The Four Horseman – Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, Harris [2007]

Selection of Quotes from the Linguistic Genius of Christopher Hitchens

On the importance of reaching agreement

I’m not looking for consensus, baby, I’m just not in the mood.

On the Church of England

It not only calls itself a flock, it looks very sheep-like.

On Mother Teresa

I would describe Mother Teresa as a fraud, a fanatic and a fundamentalist.

Everything everybody thinks they know about her is false. Not just most of the things; all the things. It must be the single most successful emotional con-job of the 20th century. She was corrupt, nasty, cynical and cruel.

I would say it was a certainty that millions of people died because of her work and millions more were made poorer, stupider, more sick, more diseased, more fearful and more ignorant.

When Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, few people had the poor taste to ask what she had ever done, or even claimed to do for the cause of peace.

What’s motherly about her by the way? Hideous virgin and fraud and fanatic and fundamentalist. Shrivelled old bat. As far from the nurture of motherhood as a woman could decently get!

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.

On which side bears the burden of evidence

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

On fairness of the ad hominem argument

A man once accused me of trying to assassinate his character. I said, “No, your character committed suicide a long time ago”.

On the intrinsic value of religious debate

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

On the death of controversial American televangelist, Jerry Falwell

I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.

The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing. That you can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and to truth in this country, if you’ll just yourself called ‘reverend’.”

He woke up every morning, pinching his chubby little flanks, thinking ‘I’ve got away with it again’.

From his wobbly base of opportunist fund raising and degree-mill money-spinning in Lynchburg, Va., he set out to puddle his sausage-sized fingers into the intimate arrangements of people who had done no harm.

If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.

On religious faith as a guide to morality

My mother’s Jewish ancestors are told that until they got to Sinai, they’d been dragging themselves around the desert under the impression that adultery, murder, theft and perjury were all fine, and got to Mount Sinai only to be told it’s not kosher after all.

The Hitchens Challenge on whether there is a divine source to human morality

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever. I am still waiting for a response to this. It carries an incidental corollary: think of a wicked action or statement that derived directly from religious faith, and you know what? There is no tongue-tied silence at THAT point. Everybody can instantly think of an example.

On the Bishop of Carlisle’s remarks that the 2007 floods in England were divine punishment for society’s acceptance of homosexuality

If there was a connection between metrology and morality, and religion has very often argued that there is, I don’t see why the floods hit northern Yorkshire. I can think of some parts of London where they would have done a lot more good.

On his need for a soapbox

It’s the old demagogue in me. I need the pulpit. I need the podium. And if I can’t be erect, then at least I can be upright.

On the Church’s co-operation with Fascism throughout the 1930s and 40s

Up to 50% of the Waffen-SS were confessing Catholics; none of them was ever excommunicated, even threatened with it, for taking part in the Final Solution. But Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated. For… marrying a Protestant! You see, we do have our standards!

On Dubya’s contribution to the evolution –v- creationism/ intelligent design debate to “teach the argument” to school children

There isn’t an argument. You don’t hear people saying, ‘Well children, chemistry class is over and then we’ll have a break and then there’ll be the alchemy period.’ ‘After we’ve done our astronomy, darlings, it’ll be the astrology class.’ You don’t get that and it would be ludicrous and hateful if it were. But under the cover of religion, there is no stupidity that can’t be advocated. But if that’s going to be the case and we’re going to teach the argument: then any church that gets a tax break or any church that gets any subsidy from the Faith Based Initiative, has to teach Darwin in Sunday school. Is the President aware of this implication? I take leave to doubt it.

On incitement to religious hatred law

Somebody said that anti-Semitism and Kristallnacht in Germany was the result of ten years of Jew bating. Ten years?! You must be joking! It’s the result of 2,000 years of Christianity, based on one verse of one chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which led to a pogrom after every Easter sermon every year for hundreds of years. Because it claims that the Jews demanded the blood of Christ be on the heads of themselves and all their children to the remotest generation.

On the human condition

Our problem is this: our prefrontal lobes are too small. And our adrenaline glands are too big. And our thumb/ finger opposition isn’t all that it might be. And we’re afraid of the dark, and we’re afraid to die, and we believe in the truths of holy books that are so stupid and so fabricated that a child can – and all children do, as you can tell by their questions – see through them.

