea Magistrates Court the Crown Prosecution Service said it was withdrawing the case against him.

But it said that investigations would continue and that "almost certainly other proceedings will ensue."

And of course I would never have googled this guy if the Observer hadn’t handed his video of the book burning to the police.

More Vatican PR

It’s a really good idea if you’re making a state visit that you say something nice about the country that is your host.  When you go to China, you praise their ancient civilisation and their invention of all sorts of things like paper and porcelain; when you go to France you eulogise their contribution to philosophy, the arts and cuisine; when you go to Britain, you congratulate them on their fight against Nazis.  That goes down a treat, especially when they’re commemorating the Battle of Britain seventy years ago end to end on the BBC.  You do this especially if one of you team has recently called the place “third world”  (a reasonable if ill-judged statement about some of the facilities eg the railways, nasty if applied to the population).

Then, with your hearers duly loved up, you can smuggle in a warning that atheism leads to Nazism.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives [as did a lot of godless Commies]. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”.  [What’s more reductive than regarding this world as only a preparation for the (non-existent) next?  I‘ll give him public virtue, but excluding God and religion leads to Nazism?  Bugger that.]

Now, some people could take exception to this on the grounds that when it comes to the chief characteristics of Nazism, that is, genocide and gross anti-semitism, Roman Catholics have had a good swing at the bat.  Those conquistadors were very devout, weren’t they?  .  As for anti-semitism. . . And others spring to mind.  The Nazis burned books, the Church indexes them.  The Nazis murdered dissenters to their creed, as did the Church ("heresy" they call it). However, I wouldn’t assume that the four million Catholics in the British population were heading towards Nazism. 

For an excellent short piece on Nazism, Christianity and religion in general read this over at Obscene Desserts.  It’s one he prepared earlier for another German bishop. Evidently this atheism-leads-to-Nazism is a meme that German clerics are taught these days.

it is necessary when considering Bishop Mixa's comments linking 'aggressive atheism' to Nazism to differentiate two things: the Party's view toward religion and the views of religious people toward the Party.

While there is plenty of evidence in the former case of a hostility to Christianity among some party leaders, their alternative was hardly atheism but a mix of Nordic mysticism and esoteric paganism.

However, in the latter case, it is equally clear that the Nazis' road to power was paved by the best wishes of a significant number of observantly religious people who--regardless of what Himmler or Goebbels or Rosenberg might have had planned--saw no contradiction between their belief in a Christian God and their support for the regime.

Atheism, of course, is no more a guarantee of morality than is theism. But what the current 'aggressive atheism'--in the words of a press release put out by the diocese of Augsburg--has to do with the history of Nazism is a mystery to me.

It’s amazing the Pope gets away with this.  I don’t know what proportion of the British population is atheist - my guess is that most are lapsed Christians or lazy agnostics - but there are probably more atheists than Methodists (a quarter million) and Hindus (half a million) combined.  If the Pope had said that Methodism or Hiinduism could lead you to Nazism, he would be taken as vilely insulting a minority.  In fact he could be prosecuted under our ridiculous religious hatred laws.

There have been distinguished British atheists.  Dead ones - George Eliot and George Orwell, two of our most considerable literary figures and great moralists.  Living ones - Richard Dawkins (okay, he‘s not much loved) and David Attenborough, a national treasure.  They are /were all of them rational and humane - that is, as far from Nazism as any human being can be.

People do the logic:-

Atheism leads to Nazism,

David Attenborough is an atheist

Therefore David Attenborough is a Nazi.

Think of the lovely old gentleman delighting in any form of life, whether it’s dophlins swimming or bats excreting.  Does he look like a Nazi?  (Mind you, there was a big nature loving streak in the Nazis. . .)

No Popery

Now Heathrow is a hellhole,
It cannot be denied.

So when I caught on the news that Cardinal Walter Kasper had said arriving in Britain was like landing in a “third world country” I thought that’s what he meant.  Compared to the Schipol airport in Amsterdam, it is a dingy and slovenly cattle pen, which travellers I know will do anything to avoid.  In fact some airports in the third world are a lot pleasanter because at least you are looking at sunshine and tropical trees rather than a general greyness.

