Why Hitchens is Great: Christopher Hitchens vs. Michael Moore

As Christopher Hitchens continues to battle the cancer that is killing him, the world would do well to remember that Hitchen’s greatness is not this most recent battle with cancer, or even his notorious battles against the concept of faith, but rather his repeated and often scathing social commentaries surrounding the events of import at a given time.

In 2004, Hitchens published for SLATE magazine, a powerful rebuke of Michael Moore’s anti-Bush propaganda Fahrenheit 911.  The film remains Moore’s most successful, but as is so often the case with hindsight, it is more commonly referred to with disdain or even worse, disinterest by many who once fell for its snide charms.  In that respect, Fahrenheit 911 has joined Al Gore’s much maligned and ridiculed Inconvenient Truth.  Both films now find themselves as products not to be taken seriously.

Not so with Fahrenheit 911 though back in 2004.  The anti Bush and anti-Iraq War waters were quickly rising, and Michael Moore craftily pieced together a fast and furious visual representation that struck a willing nerve with a viewing public then hungry for affirmation of their collective anger.  Truth and fact were secondary – feeling good about feeling bad were of the highest importance.

Enter Christopher Hitchens.  In an article titled Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore, Hitchens made clear where he stood and what was to follow.  And what was to follow was among the most appropriate descriptions of the American liberal mindset at that time.  Said Hitchens in his opening line, “One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring.”

How very true.  Liberals are so often – too often, simply self-righteous and boring, having ensconced themselves in a version of organized religion that Hitchens finds so troubling and dangerous – the religion of Big Government Statism.

And then we get this gem – classic Hitchens: “To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental.”

When reading that line one must remember that Christopher Hitchens was taking on the liberal media establishment full on, without apology, and without consideration for the substantial blowback he would face by those horrified to hear such dissension from within the ranks of the intellectual elite.  And then when Hitchens took on Moore directly, can anyone now claim that Hitchens had it wrong?

“…Yet Moore is a silly and shady man who does not recognize courage of any sort even when he sees it because he cannot summon it in himself. To him, easy applause, in front of credulous audiences, is everything…At no point does Michael Moore make the smallest effort to be objective. At no moment does he pass up the chance of a cheap sneer or a jeer. He pitilessly focuses his camera, for minutes after he should have turned it off, on a distraught and bereaved mother whose grief we have already shared. (But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia.) Such courage.”

And finally, Christopher Hitchens gives a parting shot regarding American society in general that would so willingly elevate someone so dubious as Michael Moore to the status of socio-political importance.

“You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.”

Thank you for the words Hitch – and let us all hope you are allowed a bit more time to give us just a few more.

Reference:

http://www.slate.com/id/2102723/