On the Koran

It makes quite large claims for itself, doesn’t it? It says it’s the final revelation. It says that god spoke to one illiterate businessman in the Arabian peninsula three times through an archangel, and the resulting material – which as you can see when you read it – is largely plagiarised from the Old and the New Testament. Almost all of it actually plagurised, ineptly – from the Old and the New Testament – is to be accepted as a divine revelation and as the final and unalterable one and those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle, infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims.

Well I tell you what, I don’t think Mohammad ever heard those voices. I don’t believe it. And the likelihood that I’m right, as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn’t read, had bits of the Old and the New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct.

On the Bible

Look anywhere you like in the world for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for anti-Semitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that’s on every pulpit in this city.

On people’s expectations of other people

If you hear the Pope saying he believes in God, you think, well, the Pope is doing his job again today. If you hear the Pope saying he’s really begun to doubt the existence of God, you begin to think he might be on to something.

On the importance of having your views challenged

How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else? How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be OK, because you’re in the safely moral majority.

On being well-travelled

I’ve been to all three Axis of Evil countries…

On endearing oneself to an audience in the Deep South

You know what they think about you people where I come from in the north. You know what they think. They think you’re just living in a wasteland of piety and prohibition, snake-handling, punctuated only by offences against chastity with domestic animals. You and I know better. We know that quite a lot of that’s not true.

On the Catholic Church’s policy of relocating priests guilty of paedophilia

In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, “no child’s behind left”.

On the fundamental element of telling good porkie pies

A good liar must have a good memory. Kissinger is a stupendous liar with a remarkable memory.

On religious faith as a source of consolation

I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends.

On the value of blind faith

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our scepticism and our reason,

our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

On the appeal of Michael Moore

Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.

On divine intervention

Miracles do not occur. Dead people do not cure living people of disease. It doesn’t happen, it’s a scandal. There’s no tooth-fairy either. There’s no Santa Claus. I have to keep on breaking this stuff to people and every time they say, “Well, are you sure?” And I say yes, absolutely I am.

On being a tad inebriated live on air

The woman is dead: D-E-A-D, it’s a four letter word. There’s another four letter word. All her biological and medical lines are flat: F-L-A-T. She is the ex W-F-I-E of the wretched, luckless Michael Schiavo who has had to put up with great deal of innuendo and abuse also from your guests.

On freedom in religion

I don’t think it’s any more optional than Abraham saying to his son, “Do you want to come for a long and gloomy walk?”

On the Catholic Church’s moral equivalence of contraception with abortion

Aquinas believed that every single sperm contained a micro-embryo inside it and thus if you like – I hope I don’t offend anyone – hand jobs are genocide. As for blow jobs; don’t start.

On the meaning of life

Well, I can only answer for myself. What cheers me up? I suppose mainly gloating over the misfortunes of other people. I guess that has to be it, yeah, mainly crowing over the miseries of others. It doesn’t always work, but it never completely fails. And then there’s irony. There’s irony, which is the gin in the Campari; the cream in the coffee. Sex can have diminishing returns, but it’s amaaaazing. No, that’s pretty much it and then it’s a clear run to the grave.

On the Archbishop of Canterbury

Dr Rowan Williams – who does the most perfect impersonation of a Welsh sheep I have ever seen – can go love his own fucking enemies; I don’t want him loving mine.

On the virgin birth

“Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused with Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.’ Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catilus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdesteris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Deveka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.”

Even the Koran agrees that the Virgin Mary was born by an immaculate conception. By the way, the Koran says that Jesus was not crucified at all, the Jews crucified someone else in his place and he never died.

There’s no end to the way that this kind of thing can be fabricated, but those who say you just tell by the potency and pungency of the story, for the memorability of it, that there must be something true about it, are simply inviting you to rely, not on your thinking faculties, or your intellectual capacity at all, but on straight-out credulity and on the repeated manufacture of things that appear to be part of the hard and soft wiring of legend in our mammalian primate history.

Apparently if you want to have a prophet, it’s better if his mother is a virgin. Want to fabricate another one, that’s what will happen.

Actually, Joseph Smith [founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons], as far as I know, never made that claim. But I think Mrs Smith was well enough known to the local newspaper reporters of the greater New York area, in which you can read up the whole history of that family, to make it rather unlikely that that thing could be sold.