However it seems it wasn’t the queues and lack of information that the Cardinal was talking about, but the Asians and blacks who work there, not just cleaning floors but stamping your passport or heading security teams.  Pray for PR, my brother.

He was also groaning about the “aggressive atheism” of this country.  He’s supposed to be the expert on the Church of England.   “Indifferent agnosticism” covers most of us, I would have thought.

The Pope was in Edinburgh today and his motorcade passed my office.  We all downed tools and gawped from the windows.  I don’t know what proportion of my firm would be a) practising Christians; b) Roman Catholics but I would think very few.  It was the celebrity and splash and the sense it was an historic event that got us all moving, including the high ups.  However, except for the Pope mobile it wasn’t much to look at - just a pack of police on motorbikes in front and behind, with a few minibus affairs in between.  Most of us wondered that a guy as old as that could stand for so long.  Some of the streets had supposedly been repaved, so he wouldn’t be shaken over by potholes.   I wish he had toured every corrugated and bumpy surface of the city, which are in a dire state at the moment, all the money having been spent on trams.

The Pope has been groaning about the secularism of this country and Europe in general.   Ungrateful old bugger.  If secularism hadn’t happened, ultra-Protestant Edinburgh would be rioting today with literal No Popery crowds.  Jenny Geddes would be leading the charge shouting, "Dare ye say the Mass in ma lug ye son of the whure of Babylon.”

When you make your way through Arrivals at the nice little Edinburgh airport a huge notice greets you:- "The City of the Enlightenment".  If I'd been in charge of the route I would have dropped the pothole idea and brushed him up close by the giant statues of Adam Smith and David Hume.

Hitchens Still Lives

Every Monday I check Slate, and with relief see that Christopher Hitchens has turned out another 1,000 words. After the news of his cancer it's reassuring to see that he's still alive and still writing even though his Slate pieces don't show him at his best.  They are too short, his writing is simplified and he doesn't relax into the literary allusions and the general amplitude and richness that distinguish his style. 

But here he is, on excellent form with a piece of travel writing describing his journey “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady“.  He’s a good travel writer closely observing the unfamiliar scenery and customs, and sending back vivid descriptions. 

I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Read the lot.  His senses are as alert as ever and his humour is full on and stoic.  There’s an interview here as well.

Hitchens: There are people who are praying for me to suffer and die.  They have lavish websites relishing my. . .  Then there are people much more numerous and nicer who are praying that either I get better or that I redeem my self, that I make my peace with the almighty, that my soul gets saved even if my wretched carcass does not..  Some pray for both.  ..

Interviewer: Do you tell people not to do it for you?

Hitchens: No, I say if it makes you feel better then you have my blessing.

It's not as bad as hearing that a friend or family member is seriously ill, but I really do want to howl because we are almost certainly going to be losing that individual voice in a short time. It’s painful to see pictures of him made bald by chemotherapy,  If I thought prayer, fasting and abstaining from drink would help him, I'd certainly be willing to make my contribution.  However, I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to do that. . .

Some of his religious enemies are openly rejoicing at his suffering and likely death, seeing it as his deserts, some hypocritical shits are sanctimoniously offering to pray because it makes them look good (see Shuggy‘s take on this), while some pleasant souls with genuine kindness are praying for his health and spiritual welfare.   Hichens receives this with grace, which most atheists would of course.  We would assume that someone was wishing us well, in the same spirit that we thank friends who say they will cross their fingers for us when we go for a job interview and don't snap "Never mind your superstitious nonsense".

However, this is too much for the logorrhoeac freak at HitchBitch who is taking great umbrage at what he thinks is hypocrisy.   Reading that hang out of giggling nihilists brings on as much nausea as chemotherapy ever did, without the curative powers.

