An Envoi for Christopher Hitchens
At the Pearly Gates
On April 20 there’s a memorial for Christopher Hitchens at the
Cooper Union in Manhattan. There’s a PEN tribute, also in Manhattan, on
April 30. Here’s my own little envoi. The regular Diary, tumbrils and
all, will resume next week.
SCENE ONE
Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque
style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed
in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is
about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers.
CH Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to
encounter here. All
the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports
of your demise.
HK You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed
alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically,
assess the odds.
CH You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?
HK Everything is open to negotiation.
CH Have you threatened to bomb Heaven — secretly of course?
HK Very funny. As a matter of fact, Woytila — Pope John Paul II, I
should say — has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And
talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.
CH What about?
HK That worthless book you wrote about me — The Trial of Henry Kissinger.
John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing
up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it
would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign this affidavit — my
lawyers have already prepared it — saying that you unconditionally
withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war
criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were
forced on you by your Harper’s editors.
CH Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!
HK Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how
shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I
believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.
CH Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate…
HK My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the
matter as mature adults — both of us, if I may say, now in potentially
challenging circumstances.
CH Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as
Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe
in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second
hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson
hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I
have not dropped off the perch.
HK Off the perch… How very English. You will dismiss these as a
mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your
part, but (flourishes bundle of newspapers) The New York Times certainly thinks you’re dead. The Washington Post thinks you’re dead.
CH Let me look at those… (snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently)
HK Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.
CH They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine…. I… I… (passes hand over brow) Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?
HK Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (pulls a large flask from his pocket). Some schnapps?
CH I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm. (drinks)
HK Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the
world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel
Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a
stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?
CH He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”
HK Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I
may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another
pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called The Missionary Position.
CH Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.
HK The “old slag”, as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part
of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul
II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in
libraries and all over the Internet. She, like me, would dearly love to
see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.
CH And that, of course, I will not do!
HK You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?
CH Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake
in the Campo de Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with
Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe
is infinite.
HK Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.
He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw
open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room. HK
makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near
the space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment
there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room.
CH Great God!
HK You seem to have reverted to religious belief with startling speed.
CH No, no. It was purely a façon de parler. Not a pretty sight.
HK But in your view, a pure hallucination, nein? No need to kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson.
Before CH can answer, the fallen angels seize him and start
dragging him toward the open curtains. They are about to hurl him into
the pit, when…
ST. MICHAEL (suddenly appearing through the gates of Heaven) Stop!
He hands CH and HK tickets.
These are one-day passes to Heaven. In Mr. Hitchens’ case, for
purposes of interrogation by the Board of Inquiry and Final Judgment.
Exeunt St. Michael, HK and CH through ornate gilded doors to Heaven.
SCENE TWO
Heaven. A vast Baroque gallery, in which an animated throng is enjoying itself in something closely resembling a cocktail party.
ST. MICHAEL We’ve just remodeled. Before, we had something in the
Gothic style, but the feeling was that in keeping with the times there
should be more gold, more sense of extravagant illusion. And that of
course brought us to the Baroque. You will no doubt detect many echoes
of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.
HK I think I see His Holiness John Paul II, over there. With your permission, I might have a word?
ST. MICHAEL Of course. And Mr. Hitchens, before we get to the Board
of Inquiry, I’m sure there are some immortals you’d like to tip your
hat to.
CH The hat is all very well, but….
ST. MICHAEL How forgetful of me! In general we’re an abstemious crowd here, but there’s no ban on moderate enjoyment.
A cherub swoops down, proffering a well-stocked tray.
CH (gulping down one glass quickly and taking another) Angel!
POPE PIUS V (joining the group) Michael, I couldn’t help
overhearing your reference to the Palazzo Colonna, built in the late
seventeenth century, and of course memorable for the marvelous
depictions on the ceiling of its Grand Gallery of the Battle of Lepanto
in 1571, our Holy League’s historic defeat of the Ottomans.