On brotherly love

It’s awful to hear a member of the Hitchens family sounding like Harold Pinter on a bad day.

On credit where credit’s due

That was terrible, Dinesh.

[Ten minutes later, when D’Souza has sat through a humiliating rebuttal of the historical reliability of the New Testament and has had a second go in an attempt to repair the damage…]

Ok, so it goes on getting worse…

On the only safe way of getting oneself excommunicated by the Vatican

Pius Ncube goes. The Vatican says, “That’s it, you’re no longer the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo. You have to go, you’ve gone too far.”

Robert Mugabe, the communicant, the daily Catholic communicant, who thanks God for his electoral victory, which you may have seen, recently, celebrated so warmly by his people has not been forbidden the sacraments, hasn’t been excommunicated.

Now, Pius Ncube, the Bishop of Bulawayo, had an affair with his housekeeper. Robert Mugabe has subjected his entire country to torture, famine, theft, expropriation, death, death squads and the rest of it, but it seems to me there is nothing he can do to get himself outside the church. He’d probably have to recommend condoms or abortions at the rate he’s going before anything would be said about him, any condemnation would be thundered from the pulpit.

On choosing your words carefully

The phrase “mind-torched whack-jobs” that’s in the introduction to the paper this evening naturally upset me very much; I hate to be offensive or see religion lampooned, that’s why I didn’t call my book on Mother Teresa “Sacred Cow”, though something in me will always feel sorry that I didn’t do that.

On receiving the news that a screaming rabbi once held a chair at Oxford

I am bound to say that it seems there’s been a bit of a collapse of standards at my old university…

On Thomas Jefferson’s take on the Good Book

You can buy at any Unitarian book store to this day the Jefferson Bible which was what he found was left if he took a pair of scissors and cut out everything in the Bible that could not by any intelligent person believed be believed. Makes for a slender, convenient read; I recommend it.

On the Torah as a moral guide

It’s true that genocide isn’t recommended in Genesis. You have to read several books on before you are commanded to leave not one child of the Amalekites behind… There are learned debates between rabbis in Israel, including rabbis of the Israeli defence force, on whether or not that commandment is still extant. In other words whether the fact that there are no more Amalekites means that the commandment doesn’t work any more and learned commentaries are published on the possible applicability of this genocidal commandment to present-day conditions. To know this is to tremble at the effects of religion on a people who are not supposed to have a reputation for bovine stupidity, let alone for racism, let alone for superstition.

On the inner-workings of Der Führer

I personally think I probably could overthrow the arguments for National Socialism in a fairly short time. I would have great difficulty persuading myself that its founder and leader was a rational person. I wouldn’t

have declared war on the Soviet Union, the British Empire and the United States on the same year myself hoping to have a Thousand Year Reich; wouldn’t be the right way to go about it.

On Stephen Hawking overcoming physical impairment

There’s no secular case to be made for eugenics. The whole point about our side is that we revere the brain. If Hawking had no limbs at all and only a brain we’d like him the better for it. But we would have something to ask perhaps about the person who designed him like that.

On the glory of god’s creation

I notice when people say, “Look at all we have to be thankful for,” or, “Look at what’s so wonderful,” they mean when the baby falls out of the window and bounced on the soft roof of a car, don’t they? They say, “Oh, God had it his hand.” They’ve nothing to say when the ditches are full of dead babies and no one did a thing.

Look at the beauty of the design of the plague vassilis or the incredible eagerness and hunger and ruthlessness and beauty of the cancer cell or the cobra. Who created all this, is what I want to know? If someone wants to take credit for this creation, let them take credit for the whole thing and for all the despair, misery that goes with it. For all the babies that are born without brains at all, or with cancer, or with no chance of living beyond a day. Who’s responsible for that? In what mysterious ways does the divinity move when this occurs?

Wouldn’t you rather think, harsh as it is that at least it was all random? But no, the solipsism must go on.

On his dream job

I’ve never wanted a political job, but if I was to be given grace and favour by the president, it would be the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco.