Love, Subject and Object

My bête noire, Eagleton here reviews a book about Cardinal Newman. His review is a lively piece of work, and well-informed about the Victorian milieu.  Eagleton, when not writing vapour, not making little asides about modern politics and not trying to be funny (aaargh), is worth reading.  He has to get his dig in though:-

Militant atheists today regard religious faith as a question of subscribing to certain propositions about the world. Newman countered this theological ignorance, pervasive in his own time too, with the Romantic claim (and this from one of the towering intellects of the Victorian age) that ‘man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal … It is the concrete being that reasons.’ It is the imagination, he holds, which is primary in matters of faith. Yet this passionate subjectivity was never whimsical subjectivism. How could it be, in a Catholic thinker for whom faith and truth were communal and institutional rather than a matter of private intuition? Newman, like Kierkegaard, recognised that religious faith is a kind of love, and like love engages intellect, emotion, experience and imagination together. There is a ‘notional’ kind of knowledge, Newman argues in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, by which he means a knowledge of abstract ideas, and there is ‘real’ assent, which involves one’s whole personality.

Yes, it's certainly true that love commands close and sustained attention, but love has to have an object.  You have to love something, whether a person, a country, a movement, music, literature, physics or football.  If religious faith is a kind of love, what is the object of that love?

Also, other “towering intellects” of Newman’s age eg George Eliot, were atheists.

He believed that pursuing any branch of knowledge for its own sake was a religious activity, since the whole of Nature was God’s creation. In The Idea of a University, he speaks up for an ‘intercommunion’ of all the principal academic disciplines and for disinterested scholarly inquiry. The task of a university is to foster intellectual culture for its own sake, which means that it can be the tool of neither church nor state. His book needs to be placed in the hands of the vandals, philistines and soulless bureaucrats who are currently destroying our places of higher learning.

I can go with this principle behind a university, and as to what’s destroying them everyone I know or read who works in a university agrees with Eagleton. Over every street, park and beach of our society the backed up sewer of marketing and Murdoch spreads its stinking muck .

Reclaim the streets

I saw this comment to an article in the New Statesman, which gives evidence for my theory that the way to get Muslim women to stop wearing burqas is to encourage them to cycle.

I am also a Muslim woman from Pakistan who lives in the ultra Muslim orthodox area of Bow and Mile End in London. I have lived in London for around ten years and this is my first experience of living in a majority Muslim area as I lived in Clapham before. The problem I personally find with these radical talibanised Muslims is that they don’t seem to approve of me going around on my cycle and not adhering to their code by covering myself up. I get all sorts of harassment by the "orthodox" Muslim men even though I am not dressed like a prostitute but I might as well be one in their eyes as I am not covered up from head to toe. But for some reason I just have this feeling that even if I was dressed the way they think is right, they would still find a problem with me because I am a woman. The thing that makes me so angry is their confidence, this being England and not a Muslim country, thank God!

The Muslim men in Mile End have the cheek to spit at me when I am cycling past them on my way back from work if I by mistake just glance at them because either they think I'm making a pass at them, or they feel so degraded because a woman has just glanced at them. But the thing is they are all the same. They are the same in Pakistan and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and even in England!!! So even though it is a bit of a touchy subject, I feel I need to say something as I left that country to escape this kind of constant sexual persecution which is worse than racism as that really hits the roots of your identity.

[Yeah, sister, we’ve all been there.  Sexual persecution takes different forms - groping, comments shouted at you as you go about minding your own business. If you’re a cyclist and a woman you will have to put up with a lot of shit, and shake with impotent rage.   You, poor thing, just get an extra helping of religious shit on top of it.  There are some men who can‘t accept a woman as a fellow citizen, and the righteous and the pure are the worst of all.  They are bullies who regard themselves as having a God-given right to be bullies.  They'd really like to stone you.  "Women," said Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, "have no idea how men hate them."  Now that's not all men, or most men, but it's enough men to make life dangerous and difficult for women. Give that kind of man a holy pretext and see how creative his hatred will become.]

And what about the Muslim women who are covered up? They seem to walk around extremely confidently in Mile End. They don’t seem to need all that burqa /hijab/ niqab because they seem to be able to defend themselves quite well without it. But the problem is that these women are in with the men on this. They are as radical and fundamentalist as the men - they protect their oppressors and wont let anyone question them or even let a woman fight for her rights as long as they are around to say how it is a symbol of their freedom! [Yeah, there were horrible smug cows who opposed women's suffrage, talking about women's place and pure influence and such shit.]  It infuriates me everyday. If they behaved like another minority which happened to be quite conservative and religious, it would be okay. But these people are aggressive, uneducated, ignorant and complete bigots and they have a terrible sense of fashion. [I bet they do.]  I could say a lot more but this argument is just going to start sounding weak (not to me though). Just wondering if there is any kind of support group I can go to which is not as radical as the other side? I cant go to the police just because Muslim men are spitting at me and calling me names everyday, can I? And believe me I dress quite conservative as it is.

