Get in the ring

• Christopher Hitchens vs. David Mamet in the New York Times.

Fight!

Mamet began the book more promisingly, by undertaking to review political disagreements between conservatives and liberals in the light of his own craft: “This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.”

That was certainly Hegel’s definition of what constituted a tragedy. From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise. This would have allowed Mamet to make excursions into the fields of irony and unintended consequences, which is precisely where many of the best critiques of utopianism have originated. Unfortunately, though, he shows himself tone-deaf to irony and unable to render a fair picture of what his opponents (and, sometimes, his preferred authorities, like Hayek) really believe. Quoting Deepak Chopra, of all people, as saying, “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based,” he seizes the chance to ask, “Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of liberalism, ‘Stop Thinking’?” On that evidence, yes, it would be a bit much.

Hitch on Yates

• Christopher Hitchens reviews Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road in The Atlantic Monthly (via Powell's).

Frank and April Wheeler are the reverse of the unhappy family in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. They have already tasted the fruits and sweets of the big city, and qualified as urban -- perhaps better say urbane -- sophisticates. But you know how it is. Pregnancy comes to April a teeny bit earlier than had been anticipated (or desired), and the distressing need to earn some actual money is then imposed upon Frank, who must martyr his aestheticism to the brute requirements of "the firm." Soon enough the days become regulated by the commute and, of course, by the needs of the children.

Even so, the lost Bohemia of their Greenwich Village period will not be denied, and before too long Frank and April are smilingly condescending to help out a local troupe called, with brilliant ominousness, the Laurel Players. They decide to build up the spirit of community theater with a production of "The Petrified Forest." I shall simply say that I don't remember ever feeling so sorry for a set of fictional characters. If Yates had one talent above all, it was for conveying the feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, heavily infused with the sort of embarrassment that amounts to humiliation. As the full horror of the first night, and the full catastrophe of April's own performance, become apparent, Yates catches the ghastly moment by writing, "The virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted now."

Hitchens on Potter

• Christopher Hitchens reviews the final Harry Potter opus in The New York Times.

Not as slashing as you might think, although half the time he's rattling on about everything but the book:

For all this apparently staunch secularism, it is ontology that ultimately slackens the tension that ought to have kept these tales vivid and alive. Theologians have never been able to answer the challenge that contrasts God’s claims to simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence: whence then cometh evil? The question is the same if inverted in a Manichean form: how can Voldemort and his wicked forces have such power and yet be unable to destroy a mild-mannered and rather disorganized schoolboy? In a short story this discrepancy might be handled and also swiftly resolved in favor of one outcome or another, but over the course of seven full-length books the mystery, at least for this reader, loses its ability to compel, and in this culminating episode the enterprise actually becomes tedious. Is there really no Death Eater or dementor who is able to grasp the simple advantage of surprise?

Seers and madmen

• Malcolm Gladwell gets profiled by the New York Times.

I admit, it does make me nervous when writers become more famed for their personalities than their work, but hell, if you can get a lucrative side career making $40K per speech and still get to call yourself a writer, then so be it.

• Editorial writers dismiss Islamic-fundamentalist foolishness.

I’m thankful that people now have something more constructive to debate than James Frey. At Slate, ol’ Hitchens lets off a glorious tirade:

I am not asking for the right to slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a "holy" book. But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object. It is revolting to me to breathe the same air as wafts from the exhalations of the madrasahs, or the reeking fumes of the suicide-murderers, or the sermons of Billy Graham and Joseph Ratzinger. But these same principles of mine also prevent me from wreaking random violence on the nearest church, or kidnapping a Muslim at random and holding him hostage, or violating diplomatic immunity by attacking the embassy or the envoys of even the most despotic Islamic state, or making a moronic spectacle of myself threatening blood and fire to faraway individuals who may have hurt my feelings. The babyish rumor-fueled tantrums that erupt all the time, especially in the Islamic world, show yet again that faith belongs to the spoiled and selfish childhood of our species.

At Spiegel Online, “Ibn Warraq” takes a stand as well:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

More on Arthur Koestler

• Christopher Hitchens champions Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon at Slate.

Koestler's political seesawing would make a great book in and of itself. Hitchens, of course, is more concerned with Koestler's political writings, in particular his essay in The God That Failed, in which Koestler struck out against Communism as practiced by the Stalinist regime. Towards the end of his life Koestler attempted to blur the line between "hard" science and metaphysics, which led some to believe that he'd simply gone off his rocker (not a surprise, since he was also experimenting with LSD, telepathy, levitation and parapsychology). The thing that's attractive about those later writings, though, is the Thoreau-esque sense that spirituality and science need not exist in strict separation; Koestler believed that the processes of each were reflective of the other, and he had the ability to walk you through his ideas without making you feel like you were being talked down to. That, or he bluffed awfully well. In either case, Hitchens makes an interesting case for Koestler's early writing career and how it was defined by his ever-evolving political beliefs. (See my profile of Koestler from August.)