Hot, Cool, and Hitchens

This piece was written back in 1999. It's being reproduced here not to speak ill of the dead (something its subject, quite rightly, had no qualms about doing if the ill was bad enough), but to demur from its subject's recent elevation to sainthood. On the whole he made a positive contribution to the degenerate public discourse of our day by actually reasoning about important issues. But, as he argued himself, not even Mother Teresa is a saint.

When he appears on television Christopher Hitchens is supremely out of place. He is what McLuhan would call a hot figure. He exudes information. His hair is usually tousled, his clothes are often askew, and he has an opinion about everything. In other words, he ain't your common everyday well-groomed, grinning, platitudinous television "personality." Worst of all he is linear. When he opens his mouth what comes out is not a sound bite but an argument.

Television isn't good at communicating large amounts of information in linear fashion. Books are, though, and so we here in the literary department expected a better performance from Mr. Hitchens in his most recent book, No One Left to Lie To (Verso, 1999, 113 pp.).

Although his book is an attack on President Clinton we were not interested in it for partisan reasons. For one thing, we're not Americans, and since we cannot vote in American elections our opinions of American political leaders aren't even important to us. And as you will see, we found that we were neutral on the issues Mr. Hitchens raises. Anyway, what we were interested in was some effective communication, and what this review will discuss is Hitchens' success in communicating in a manner appropriate to his medium.

Mr. Hitchens can present linear analysis effectively in writing. We've read articles where he's done just that. Unfortunately, No One Left to Lie To is not an effective linear presentation.

Linear arguments are evaluated at each of their steps. Mr. Hitchens starts missing steps early on. First, he makes unsubstantiated accusations. Please note that we are not complaining about the specific accusations or arguing that Mr. Hitchens is necessarily mistaken. We are pointing out only that he doesn't justify his accusations. For example, Mr. Hitchens accuses Mr. Clinton of rape, without offering any reason to believe the accusation. He accuses Mr. Clinton of intimidating Kathleen Willey, but the only "evidence" he offers is an unsupported allegation which the reader has no way of verifying. These allegations are padded out with some implications of guilt by association.

Then the errors of fact start. The most serious involve matters of fact which Mr. Hitchens should know but gets wrong. Mr. Hitchens is a journalist. If he isn't an expert in the history of racial integration in the United States then he knows where to find out about it. Nevertheless, he dismisses Mr. Clinton's recollections of debating racial segregation as a young person by implying that racial integration was an accomplished and accepted fact in the United States by 1955! You do not need to be a historian to know, though, that segregation in public places was abolished only by the Civil Rights Act of  1964, the year in which Mr. Clinton turned 18, or that discrimination in housing was abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the year in which Mr. Clinton turned 22, and that if Mr. Clinton was not debating integration in those years, he was probably the only young person in America who wasn't.

Mr. Hitchens is probably not being disingenuous here. Publishing things he and everyone else know to be wrong is not in his interest. He just doesn't know what he's talking about, and he should. Mr. Hitchens can't even do simple arithmetic, or at least he can't be bothered to check his own arithmetic. On page 33 he describes Mr. Clinton taking a phone call that lasted from 12:42 pm to 1:04 pm. On the next page Mr. Hitchens says that Mr. Clinton talked on the phone during that call for at least half an hour. On page 36, he quotes a 1997 speech by President Clinton at a celebration of the anniversary of Jackie Robinson's entry into major league baseball. He notes that Mr. Robinson retired in 1956, when Mr. Clinton was nine (he turned ten in August, 1956). Mr. Hitchens then makes the astonishing claim that Mr. Robinson entered the major leagues when Mr. Clinton was six! Mr. Clinton was of course less than a year old at the time, as Mr. Hitchens' own exposition of the facts makes clear (unless, of course, he thought they were celebrating the forty-third anniversary of the integration of baseball in 1997).

By the time he is a third of the way through his slim volume, Mr. Hitchens seemed to have made his credibility disappear as quickly as Doug Henning used to get rid of that elephant. If the guy can't even subtract 1946 from 1947 and get the right answer, he's scarcely going to impress you with his analytical ability, right? If he's unaware of important events in recent history, he's scarcely going to impress you with either his mastery of his discipline or his concern for accuracy, right?

Well, wrong. The literary department had a look at some other reviews and found that they praised Hitchens if the reviewer didn't like President Clinton and attacked Hitchens (one even talks about a supposed drinking problem) if the reviewer liked President Clinton. The veracity of Hitchens' accusations and analyses was of little if any importance.

The simple explanation would be that these other reviewers didn't care about the facts, and that's likely. Disregard for the facts is a popular habit these days. To many people hatred of or admiration for President Clinton seem to offer psychological benefits, and they're not going to let the facts get in the way of those benefits. The literary department's concern for linearity and fact persuaded us that we must be neutral, and that Mr. Hitchens' book would be unpersuasive to anyone who does not already agree with him when they open it for the first time.

Even the best argued parts of the remainder of the book (and there are some, notably the section on welfare reform which appeared recently in the National Post) are rendered unpersuasive by his earlier demonstration of his disregard for accuracy. We found ourselves, while reading Mr. Hitchens' section about Lani Guinier, saying to myself "That's an interesting fact – well, if it's a fact."

In McLuhan's terms, Mr. Hitchens succeeds in converting a hot document into a cool one. The linearity of his argument is destroyed by his errors and vagueness, and instead of analyzing his argument logically his reader starts to try, as one does with cool media, to interpret Mr. Hitchens. If you like his opinions, you decide he's the greatest figure to grace the world of letters since Johnson. If you don't like him, you mention, as one review did, that he doesn't conceal his chest hair well enough to satisfy the reviewer.

As for us neutrals, we asked ourselves why Hitchens wrote the book. The most likely explanation seemed to be that he was simply trying to justify himself in his falling-out with Sidney Blumenthal. The most reasonable and linear conclusion, though, is that we just don't know why he wrote it. However, because Mr. Hitchens has produced a cool document rather than a hot one we keep on trying to figure out why he wrote it. Hey – maybe he's a narcissist! Maybe he owes someone a favour! Maybe he's as intellectually sloppy as he is sartorially sloppy! Maybe....

Because Hitchens ended up with a cool presentation, all the reviews (including this one) focus on him to an unusual degree, a phenomenon which follows from the analysis presented here. Mr. Hitchens' book is as much about him as it is about President Clinton. All Mr. Hitchens communicates, despite the parts of the book in which he actually argues effectively, is that he doesn't like President Clinton. He pleases those who don't like President Clinton, displeases those who do, and fails to convert anyone to his way of thinking. He might as well just have aimed at his foot.

Hot, Cool, and Hitchens © John FitzGerald, 1999