On the impossibility to excuse child rape

The rape and torture of children is not something to be relativised. It’s not something to be excused as a few bad priests. It’s certainly not be excused by the hideously false claim made by some Catholic conservatives that this wouldn’t have happened if queers hadn’t been allowed in the Church. Sorry to say that queerdom in the Church is an old story too. And it’s worse; it’s much worse than pornography and it’s much worse than bad language on TV. And it’s the crime that cries out for punishment. It’s the thing that if we were accused of on this side of the house we would die rather than admit. And if we were guilty of it we would kill ourselves. And it’s the one thing the Church has decided to excuse itself for under this papacy.

On the historicity of Matthew 27: 25 –v- the Final Solution

[Bishop Richard] Williamson… has long been a believer that – I’ll put this shortly – that the Holocaust did not occur, but the Jews did kill Christ. In word others, “Genocide? No. Deicide? Yes!”

On batting for the other side

For condemning my friend, Stephen Fry, for his nature. For saying, “You couldn’t be a member of our Church, you’re born in sin.” There’s a revolting piece of casuistry that’s sometimes offered on this point. “Yeah, we hate the sin only. We love the sinner”. Stephen is, I’m sorry to say, not quite like other girls. It’s his nature. Actually, he is like other girls, in that he’s, when I last checked, absolutely boy-mad. He’s not being condemned for what he does, he’s being condemned for who he is. You’re a child made in the image of God. Oh no you’re not, you’re faggot! And you can’t join our Church and you can’t go to heaven. This is disgraceful, it’s inhuman, it’s obscene, and it comes from a clutch of hysterical, sinister virgins who have already betrayed their charge in the children of their own Church.

On the only reason why he would like to see the Pope dead

I don’t wish any ill on any fellow primate or mammal of mine, even if this primate or mammal claims to be a primate in possession of a secret that is denied to me… So I don’t at all look forward to the death of Joseph Ratzinger, I don’t. Or any other Pope, not really. Except for one tiny reason which I ought to confess and share with you.

When he dies, there’s quite a long interval till the conclave can meet to pick another Pope. Sometimes it goes on for months till they get the white smoke. And for that whole time, that whole interval – it’s a delicious, lucid interlude – there isn’t anyone on Earth who claims to be infallible. Isn’t that nice?

All I want to propose in closing is this. If the human species is to rise to the full height that’s demanded by its dignity and by its intelligence, we must all of us move to a state of affairs where that condition is permanent. And I think we should get on with it.

On his primal urges

Those who ask confessions from other people should be willing to make one oneself. I am obsessed with sex. Ever since I discovered that my God-given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return. Seems fair to me.

On the cure for world poverty

There is only one cure for world poverty that has ever been found or ever will and it’s very simple. And it could be phrased very simply too. It’s called the empowerment of women. Go to Bangladesh or Bolivia – I have to ask you to hold your applause though I love you – go to Bangladesh or Bolivia, give women control over their reproduce cycle, throw in a handful of corn if you can, make them not just the beasts of burden and the beasts of childbearing that they’ve become and the floor will rise, it just will. It never fails anywhere. Against this one solution, the Catholic Church has set its face. The efforts of the missionary Church

in the Third World mean more people die, not less. It’s as simple as that. More famine, more disease, more ignorance, more random and avoidable death.

On the sort of person he would let near his children

I say that homosexuality is not just a form of sex; it’s a form of love and it deserves our respect for that reason. In fact, when my children were young, I’d have been proud to have Stephen [Fry] as their babysitter and I’d tell them they were lucky. And if anyone came to my door as a babysitter wearing holy orders, I’d first call a cab and then the police.

On the right to his own opinion

I don’t need a seconder. My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.

Christopher Hitchens – Diana The Mourning After [1998]

Hitchens ’09: The Village Voice

Hitchens on Booze!

Living Proof
By Christopher Hitchens

A tip: Try to eat something, indeed, at every meal. 

(Note the whiskey for better lecture inspiration.)

“Instead of marveling at the number of books, articles, and documentaries he produced, some of the author’s friends muttered about the quantity of booze he drank.  Now medical science backs his long-held belief that booze is a subtle weapon.   Plus:  Hitch’s tips on drinking right.”

My heart soared like a hawk when I read the recent study which recommended eating at least a clove of garlic a day.  Apparently this treatment, along with plenty of onions, would toughten up my prostate gland.  I had been vastly encouraged already by the news that tobacco smoking enhanced short-term memory and helped to ward off the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.  And then it was good to read that decaffeinated coffee beans were actually higher in cholesterol than the real thing.  But the very best news was saved for January’s edition of “The New England Journal of Medicine”.  From there I learned that, in the breezy words of my hometown rag “The Washington Post”:

“Drinking a glass or two of wine, beer or any other kind of alcohol everyday can significantly reduce the risk of suffering a heart attack, according to a large new study that is the first to examine whether drinking occasionally or daily is the best strategy for taking advantage of alcohol’s health benefits.