CH Ha! The wily Turk, lurking like a cobra ’midst the fairest
flowers of God’s creation, lies ever ready to pounce upon the
unsuspecting traveler and bugg…
PIUS V I don’t believe I’ve had the honor.
ST. MICHAEL This is Mr. Hitchens, a British-American writer here on a possibly brief visit. And (to CH) this is St. Pius V, who indeed occupied the Holy See at the time of Lepanto.
CH (theatrical bow) The honor is mine.
PIUS V Those were the days, when the wind was truly at our backs!
210 ships of the Ottoman armada — almost their entire fleet — sent to
the bottom of the Gulf of Patras; the Counter Reformation in full spate;
the Council of Trent a magnificent success; heresy confronted and
extirpated by our Inquisitors.
CH The screams of their victims no doubt inaudible amid the general brays of triumph.
PIUS V Speaking as a former Inquisitor, let me say that by modern
standards of bloodshed consequent upon religious or ideological
conflicts, the number of those who perished by reason of their adamant
heresy was startlingly small. Have you kept up with recent scholarship
on the topic? I thought not. Out of 62,000 cases judged by the
Inquisition in Italy after 1542, only 1,250 ended with death sentences.
The Spanish Inquisition held an average of 350 trials a year between
1560-1700 and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people.
CH (snatching two more glasses from the tray of a passing cherub)
I do not propose to stand silently here, your so-called Holiness, and
endure from a dotard in a white petticoat filthy apologias for atrocious
barbarism in the name of his so-called God.
ST. MICHAEL Mr. Hitchens! I suggest you moderate your language immediately.
PIUS V (walking away) Brutto insolente, ignorante, ubriacone pieno di merda!
MOTHER TERESA (approaching, with Pope
John Paul II; HK lurking discreetly)
Brutto insolente, indeed! Mr. Hitchens, I understand from Dr. Kissinger
that you are prepared to repudiate your libels upon me.
CH Certainly not.
JOHN PAUL II But why not? After all, your arguments against the
Blessed Teresa were either trivial or absurd, and in all instances
morally odious. To focus on the latter: by 1996, the Blessed Teresa was
operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. And you, what were
you doing for the poor? Would a starving person near death be more
likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from
Christopher Hitchens?
CH I have never had pretensions to be in the professional charity business.
MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE If I may intrude. Of course, as a great admirer
of Mother Teresa, I was in receipt of Mr. Hitchens’ barbs, so I do speak
as a biased witness. I regard it as truly extraordinary that while Mr.
Hitchens was blithely ladling his sewage over our heads, he was — as a
sometime US correspondent, I have followed these matters closely from
here in Heaven — a fierce and influential advocate of one of the most
violent onslaughts on the poor in recent historical memory: first, the
sanctions on Iraq, which caused untold misery to Iraq’s poorest
citizens; then the actual attack of 2003, which eventually prompted the
deaths of over a million Iraqis and a crisis that still virtually
paralyses that wretched nation.
CH I would not change a syllable of what I wrote.
MM Worse still — I speak also as someone who reported from the
Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule — Mr. Hitchens displayed himself as a
craven apparatchik of the Bush White House, actually going to 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue the night before the invasion to give a pep talk to
the President’s staff about their noble mission.
Since Beatrice Webb was my wife’s aunt, I am intimately familiar with
the follies of socialists. You, in your contempt for “lesser”
cultures, remind me of the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, who
argued that to oppose Rhodes’s suppression of the Matabele uprising was
to oppose “the spread of civilization”, and that “the higher culture
always has the greater right on its side over the lower; if necessary it
has the historical right, yea, the duty, to subjugate it.”
CH The mission to Baghdad was noble: the eviction of a filthy tyrant…
MM …was worth the denial of medicine and medical equipment for
babies, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis into near
starvation, the creation of millions of internal refugees plus those who
managed to flee the country, the unleashing of sectarian bloodshed on
an unparalleled scale? Just so that your hero, Tony Blair, and your
supreme leader, Mr. Bush, could boast, “Mission Accomplished”?
