Nothing sacred

Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Christian Witkin/McClelland & Stewart)

The trouble with columnists, besides the fact that there are too damn many, is that after a period of great verve, most fall prey to boredom, complacency, solipsism and, finally, irrelevance. In short, they tire out. Christopher Hitchens, however, seems indefatigable; in fact, the Hitch has never been more vital.

Born in England and a resident of Washington, D.C., since 1981, Hitchens made his name in the ’80s with a political column in the left-leaning The Nation magazine, where he took repeated, relentless swipes at the Reagan administration. He supplemented his magazine missives with a series of erudite books on everything from Cyprus to Anglo-American relations. But his most seditious works were books outlining the misdemeanours of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and, most provocatively, nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa.

While Hitchens, 58, has long warned of the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, since 9/11, it has become his main cause. He has ripped into left-wingers like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore for arguing the U.S. had it coming. More importantly, Hitchens advocated the war in Iraq as necessary to removing a murderous dictator. This unequivocal stance led to his split with The Nation in 2002, and indeed, with many of his lefty sympathizers.

Hitchens’s columns in Vanity Fair and Slate are often belligerent. While critics view him as a born antagonist, what has always animated him to write is a strong distrust of convention — he has zero tolerance for cliché and ideological cant. That trait informs his latest book, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. With inimitable rancour and wit, Hitchens unpacks the Torah, the Bible and the Koran in an attempt to prove not only that they’re man-made texts, but also that they’re injurious to human freedom.

“Religion is the most important argument there’s ever been, because it’s about the meaning of life,” says Hitchens, rather serenely, in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in New York. “It’s much more necessary to understand this argument than anything else. It touches on all the other great matters of science and medicine and, indeed, literature, ethics and morality. Therefore, it’s the progenitor of very strong passions.”

Hitchens’s resistance to religion began when he was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Dartmoor, England. One day, his teacher informed his class that God made all the trees and grass green because that was the colour most restful to human eyes. “My little ankle-strap sandals curled with embarrassment for her,” Hitchens writes. “The eyes were adjusted to nature, not the other way around.” From this halcyon remembrance, Hitchens moves to the furor over The Satanic Verses (1989), the novel by his friend Salman Rushdie that explores the less savoury side of the Prophet Muhammad. The death warrant issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini was outrageous enough, but what appalled Hitchens was how many observers, pious or not, seemed to side with the ayatollah. The implication was that Rushdie had somehow asked for it. “It is impossible to imagine a greater affront to every value of free expression,” Hitchens writes.

Hitchens says we continue to be plagued by “religious bullying, whether it’s the attempt to murder cartoonists in tiny, democratic Denmark, or the way that the parties of God are destroying Iraqi society, or the attempt to teach nonsense in our schools under the guise of ‘intelligent design,’ or the belief in many churches that AIDS is bad but condoms are worse, or to retard research into stem cells in the name of God. Enough already with this.”

(McClelland & Stewart)

Hitchens concedes god is not Great is “the beneficiary of a coat-tail effect” in the current surge of atheist literature, which includes Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Hitchens claims he’s not an atheist, but in fact an “antitheist.”

“You could be an atheist and wish that the belief was true. You could; I know some people who do,” he says. “An antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who’s very relieved that there’s no evidence for this proposition.”

God is not Great is a fierce, brilliantly sustained argument filled with all manner of cutting asides — he refers to The Passion of the Christ as “a soap-opera film about the death of Jesus Christ … produced by an Australian fascist and ham actor named Mel Gibson.” That said, read enough Hitchens and certain rhetorical patterns emerge. Call it consistency or repetition, his work tends to circle back to the same gang of historical thinkers (including Freud, Thomas Jefferson, philosopher Bertrand Russell and his fave, George Orwell). As well, many of the book’s most illuminating anecdotes appear in Hitchens’s manifesto, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2002).

Nonetheless, it’s hard to think of a more entertaining political commentator. Whether in print, in sweltering live debates or as a habitual guest on news networks, Hitchens is at his best when he seems backed into a corner, which has been his position as part of the pro-war faction in the Iraq debate.

While he doesn’t have a high estimation of the sitting U.S. president and refutes claims that he himself has become a conservative, Hitchens also has little patience for liberal potshots. On Real Time with Bill Maher last year, Hitchens taunted Maher’s audience by saying that quips about Bush’s intelligence are “the joke that stupid people laugh at.”

“I wish there was a word — and I ought to make an effort to coin one — for someone who believes that American power should be used to overthrow psychopathic dictators. ‘Hawk’ obviously wouldn’t be it,” Hitchens says. “It is the most radical cause, to be in favour of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that I’ve ever been involved in, and it’s brought me up against the most reactionary forces I’ve ever had to fight.”

While sparring over Iraq occupies much of his time, Hitchens still pushes other buttons. He wrote a piece last year for Vanity Fair claiming that women aren’t funny. (His rationale: they don’t need to be. Humour is an evolutionary strategy developed by men to cosy up to women.) In a recent Slate column on the Virginia Tech massacre, Hitchens berated the press for its gratuitous coverage of what he callously calls a “non-event.”

“I don’t write until I’m absolutely sure of what I’m going to say, and that I’ve got enough conviction to get the first sentence,” Hitchens says. “Before the Virginia Tech thing went on to an intolerable, insufferable extent, I refused all offers to comment. ‘What do you think about it?’ I don’t; it isn’t designed to provoke thought. And in me, it doesn’t succeed in provoking that much emotion, other than an ordinary, decent sympathy.” Hitchens was affronted by the notion that America was united in grief. “What they’re not to do is to tell me I’m mourning as well. That is not true. That’s negation of journalism; they’ve no right to do that. Then I realized that I did have a column.”

Says Hitchens, “I never fake my convictions; I never pump up spurious indignation just because I’ve got a column to write. Unfortunately, I don’t have to; these days, it’s a target-rich environment. And very often, I find that what’s getting me going is cruelty or stupidity that’s faith-based.”

God is not Great is published by McClelland & Stewart and is in stores now.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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