“The research also shows clearly for the first time that drinking any kind of alcohol — not just red wine — can protect the heart.”

I rolled this luxuriously around my tongue with the approbation that I customarily reserve for port or single malt.  Its finer points made themselves apparent in the glowing yet decisive manner that is politely imposed by a good vintage.  Not just the occasional drink — the daily drink.  Not just red wine — any alcohol is better than none.  An apple a day, they said in my boyhood, kept the doctor away.  Yeah, that’s right — just bathe your teeth in sugar water and acid and see what happens.  Much better to hurl the heartburn-inducing fruit into the trash and reach firmly for the corkscrew, which was the strategy that I began to adopt when I was about 15.

I’ll be 54 in April, and everyone keeps asking how I do it.  How do I do what?  I’m never completely sure what the questioner means.  I *hope* they mean how do I manage to keep producing books, writing essays, making radio and television appearances at all hours, traveling all over the place with no sign of exhaustion, teaching classes, and giving lectures, while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike physique which is the envy of many of my  juniors.  Sometimes, though, I suppose they mean how do I do all this and still drink enough every day to kill or stun the average mule?  My doctor confesses himself amazed at my haleness (and I never lie to a medical man), but then, in my time I’ve met more old drunks than old doctors.

2.

What with the garlic, the full strength cigarettes, the raw espresso, and the array of winking and shimmering glasses and bottles, I can face the world pretty heartily (despite a slight heftiness around the central portions which i keep meaning to “address,” as the saying goes, and despite a long-standing preference for nocturnal activity over encounters with “morning persons.”  I will admit that I am a standout in Washington for non-attendance at power breakfasts).  In Europe, I don’t seem to attract as much attention, or as many questions.  Indeed, it was the so-called French paradox that started the inquiry into the medicinal effects of alcohol in the first place.  American physicians, taking their cautious tours of Paris and Strasbourg in the spring or perhaps having arranged to have their tax-deductible proctologists’ conventions in Provence, went to restaurants where they predicted from observation that all the diners would be dead or dying within a year.  Then they went back — perhaps after attending a few boring funerals for their own miserable colleagues — and saw the selfsame French still browsing and sluicing away and looking more joyously fit than ever.

Well, that surely couldn’t be right.  But an unsmiling look at the statistics confirmed that there was less heart disease in France, and meticulous scientific investigation then isolated red-wine consumption as the key variable.  So let me tell you something that I could have told you long ago, and that your doctor already knew but hadn’t been telling you.  Red wine will elevate your “good -cholesterol numbers (H.D.L.) as against your “bad” (L.D.L.) ones, and it will then and inspire your blood so that it is much less likely to go all clotted on you.  A few drinks also assist you in warding off diabetes.  And not just red wine, either.  pretty much any grape or grain product will do.  In Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper, he plays an owner of a health-food restaurant in Greenwich village who is cryogenically frozen, and then thawed out in the year 2173.  Among the many breakthroughs made by science in the intervening two centuries is the liberating discovery that steak, cream pies, and hot fudge are positively good for the system.  The New England Journal of Medicine for January 2003 contains news much more encouraging than that.  After all, nobody wants cream pie and hot fudge every day (do they?).  And even if they did turn out to be beneficial for the health, they wouldn’t make you wittier, sexier, more vivacious, and less tolerant of boring and censorious people. Which the the daily intake of the fruit of the vine — to say nothing of the slowly distilled and matured grain — will also do, if you know how to make it your servant and not your master.

3.