CH Since His Holiness St. Pius V, who has departed the field of
disputation, was invoking the Battle of Lepanto, I’m surprised not to
hear any parallels drawn between that engagement and the Crusade against
Islam, of which the war in Iraq — and the terror axis of Hussein and
Osama — was a significant element.
MM You mean your precious crusade against so-called
“Islamo-fascism”, the bizarre coinage of a Trotskyite, such as you once
were? Lepanto at least saw the Ottoman armada, and the unfortunate
slaves who rowed their galleys, sent to the bottom of the sea. Your
crusade in Iraq saw the triumph of the Shi’a, and a significant victory
for Iran. With Vice President Cheney you must be the last two men alive
who believe in the Hussein/Osama axis.
JOHN PAUL II The Holy See strongly opposed the war. Before it
began, I sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to tell Bush it would be a disaster and
would destroy human life. The war was useless, served no purpose and
was a defeat for humanity. Such was my view, which was the recorded
opinion of the Holy See.
MM Surely, a more humane posture than your own hosannas to cluster
bombs: “Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out
the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say,
‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and, guess what, the missile
stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that
as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”
CH Rather well put, if I say so myself.
MM You are impervious to rebuke, which is not surprising, since if
one rebuke is let in the door, it can usher in another, and then some
serious inner reflection may become unavoidable. As Cardinal Newman put
it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”
CH Newman, that old queen!
MM Like St. Pius, I’ll quit the field now, but let me return to
something His Holiness John Paul II said. “Would a starving person near
death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed
Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?”
What has constantly struck me is the desolate sterility of your
atheism. We had atheists in our generation, of course, but they lived in
a world and consorted with people for whom religion had profound
meaning, often inspiring them to acts of nobility and extraordinary
self-sacrifice. In your book, religious people are stupid. But they
weren’t stupid, and the atheists — I’m thinking of my dear friend, a man
you profess to have admired, Claud Cockburn — didn’t deride them, but
cheerfully swapped quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. The context
was one of respect and mutual striving for a better world.
What sort of moral leadership did you, the great and ultimately
rather wealthy exponent of atheism display? Extreme disloyalty to close
friends, constant public drunkenness and brutish rudeness, particularly
to women, and a life, if I may say so, of almost psychotic
self-centeredness and exhibitionism. You had your claque — Messrs Amis,
Fenton and the others — and their energies in promoting you as a major
intellectual and stylist were unceasing, and in their somewhat
homoerotic loyalty, rather touching, but I don’t think the verdict of
history will be quite so kind.
SCENE THREE
Antechamber to Heaven. CH is sitting on a bench. Door opens and St. Michael bids HK a cheerful goodbye.
HK Mr. Hitchens. You seem somewhat subdued. (proffering flask) A little schnapps?
CH My dear fellow! (drinks deeply) You arranged your affairs successfully?
HK Entirely so. In large part owing to you. Pope John Paul II and
Mother Teresa, not to mention St. Pius V, were so shocked by your views
and by your language that they entirely discounted the charges you
leveled against me, and believe me to have been vilely traduced.
CH I suppose I should be glad to have been of service. But let me
ask a question: since you are Jewish, why would you be taking such
trouble to build up contacts in what is clearly a Christian Heaven?
HK Between ourselves, I am preparing for a final conversion and
absolution. Jews are vague about heaven and, after a lifetime’s
observation, I am inclined to think that the atmosphere in Gehenna would
be extremely acrimonious. Your plans?
CH Once again, I feel it necessary to insist that I do not
recognize myself as being in Heaven, or disputing with a
sixteenth-century pope, or indeed being reprimanded by St. Michael and
Malcolm Muggeridge. Or talking affably with Henry Kissinger. So, please,
regard this as ongoing cerebral activity on the part of C.H. Hitchens,
patient at M.D. Anderson.
HK As you wish. But here, (slips him the flask) just remember Dr. Johnson’s stone. Farewell, my friend.
Lights fade to a dark red.
END
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com
