Blood, Class and Nostalgia and For the Sake of Argument, by Christopher Hitchens
Mandler, Peter
BLOOD, CLASS AND NOSTALGIA: ANGLO-AMERICAN IRONIES, by Christopher Hitchens. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. 398 pp. $22.95. FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT: ESSAYS AND MINORITY REPORTS, by...
...296 • DISSENT...
...Clinton's Rhodes Scholarship has hardly proved a political asset...
...So in this case the elegant philosopher is himself only a slimmed-down emperor, passing on the half-remembered bromides of his own Greeks...
...something even more gross, we have to suppose...
...One of his characteristically penetrating insights is that "conspiracy theory" is just the toxic byproduct of dubious "official versions...
...But only in this last respect did sagging Anglophobia make way for a resurgent Anglophilia...
...Like Eliot, Hitchens suspects that the subjects of mass society will be no better masters...
...In Southern California, would-be-tony tracts are called Rancho Miranda or Villa Hermosa...
...The function of Anglophilia in the twentieth century is to lend that veneer of civilization and higher purpose to the dirty business of empire...
...And the sarcasm is rarely gratuitous...
...Hitchens's Greekness makes him, perhaps, not always the ideal commentator on American society taken as a whole...
...It's not that Hitchens is incapable of fellow feeling with ordinary people...
...At least that can change...
...In the nineteenth century, a special feeling for the English was nurtured primarily by WASPs of good birth for whom it represented not only "blood" and "class" but the dirty secret of residual toryism, an Un-American Activity of the right wing never prosecuted by Congress...
...This "highly dangerous and febrile mixture" creates all sorts of opportunities for scare-mongering and what Chomsky calls the "manufacture of SPRING • 1994 • 295 Books consent," but it also—I am sure Hitchens is right in saying—makes the mass media "an area of contestation" for people like him, and us...
...Yet the question arises in these essays, as in Blood, Class and Nostalgia, whether challenging the official version is quite enough...
...Nixon's turgid memoirs demonstrate that the unlived life is not worth examining...
...What refreshing patience...
...After Thatcher, after Reagan, after the cold war, what remains of the "special relationship" between Britain and America...
...Though he says ritually that the voters aren't stupid, he also says that Perot owes his support to "the elitism of fools" —essentially his diagnosis of Nixon and Reagan—so there appear to be an awful lot of foolish yet not stupid people out there...
...He quotes Laszlo Rajk—"In the end, I'd rather be comrades with people I trust but don't agree with entirely—we can argue—than with people to whom I'm ideologically close but can't trust"—and concludes: "Not for the first or the last time in history, the right people have the wrong line...
...He displays it movingly in a report from Sarajevo, and on the road to Timisoara...
...It had always been Rome to America's—what...
...Both WASPs and the Irish play a diminishing role in American public life...
...In this phase it matters little that the American governors are called Roosevelt rather than Adams...
...it must fall...
...The essential glue is no longer "blood" and "class" but NATO and the "national interest...
...There has always been less there than meets the eye...
...At one point, while gently chiding Noam Chomsky for his pessimism, Hitchens points to the link between the "superpower delusions" of the establishment and the "provincial fear" of the American people...
...Some of the epigrams deserve an entry in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations...
...Taken together, the political essays amount to nothing less than an alternative history of the Washington establishment, not so much inside as below the Beltway...
...The catalogue of Kissinger's misdeeds left me shaking, whether with anger or pity I cannot say...
...We are expected to imagine a silkily elegant philosopher standing at the elbow of the corpulent emperor, supplying him with the wisdom requisite for the smooth execution of his world-historical tasks...
...Fair enough—you don't write for any of his favored outlets (including Dissent) expecting to reach the uneducated and the credulous...
...America is less militantly republican, Britain less imperial...
...Nor am I sure that the persistence of "Brit Kitsch" —Ralph Lauren's country-house style and Houston tract suburbs called Nottingham Oaks or Sherwood Forest—testifies to much more than the restlessness of postmodern consumer culture...
...And yet . . . the ancien regime is so rotten...
...As befits the author of the "Cultural Elite" column in Vanity Fair, he finds his natural constituency in "the educated, the skeptical and the ironic: the only class (precisely because it isn't a class) in whose defense I myself feel willing to be snobbish...
...Verso, 1993...
...Consequently, it has not been adequately recognized in our Modern Rome, suiting neither the popular market for history (too short, too clever, too few characters) nor the academic (no footnotes, no theory, too committed...
...Victims of variable worthiness, ranging from George Will and P.J...
...As I worked my way through these essays, I began to get a picture of Christopher Hitchens as a late-nineteenth-century radical-liberal, powered by the high-octane fuel of the Enlightenment— freethought, science, atheism, universalism and internationalism, hatred of ignorance and tyranny—yet also aware of the social question, the new injustices of mass society...
...Rumor has it that this thinly veiled contempt has lost a few more of its veils in his recent appearances on cable television...
