You Say You Want a Revolution

The cover of Christopher Hitchens’s latest book finds the author pictured, dapper in a rumpled olive trench coat and five o’clock shadow, brandishing a cigarette and gazing at us with obstinate skepticism. By posing as the craggy dissident, as if slumped in the corner of some dim café, the British-born journalist and author evidently seeks to cast himself as a morose rebel from the outset. The mission of Letters to a Young Contrarian, the latest addition to a career carved in stubborn public controversy, fits in nicely with this conceit: the seasoned revolutionary passes his wisdom onto flame-brained youth.

In a series modeled on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (Alan Dershowitz has penned a Letters to a Young Lawyer) Hitchens dispenses advice on how to batter away at the prevailing hypocrisies of our day by living in a state—or rather, an activity—of principled opposition. Luckily, Hitchens has at least enough of a sense of humor to appreciate the condescending silliness that encircles this idea. “I myself hope to live long enough to graduate, from being a ‘bad boy’—which I once was—to becoming ‘a curmudgeon,’” he reflects, tongue firmly in cheek, after professing to be flattered and embarrassed by being deemed a role model.

Hitchens’s other books already walk the path of resistance, including diatribes against President Clinton (No One Left to Lie To, 1999), Mother Teresa (The Missionary Position, 1995) and, most recently, Henry Kissinger, whom he claimed should be indicted for war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor and Chile, to name but a few.

“Nobody asked me to do this and it would not be the same thing I do if they had asked me,” writes Hitchens in Letters of his life against the grain. “I can’t be fired any more than I can be promoted. I am happy in the ranks of the self-employed. If I am stupid or in poor form, nobody suffers but me. To the question, Who do you think you are? I can return the calm response: Who wants to know?”

Being an army of one in the war for truth can be hard when you’re cashing in a rumored $400,000 a year writing for glossy corporate rags like Vanity Fair alongside columns for more customary leftist vehicles like The Nation.

Or it can be very easy. It’s unfair to say that Hitchens is a total mercenary, or that he doesn’t live at least some of his principles—he takes care to remind you of all of his sundry sojourns alongside this political radical or championing that unpopular cause—but he undeniably benefits from the very best of the system he so deplores.

That criticism is part of what has occasionally garnered Hitchens the title of media whore, along with his recurrent television news panel appearances (surely the fastest way to earn the label). To his credit, nearly all of Hitchens’s contributions to public dialogue have been generally meaningful and unfailingly shrewd. One could argue, too, that his brand of rootless intellectual promiscuity embodies his professed ideal of nonconformity in refusing to stay within the traditional alignments of a man of the left: by giving favors to all, he pledges allegiance to none.

Besides, figures like him are amusing, and even useful, to have around to visibly puncture the sanctimonious grandstanding of public figures. During the Gulf War, in a live CNN appearance alongside Charlton Heston, Hitchens asked the actor and NRA president to identify the countries that bordered Iraq. Stumped after naming three, Heston complained that Hitchens was wasting the nation’s time by “giving a high school geography lesson.”

“Oh, keep your hairpiece on,” retorted Hitchens, according to Reason magazine.

That combination of dogged truth-telling and tactical snideness defines Hitchens. He was memorably dubbed “Christopher Snitchens” by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and widely condemned for his affidavit incriminating his friend, Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, in defaming Monica Lewinsky. Most recently, Hitchens has been sparring on the pages of The Nation with radical icon Noam Chomsky over the role of U.S. foreign policy in provoking the Sept. 11 attacks.

All of this makes him an obvious candidate for teaching ethical resistance. But like so many eminent sages who dabble in teaching, Hitchens is often too distracted by his own meditations to notice his students very much. In the end, the practical impact of his insights must be raked out of the heap of historical accounts, literary reflections and sweeping pronouncements.

Steeped in the Western canon and the weight of his own intellectual superiority, Hitchens’ book would be worth reading even if all he had were the trappings of a superb stylist—an obvious delight in the English language with which to cast his scrutiny, and a spiked wit that sometimes cuts at the expense of a proportionate level of intensity. In fact, he takes pride in obsessively driving points home, devoting an entire chapter in this slim volume to the art of being considered boring in pursuit of one’s ideals.

Hitchens has disdain in abundance; for the ideal of consensus, for religion and piety, for phony populism and for any number of perceived half-truths, betrayals, insincerities and miscarriages of justice. But he manages to redeem himself from excessive negativity, or intellectual masturbation, for that matter, by offering at least some valuable direction: “Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.... Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.”