A few swift tips here, to show that I am perfectly serious.  On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis — and all gin drinks — that you would in judging female breasts:  one is far too few, and three is one two many.  Do try to eat the olives:  they can be nutritious.  Try to eat something, indeed, at every meal.  Take  lots of fresh or distilled water.  Don’t mix from different bottles of red wine:  Dance with the one that brung ya.  Avoid most white wine for its appalling acidity and banality.  (Few things make me laugh louder than the ostentatious non-drinkers who get plastered when they condescend to imbibe a glass of toxic Chardonnay, and who have been fooling themselves for so long.)  Avoid Pernod and absinthe and ouzo.  Even if it makes you look like a brand snob, do specify a label when ordering spirits in particular.  I once researched this for a solemn article and found that if you just ask for, say, vodka-and-tonic the barman is entitled to give you whatever he has on hand, which is often a two-handled jug labeled “Vodka” under the bar.  It can be even worse with scotch, where imitation blends are rife.  Pick a decent product and stay with it.  Upgrade yourself, for Chrissake.  Do you think you are going to live forever?

4.

In a way, that is the whole question to begin with.  I noticed early in life that some colleagues drank because of the writer’s life, and others had seemingly become scribblers because it gave them a high-toned excuse to drink.  Some drank to meet a deadline, and some drank to give themselves an excuse to miss one.  The latter crew had a tendency to clock out prematurely.  When the late Mur… Kempton was asked by a copyboy how much longer it would be until his column was ready, Kempton held up a bottle and jovially said, “About an inch.”  That piece, you can bet, was band on time and word-perfect.  Whereas John Coleman, the smashed movie critic of the old New Statesman in my day, retreated at press time into his den with a bottle of hooch.  Soon after,the reassuring sound of the typewriter keys was no longer to be heard.  One day Martin Amis, who was editing the pages, decided to look in and found Coleman’s slumbering face making a faultless left-profile impression in the keyboard.  Wondering if the short burst of typing had produced anything usable, Martin yanked the paper from he machine and read the two words “Clink Eastwoo…”

In a highly “judgmental” study entitled “The Thirsty Muse:  Alcohol and the American Writer,” Tom Dardis examines the careers of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Eugene O’Neill.  He maintains that booze was not the making of them and their writing, but rather their undoing.  That’s relatively easy to argue with letters like this from Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins:

“Will have to take Marty to the movies as a present for being drunk Saturday night… Started out on absinthe, drank of bottle of good red wine with dinner, shifted to vodka in town…and then battened it down with whiskeys and sodas until 3 a.m.  Feel good today.  But not like working.”

Good, but not like working…Good?  how good is this?  I couldn’t possibly drink like that, but then, I am not a genius.  And I certainly couldn’t have gone even one round with William Faulkner when he was on form.  Mr. Dardis demonstrates with ease that drink was the death of these men and eroded their talent in the end, but he cannot account for the fact that they did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wine.  It’s true that O’Neill did his best stuff after he sobered up, but he had obviously learned a lot from the years when he couldn’t remember which train he had boarded, or why.  Here’s some advice, from a different book about O’Neill, on how to deal with the shakes:

“O’Neill would prop himself against the bar. The bartender, who knew him well, would place a shot glass in front of him, toss a towel across the bar, as though absentmindedly forgetting it, and glide away…. Hanging the towled around his neck, O’Neill would grasp both the glass of whiskey and one end of the towel in his right hand, while he clutched the other end of  the towel with his left.  Using the towel as a pulley, he would laboriously hoist the glass to his lips.”

I actually saw this maneuver executed once, by a deeply troubled delegate at the British Conservative Party conference.  When you get the shudders, even slightly, it’s definitely time to seek help.  But this wreck of a Tory wasn’t going on to compose plays about the perils and splendors of addiction.

5.

What the soothing people at Alcoholics Anonymous don’t or won’t understand is that suicide or self-destruction would probably have come much earlier to some people if they could not have had a drink.  We are born into a losing struggle, and nobody can hope to come out a winner, and much of the intervening time is crushingly tedious in any case.  Those who see this keenly, or who register the blues intently, are not to be simplistically written off as “dysfunctional” cynics or lushes.  Winston Churchill put it very squarely when he defined the issue as, essentially, a wager.  He was a lifelong sufferer from the depression that he nicknamed his “black dog”, but he could rouse himself to action and commitment and inspiration, and the brandy bottle was often a crucial prop.  I have taken more out of alcohol, he said simply, than it has taken out of me.  His chief antagonist, Adolf Hitler, was, I need hardly add, a fanatical teetotaler (though with a shorter and less wholesome life span).  The most lethal and fascistic of our current enemies, the purist murderers of the Islamic jihad, despise our society for, among other things, its intolerance of alcohol.  We should perhaps do more to earn this hatred and contempt, and less to emulate it.