[I do wish this woman could find a group of woman cyclists to pedal along with her shouting “Reclaim the streets!” against harassment as feminists used to go about shouting “reclaim the night”.]
 

Partially Answered Prayer

My prayer has evidently worked to a degree.  Hitchens had a piece in Slate today. 

The piece in The Observer pays more interest in Hitchens’s psychology than he has ever been bothered about (Hitchens is not introspective):-

A common conclusion, and one even reached by his wife, Carol Blue, is that it all stems from his postwar upbringing. His father was a commander in the Royal Navy who had a "good war", and the suggestion is that living through a period of extended peacetime in the west, Hitchens felt he had failed to test himself as his father had.

In a recent interview, Hitchens appeared to lend some credence to this judgment. "One of the things I've realised, writing the book [Hitch 22]," he said, "is that it has to be true." Whatever their provenance, physical and moral courage are qualities that Hitchens has never lacked. Nor is he likely to be in want of them now.

He’s have hard words to say about “credence” when The Observer columnist meant “credibility”. 

There’s a wonderful mixed metaphor in the comments from zoetroped:-

Love him or hate him, what a writer, and at least he has the balls not to rest on the cushion of his laurels.

Hitchens is suffering from oesophageal, not testicular, cancer, zoetroped.  You’ve got it quite the wrong way round.

A piece here about Christians regarding this illness as divine retribution:-

Naturally it isn't easy for Christians to come straight out and say "serves you right". Virtually all of them can see that might make God look a bit small-minded. The posting on a blog called Associates for Biblical Research is fairly typical of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone adopted by most. "It is not our place as Christians to say the specific reasons why Mr Hitchens has contracted this disease", writes Henry B Smith Jr. "We only know that God often uses illness as a means to bring people to repentance and faith. We can only hope Mr Hitchens responds."

I can imagine the form Hitchens’s response will take, should he read that kind of thing.  He can still operate a keyboard, so at least two of his fingers must be working.

A prayer for Hitchens

I read somewhere that Paul Foot, an atheist, used to get shirty with people who told him they had  prayed for him when he was ill.  Most of us wouldn’t be so ungracious if our religious friends and colleagues performed a ritual for us in our hour of need, even if they might as well have gone to the pub and played darts for all the good it would do us.  We would appreciate the thought and concern behind the action. 

If I thought praying would help cure Christopher Hitchens’s cancer of the oesophagus I would be in the church now, of course.  I want the guy to live for purely selfish reasons, that is, because I love reading him.  He’s only sixty-one and we should get another ten years or so of writing out of him.  Two of my favourite writers, Jane Austen and George Orwell, both died far too young - Austen at forty-one, when she was really getting into her stride as a novelist, Orwell at forty-six when he was starting to earn good money from Nineteen Eighty-Four.  It’s especially galling that Jane Austen’s brothers and sister lived to their seventies and eighties. The length of lifespan should have been more equably managed in the Austen family, with the rest of her siblings sharing out a couple of years apiece to her, without much inconvenience.

There are others who believe in the power of prayer but are in a quandary about it eg Christina Odone:-

I would like to get on my knees and say the “Our Father” for someone for whom I have a sneaking admiration. But is it right to pray for someone who claims to find prayer hateful?

The short answer to that is if you thought your prayers would work, of course it’s right, just as it’s right for a doctor to give someone medicine even though they don’t like the taste or amputate their gangrenous leg against their objections.  However, evidently Odone’s view of prayer is that it's something you do to make yourself feel good, rather than for any results it brings to the one you're praying for.  (For further takes on Odone’s views see here and here.) 