...BLOOD, CLASS AND NOSTALGIA: ANGLO-AMERICAN IRONIES, by Christopher Hitchens...
...Hitchens has little taste for these latter tasks...
...FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT: ESSAYS AND MINORITY REPORTS, by Christopher Hitchens...
...In our own century, changes on both sides of the Atlantic have undermined the foundations of Anglophobia...
...Reaganism is derided as a three-credit-card trick...
...The main thrust of Christopher Hitchens's cultural history of the special relationship, Blood, Class and Nostalgia, is to remind us that Britain's position was hardly that of Greece to Rome...
...Harold Macmillan overdignified this function by describing it in public, around the time of Suez, as playing Greece to America's Rome: "The power has passed from us to Rome's equivalent . . . and we can at most aspire to civilize and occasionally to influence them...
...It came as no surprise to find, at the end of the volume, that George Eliot has a place in his pantheon...
...The Anglophilia that interests him has, after all, a very elevated but still limited constituency: it's been of more use in gluing the ruling caste together than in building a popular following...
...How meaningful could Kipling be to a democracy always composed overwhelmingly of non-WASPs, a people of whom even today only 10 percent so much as hold a passport...
...He has the decency to defend the Swedes' civic and social virtues...
...In contrast, most Americans had good reasons to hate the English, chiefly Irish reasons (at a time when the Irish were America's most vocal ethnic minority), republican reasons, and anti-imperial reasons...
...It does help, though, that upper-class WASPs still buzz around the foreign policy hive and that non-WASPs can don Harris tweed and Burberry as dignified fig-leaves for the naked interest that lies beneath...
...The New World Order is an order imposed by the New World...
...Similarly, I've always thought it interesting that James Baker wrote his undergraduate thesis on British foreign policy under Ernest Bevin, but he would hardly have advertised this on the campaign trail—as much because Bevin was a Brit as because he was a socialist...
...Hitchens hates all the modern devices aimed at plumbing public opinion—polls (which of course he uses when they suit him), talk-shows, new forms of politics like Perotism...
...But the cheerful respect accorded people in Bosnia, Romania, and Hungary rarely gets extended to Americans, who have had the misfortune to retain some control over their own destinies...
...Hitchens falls for neither...
...Kipling, for instance, played midwife to the American Empire by supplying Teddy Roosevelt with "The White Man's Burden" — subtitled "The United States and the Philippine Islands" —which conveniently found its way into the pages of the 294 • DISSENT Books New York Sun the day before the Senate voted on annexation of the Philippines...
...What is most brilliant in Hitchens's pretty brilliant book is his ability to show how much and how foolishly the practitioners of power politics in our century have valued their British cultural attaches...
...Over the fifty years between the Spanish-American and Second World Wars, the grudging, halting but inexorable baton-pass of imperial responsibilities forged a new and special relationship between the British and American governing classes...
...And Churchill himself, having failed to salvage his empire, cemented a British role in the new one by supplying the rhetoric of the Iron Curtain and of the "English-speaking world" that stood against it...
...Churchill's lasting significance in American history has not been as a world leader but as a tutor in the language of leadership: "a mere thesaurus of quotations for 'standing tall,' " Hitchens calls him...
...I liked very much his celebration of political renewal in Hungary, even though this means in the short term the alliance of the left with neoliberals and neocons...
...A further Anglo-American irony, of which Hitchens is no doubt all too aware: this is a very Greek book, supple, polished, emotional, convincing, a flashing gem of engaged contemporary history...
...On the insiders he is consistently sane and knowledgeable and, above all, highly readable...
...The same strengths and weaknesses are evident in Hitchens's latest collection of essays—they are too good, too durable to be called journalism...
...Still, neither can you chart an alternative political course without some grasp of, some measure of sympathy for American democracy...
...For public consumption, Baker had to speak a tougher language of cash and bombs...
...On the few occasions when he lowers his own dipstick into Middle America, it comes up cloudy, not to say greasy...
...American empire," Hitchens concedes with a note of disappointment, "tends to define itself in terms of strategic jargon rather than grand design and noble mission...
...The United States has an isolationist and insular culture, combined with a global and interventionist posture...
...16.95, paper...
...Poets may not be our unacknowledged legislators, but they can still be awfully useful to our acknowledged ones...
...Some further Kipling verses, even more hair-raising on the subject of imperial responsibility, appear to have been passed on to the next Roosevelt by Winston Churchill in October 1943, as part of his unsuccessful campaign to keep the British Empire together in the coming postwar settlement...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990...
...353 pp...
...O'Rourke to the neocons and Nixon, are all eviscerated with the same stylishness...
...27.95, cloth...
...beneath it always lies a perceptible moral foundation...
...However, successful contestation of this kind requires not only an unmasking of "superpower delusions" but a coming to grips with "provincial fears" —either by stoking them up, as the far right is wont to do, or by meeting, diagnosing, and assuaging them...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