Such wicked thoughts are almost verboten in our new, therapeutic, upbeat boring idiom, where there is always some mediocre jerk who knows what’s best for you.  I remember going to Aspen about a decade ago to cover the Bush-Thatcher summit that coincided with the invasion of Kuwait.  The town sponsored a reception for the press, held at the top of the ski lift on the summit of a perfectly nice mountain.  When we got up there, pointlessly beautiful and white-toothed girls offered drinks.  I thought a gin-and-tonic would meet the case nicely.  “Sorry, sir,” I was told with faultless politeness, “but that would be inappropriate.”  When I queried this, I was told that gin-and-tonic was much more potent at that high altitude.  “In that case I’ll have a double,” I said flippantly, and was rewarded by a millimetric contraction of the flawless but phony smile.  So I got back onto the ski lift and went down to spend the evening at Hunter Thompson’s place in Woody Creek, where we ended up doing some pretty accurate target practice with high-velocity rifles.  I think I had a better time than those who stayed correct — and what’s more they can’t take that evening away from me, try as they may.

I’m perhaps straying (though quite soberly, I assure you) from my initial point about the connection between alcohol and physical well-being.  The relationship between booze and mental well-being is much more oblique, and even more fraught.  But there is a connection.  The very word “spirit” preserves the initial intuition of the “inspired” that was detected by the Greeks when they hit upon fermentation and employed it to lubricate their symposia.  In moderation, of course, yes, if you insist… but how was “moderation” established except by transcending itself just a bit?  John Keats caught the point deftly in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is actually not all that much about birdsong, sweet though it may be:

O for a draught of vintage!  that hath been / Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country-green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth! / O for a beaker full of the warm South! / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim…

These are, indeed, matters of the heart as well as of the mind.  Perhaps the most damning disclosure arising from the recent findings is the one:  a medical investigation into cardiac disease, started in 1948 and known as the Framingham Heart Study, found that alcohol was beneficial.  In his 1996 memoirs, Dr. Carl Seltzer, one of the Framingham researchers, confessed that he and his fellow physicians had been prevented by officialdom from publishing their evidence.  When a guy called Zeltzer tells me that drink is wholesome, I pay attention. But something in the Puritan soul is committed to making and keeping people miserable, even when it is *not* for their own good.  Some of us have at least an inkling of the pursuit of happiness, as well as of happiness as a pursuit.

Hitchens on Mother Teresa

Saint to the Rich

Christopher Hitchens

There was less — and more — to Mother Teresa than met the eye.

“SAINTS,” George Orwell wrote in 1949, “should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.” For an illustration of the exact reverse of this admonition, consider the career of “Mother Teresa” of Calcutta, who died Friday at the age of 87.

Most public figures have their reputations judged in the light of their actions. But uniquely, all of Mother Teresa’s actions were judged by her reputation — as a holy, selfless person, completely dedicated to the service of the poor and the wretched.

Let me offer examples of two small but related “actions.” Two years ago, the population of the Republic of Ireland went to the polls in a referendum. The single issue was the removal of the constitutional ban on divorce. Ireland is the only country in Europe with such a prohibition, and it is also engaged in serious talks with the Protestant minority who fear clerical control of their lives in a future “power-sharing” agreement. For this reason, most Irish political parties called for a “yes” vote. In the concluding stages of the campaign, which was very closely fought, Mother Teresa intervened to urge that the faithful vote “no.”

A few months later, she gave an interview to the American magazine, Ladies Home Journal, which reached millions of housewives. She was asked about her friendship with Princess Diana, a friendship which has been evolving over the past several years, and also about Diana’s then impending divorce. Of the divorce Mother Teresa said that “It is a good thing that it is over. Nobody was happy anyhow.”

So, from Mother Teresa it was sermons for the poor about morality and obedience, but forgiveness and indulgence for princesses. Few commentators noted the contrast, because such facts did not “fit” the image that has become so necessary. But actually, this contrast is a far better guide to Mother Teresa’s theory and practice than the received opinion about either.

While much was made of Mother Teresa’s devotion to the poor and downtrodden, she was in fact a lifelong friend to the rich and powerful. Some examples:

– In 1981 Mother Teresa journeyed to Haiti, to accept that nation’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur. She received it from the Duvalier family, and made a glowing speech in which she said that dictator “Baby Doc” and his wife Michele not only loved the poor, but were loved by the poor in return.

