For the Sake of Argument

...Having once in his journalistic rovings "scheduled a stop-by at the Missionaries of Charity in Bose Road," Hitchens gives this account: Instantly put off by the mission's motto ("He that loveth correction loveth knowledge"), I none the less went for a walkabout with M.T...

...come to be perpetrated so widely...

...And a star was born...

...myth began after a British poseur named Malcolm Muggeridge found himself on the steps of St...

...Hitchens takes himself to be writing in the tradition of Orwell, opposing all "smelly little orthodoxies...

...A world in which "vulgar fools" and "mediocrities" like Reagan are right, and properly educated sophisticates like himself wrong, is, one suspects, too unbearably mundane to contemplate...

...Nowhere do we catch the whiff of smelly little orthodoxy more than in Hitchens's treatment of ex-leftists, which sound like one of those Peoples' Meetings of old where doctrinal infractions were exposed, denounced, and swiftly dealt with...

...y ou can't help but admire that intensity...

...A little more investigation into the M.T...

...Yes, what could an ignorant bumpkin of a colonel know of such refined sentiments...

...So in just about every other column, no matter what the topic, Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, North, William Casey, Lee Atwater, et al., are dragged in for a dismissive roughing up...

...Hitchens is a sharp one, all right...

...Obviously, the fetus is alive, so that the disputation about whether or not it counts as "a life" is casuistry...

...It would have been a nice fault others for not spending "too much time" among the afflicted of Calcutta...

...What's more, this same "hell bat" took donations from Charles Keating, "prostituting herself' for "the worst in capitalism": How has the extraordinary deception of M.T...

...Here his luck runs out, though...

...It's that we won't find out in time," meaning before Bush left office...

...Ronald Radosh, for reporting an alarming conversation he overheard between Sandinista officers (about progress in America on the propaganda front), is a "fink" and "patriotic eavesdropper...

...And its absence from the book attests more eloquently than anything included to the intimidating power of smelly little orthodoxy...

...herself and had a chance to observe her butch style at first hand...

...L ikewise, there is something surreal in the air of vindication with which Hitchens writes of the "Cold War nostrums" now so clearly discredited...

...Maybe this is because Hitchens is forever absorbed in secondary matters, grubby little leftist quarrels which make up the closest thing the book has to a moral theme...

...Along with a first-rate mind he has a disorienting stock of historical knowledge—accounting, when overused, for that slightly overstuffed quality to these otherwise model essays...

...One's first reaction is to ask simply if Hitchens's "stop-by" qualifies him to But none of these reactions quite does justice to Hitchens, who is much more than the brazen little snob he seems in this passage...

...Indeed, reading his reflections on all the mediocrities, simpletons, fools, vulgar capitalist "fat cats," liars, bores, and pious frauds who surround him, one is reminded of Newman's observation that the sinner wouldn't enjoy heaven if he went there...

...Anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has ever spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows that emotions are not a deciding factor...

...There were the obligatory references to the "hypocrites" and "religious cretins" on the pro-life side...

...In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture some organs...

...What other kind could it be...

...One's second reaction is to point out that the woman had labored in obscurity and self-imposed poverty about thirty years before Muggeridge arrived with his BBC cameras...

...His attachments can usually be discerned only through the prism of his hatreds...

...Paul's...

...For him the letter "breathes with much of the same spirit of those most defensible of days," though alas it was "obviously wasted on the colonel to whom it was addressed...

...The Soviet Union," he writes matter-of-factly in a July 1990 piece for Harper's, "did not intend to move its massed armour across the north German plain into Western Europe...

...Ready to spend time—but not too much time—among the lepers and beggars, Muggeridge got himself to Calcutta and struck pay dirt with a flying visit to Bose Road...

...deception, moreover, would have revealed that Muggeridge quietly donated all that lucre from his Christian writings to charity, chiefly to this same mission where Hitchens spent all of half an hour on his' - inspection tour...

...Much like Muggeridge, in fact, he has a fluency beyond the reach of most of us, and on television is a ferociously articulate debater...

...Strange, given the range of his own resentments, to hear Hitchens fault conservatives for their "rancid pessimism about human nature...

...Here at least is someone who discards the pretense...

...like Muggeridge, he became a poseur the moment he renounced socialism...

...From a certain angle the column actually reflects one of his more admirable qualities—a scorn of cliché and equivocation...

...as an observer of men he lacks the charity and—a virtue he touts without ever quite displaying—the empathy...

...The same applies, from a materialist point of view, to the question of whether or not this "life" is "human...

...This woman "calling herself 'Mother' Teresa," writes Christopher Hitchens in one of his Nation columns collected here, is "a dangerous, sinister person who properly belongs in the caboose of the Pat Buchanan train...

...O'Rourke that "his efforts to be funny about Nicaragua were more successful than my efforts to be serious...

...But then this: I have always been convinced that the term "unborn child" is a genuine description of material reality...

...The column attests to a deep, if often hidden, intellectual integrity...

...Hitchens, it turns out, was an anti-war activist attending Oxford at the same time...

...As far as one can determine, the M.T...

...For it was only in March of this year that the German government released detailed plans by the East German and Soviet armies for the seizure of Western Europe—right down to ready-made maps with new street names for occupied cities, printed currency, even medals to pin on heroes of the conquest...

...It's never clear which particular human beings he himself likes or trusts...

...But his introspection never extends to matters of substance...

...For examining the faults of socialist intellectuals, ex-leftist Paul Johnson is a "would-be informer and stool pigeon...

...The problem is figuring out exactly to what end all that intensity and anger are directed...

...So often, indeed, as to exhaust Hitchens's resources of irony and wit and reduce him to uncharacteristically dull insults, like calling Reagan an "unashamed vulgar fraud," or Nixon a "wretched, warped, dishonest individual"—"vulgar," "vile," and "low-minded" being his stock taunts...

...Maybe he loathes Reagan so much for the same reason he finds Mother Teresa so distasteful: they both have in different degrees the one gift he clearly lacks—the gift of simplicity...

...As a stylist he may measure up to Orwell...

...Allowing for the low mentality and the degeneration of the white gene pool under the influence of a decade of Reagan/Bush . . ." is typical of his strained put-downs...

...Nor is it just glibness...

...It's not that we won't find out," he wrote of that sinister conspiracy last December...

...And one wonders how the motto "He that loveth correction loveth knowledge" should so offend a professional critic who certainly loveth giving correction...

...True, the bitterness is relieved now and then by moments of self-deprecation, as when he writes of P.J...

...gesture of humility, for instance, to include here one or two of his devastating revelations on the "October Surprise" conspiracy—just to remind us that not only those vulgar fools on the right are capable of being duped...

...For abandoning their post at Ramparts, ex-radicals David Horowitz and Peter Collier are "breast-beating recusants...

...The one time Hitchens really acted in the tradition of Orwell was in an April 1989 "Minority Report" about abortion...

...Three hundred and fifty pages of fury and scorn make forlively reading, but the sum effect is to leave even an admirer wondering about the critic himself...

...After all, a lot of us breathlessly invoke Mother Teresa the metaphor without ever really modeling our lives on hers...

...Lucky for Hitchens that he found out in time—in time to discreetly withdraw these prescient exposés from his collected works...

...Even Bill Clinton earns a rebuke for having second thoughts about his letter of 1969 expressing a "loathing" toward the military...

...This would have been about ten years before Chris Hitchens began his own earthly mission as comfortable social critic and champion of the poor and oppressed...

...There was something in the way she accepted the kisses bestowed on her feet, taking them as no more than her due, that wasn't quite adorable...