HITCHENS HUBRIS

You know your doing something right when your enemy’s gets riled. Reports of Cheney letting fly a few sweary oaths at Vermont Independent last week ("Dick Cheney told Senator Leahy “ you and the horse you rode in on” when hassled about Halliburton) were perhaps the first signs that the American Right are getting really rattled, now the full spectrum of the right-wing media is turning against Michael Moore.

How he must be chuckling under his fat beardy gob as a rash of Moore-hating websites fan the flames of his publicity for his now predicted $100 million grossing Fahrenheit 911.

One high profile critic is the increasingly bewildered Christopher Hitchens, or ‘Hitch’ as his many media acolytes call him. The famously langurious writer who is in love with all things American, has got himself in a bit of a fankle. Between lunches he threw his weight behind Bush and Blair’s war lending (he believed) some much needed credibility for their escapade. Now, like the Guardian’s David Araanovitch he’s now struggling under the amassing weight of evidence that he backed the wrong pony. As one the arguments of the anti-war movement get proven right with each beheading video, each Israeli persecution, and as the ranks of Al-Qaeda swell with new recruits three simple words escape them both: I was wrong.

In Slate magazine he joined the mob baying for Moore's blood: “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. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.” See the full thing here.

Now no doubt if you’d been in New York at the time of 9/11 you’d have been profoundly affected but this guy who for years has written cojent attacks on Leftist-hypocrisy (his 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger' was great, if about thirty years late). But the ideological somersaults the guy’s engaged in are becoming increasingly confusing, and he’s surely in danger of becoming a simple Bush-apologist, a furtive scriptwriter for the Republican regime. As Ian Williams writes in a review of Hitchens’, ‘A Long Short War: the Postponed Liberation of Iraq’:

“It is also confusing, since he is trying to maintain all the former positions he held while on the left, while uncritically embracing his new friends, whom he calls, "the Pentagon Intellectuals" or the "tougher thinkers in the Defense Department." The resulting portmanteau politics are an ill-matched and disturbing mix.” More here.

That’s maybe being a little polite. As Alexander Cockburn wrote of Hitchen’s retreat from the Nation: “Hitch is no longer the beautiful slender young man of the Left. Now he's just another middle-aged porker of the Right."

Meanwhile LOS ANGELES - Michael Moore's anti-Bush "Fahrenheit 9/11" became the highest-grossing documentary of all time on its first weekend in release, taking in $21.8 million as it packed theatres across the country this weekend.

What Hitchens and other less compromised elite-rule propagandists can’t stomach about Moore is that he’s popular. Dissent can always be managed when it’s confined to a liberal clique, but as soon as criticism is allowed to filter through into the mainstream they get real anxious.

More at Michael Moore here…

3 comments

this is a test message

left by hodgers on 28 June 2004

test test test

left by hodgers on 28 June 2004

hodgers said:
"this is a test message"

then arrogantly repeated:
"test test test"

How can you say that in the light of recent events? You are so closed to the truth you can't see what's in front of your face. You "moore-on".

left by richard on 10 August 2004