– In 1990 she made a trip to Albania, then the most oppressive of the Balkan Stalinist states, and laid a wreath on the grave of the dictator Enver Hoxha as well as on the irredentist monument to “Mother Albania”. She was herself of Albanian descent (born in Skopje, Macedonia), but many Albanians were shocked by her embrace of Hoxha’s widow and her silence on human rights.

– In 1992 she intervened with a court in Los Angeles, which was about to sentence Charles Keating, the biggest fraud and embezzler in American history. His S & L racket stole a total of $252 million, mainly from small and poor depositors. A strong Catholic and right-wing campaigner against pornography in his spare time, Keating gave Mother Teresa $1,250,000 in cash and the use of a private jet, in return for which she gave him many useful endorsements, including a character reference to the court. The court had asked Mother Teresa to return Keating’s donations, which may well have been stolen, but she never replied to the request.

What about her celebrated concern for the poor and the weak? Here the record is much murkier than her saintly image would suggest. I have been shown testimony from leading American and British physicians, expressing their concern at the extremely low standard of medicine practiced in her small Calcutta clinics. No pain killers, syringes washed in cold water, a fatalistic attitude toward death and a strict regimen for the patients. No public accounts were made available by her “missionaries of Charity” but enormous sums are known to have been raised. The income from such awards as the Nobel Prize is alone enough to maintain a sizable operation. In one on-the-record interview, Mother Teresa spoke with pride of having opened more than 500 convents in 125 countries, “not counting India.” It seemed more than probable that money donated by well-wishers for the relief of suffering was being employed for the purpose of religious proselytizing by the “missionary multinational.”

What kind of theology was she promoting? Mother Teresa offers an intensely simple version of Christian Fundamentalism. She believed that we are all sinners conceived in iniquity. She frequently described the suffering of the poor as a gift from God, and took a highly traditional attitude of resignation and stoicism. She was extremely critical of political attempts to change injustice and equality, describing herself as “non-political” but also expressing sympathy for conservative Catholic forces in Latin America and Southern Europe. She was adamantly opposed to the use of contraception. She said that she would never permit a child to be adopted by any parent who had ever consented to an abortion. In her Nobel Prize speech, she described abortion as the single greatest threat to world peace. She was a staunch ally of the present Pope in his battle, within the church, against the “social gospel” and other liberal heresies.

It is paradoxical that a woman of almost medieval opinions should have been so revered by the world of secular modernism as well as by the community of the devout. Perhaps it’s because that people in the West, afflicted by bad conscience about the misery of what we call the “Third World,” are happy to delegate the task of relief to somebody else. And, having made this vicarious decision, they do not wish to inquire too closely into the actions and motives of the “somebody else” they have chosen. Thus Mother Teresa could say — as she did more than once — that there can no more be too many babies than there can be too many flowers or stars. Those who believe in the need for some sort of limitation on population must not have heard those words too well.

In September 1996, the U.S. Congress voted to make her an honorary American citizen, a distinction bestowed previously only on Winston Churchill, Raoul Wallenberg and Mr. and Mrs. William Penn, founders of the state of Pennsylvania. The United States may have a secular constitution, but with the abortion question and the (greatly overstated) power of the “Christian Coalition” being such political hot potatoes, the vote was unanimous.

In Calcutta once, Mother Teresa gave me a tour of a tiny orphanage she had opened. The scene was an affecting one, though it hardly made much difference to the immense problems of that city. As the tour was concluding she suddenly gestured with her arm and said, “You see? This is how we combat abortion and contraception in Bengal.” This admission, that the purpose of her operation is propagandistic rather than strictly humanitarian, was an honest one. Mother Teresa, as far as I am aware, never made any attempt to conceal her extremely dogmatic and conservative agenda. Nor was she ever shy about her choice of rich, unscrupulous, authoritarian patrons. Some of her more awe-struck apologists argue that Jesus, too, was criticized for keeping bad company. Still, I do not recall him ever doing anything like kissing the feet of the Duvaliers.

In this sense, then, her hold on public opinion in a skeptical and materialist age was a small “miracle” all by itself.
Sept. 5, 1997