I’ve been leafing through Hitchens’s collections of essays, For the Sake of Argument, Love, Poverty & War and Unacknowledged Legislation to find a piece that would encapsulate his brilliance.  But I don’t find Hitchens very quotable, not like Orwell, say.  He himself though is deft with the quotation and illuminating with the allusion.  Hitchens says as a riposte to those who accuse him of being a drunk that he turns out 1000 publishable words a day.  He evidently loves to write and what you get from his work is gusto and enjoyment.  He describes James Joyce:-

His universe of words was a torrent of puns, palindromes, parallels, parodies and plagiarisms (with a good deal of Parnell stirred into the alliteration).  Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is “naïve” spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of “bonsai”. . Joyce could do that at an infinitely higher standard of multiple entendre, drawing on several languages, for pages on end, so that - depending on your level of awareness, and your capacity to spot new allusions and analogies - you never reopen the same book of his, or even the same chapter, without realizing that you are holding a new text in your hands and haven’t really read it before.

Hitchens can put the boot in when it’s deserved, very amusingly, but his great strength is as an appreciative critic.  “Marvellous” is one of his favourite adjectives, and so is “finely written”. He is good at entering into another writer’s mind and presenting their world view.  Here he is on Mencken:-

Mencken did take the viewpoint of ‘natural selection’ precisely because it validated his own views of Nietzsche and the pitiless battle for mastery. . . It is thus possible to derive all of his finest and most memorable polemics - against the First World War, against Christian fundamentalism, against the Anglophile WASP aristocracy, and against the backwardness and misery of the Dixie states - from an essentially vile and infirm premise that he adopted from the outset.  He opposed the First World War because he thought Wilhemine Germany to be the embodiment of Nietzschean strength and virtue.  He opposed the Christian fundamentalists because they made it easier for him to attack religion itself - the source of all sickly and irrelevant feelings of charity.  Dislike for the Anglophiles and WASPs was a natural corollary for a man who believed in Teutonism, while contempt for the states of the old Confederacy was a merely pleasurable corollary of that, because it offered up the Anglo-Saxon white trash at their trashiest and their Christianity in its most maudlin and twisted form.  No wonder, then ,that in his ill-tempered and misanthropic shape, he has been adopted as a premature foe of ‘PC” by the rancorous crowd of minor swells who put out the American Spectator. . . . . .

But any reductionist analysis of Mencken runs the risk of ignoring a fine mind that engaged itself in some high duties. . . Mencken is fascinating because he often transcended what he freely called his ‘prejudices’.  . (From "Critic of the Booboisie", Unacknowledged Legislation.)

A good literary critic knows the world as well as books and that dig at the libertarian tendency is typical of Hitchens, who likes to view the dead mingling with the living.

Hitchen is sometimes wrong-headed and partisan and the short pieces he has been producing for Slate recently are not his best work but he is irreplaceable. 

So if I was of the praying persuasion here’s my prayer for Hitchens:-

May Christopher Hitchens respond to treatment and recover.  May his doctors be competent and his medical insurance (since he lives in the USA) cover all the costs of state of the art procedures.  May his sanctimonious enemies be confounded.  May he get well and return to writing and lecturing.  May I see him at an Edinburgh Book Festival, have a drink with him and pour a pint over his lap for that idiotic article he wrote about how women are rubbish at being funny.

Amen.

Burqas and Bicycles

A French Muslim woman has been fined for wearing a burka at the wheel of her car – weeks before the proposed introduction of a total ban on the full-body veil.

The 31-year-old was stopped by two policemen in Nantes in western France earlier this month as she drove wearing a burka, or niqab, covering all but her eyes. She was given a €22 (£19) fine for "driving in uncomfortable conditions", because her vision was allegedly reduced. .

I don’t agree with banning the burqa on the usual liberal grounds that people can wear what the hell they like, but I think the woman instead of being fined should have done community service as a cycle courier.  She would have ditched the full-bodied curtain soon enough.  I mean, can you imagine cycling dressed like this:-

Cycling was emancipating for women.  It was easier to keep a cycle than a horse and it meant a woman could travel alone quite cheaply, or join in with a gang of other cyclists.  It freed her. Victorian clothes were nearly as bad as burqas, which at least don’t constrict you in whalebone, so women cycling lead to rational dress.-

So I would encourage cycling among the women from conservative Muslim backgrounds.  They'll chuck those vision-stopping, spoke-grabbing garments and move into  lyrcra and safety gear.  And if their reason for wearing the burqa is to thwart male lust, nothing is as unalluring as a bicycle helmet and a day glo yellow jacket.