Fwd: Hitchens interview

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Jim Beha
> To: American Constitution Society at NYU Law
> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:32:19 -0500
> Subject: Hitchens interview
> It's been brought to my attention by a couple of people that the
> Christopher Hitchens interview I forwarded earlier is only available
> to subscribers to the Atlantic. If you're interested, I've pasted the
> text below.
> Regards,
> JJB
>
> The hostility toward Christopher Hitchens from certain members of the
> political left is presently immeasurable. The writer and activist
> Tariq Ali has called him a "vile replica" of his former self.
> Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation—a position Hitchens
> himself held until he quit in 2002—has accused him of "frothing
> crudity." The writer Dennis Perrin has published an "obituary" of his
> former mentor in radical politics. And the leftist critic George
> Scialabba has written that Hitchens has been making an "egregious ass
> of himself."
>
> What has made Hitchens—the journalist, critic, lecturer, and
> self-proclaimed "contrarian"—into the object of such vociferous scorn
> is his muscular support for the war in Iraq. Soon after September 11,
> with the Pentagon (not far from his Washington home) in ruins,
> Hitchens became arguably the most prominent American journalistic
> opponent of Saddam's regime. And since that time he has focused the
> bulk of his famously voluminous energy on making the legal, moral, and
> political case for war. Coming from a mainstay of the radical press,
> this turn has been perceived by some as apostasy and by others as
> symbolic of the ideological differences that currently divide the
> American left—and gallons of ink have therefore been spilled in an
> attempt to analyze the political "defection" of Christopher Hitchens.
>
> In one sense, the Hitchens-watchers see a great deal more
> discontinuity than actually exists. In 1989, when the Ayatollah
> Khomeini sentenced Hitchens's close friend Salman Rushdie to death,
> Hitchens became finely attuned to, and repulsed by, Islamic
> fundamentalism. He was a supporter of the American bombing of Serbia,
> in 1999, when many on the left opposed it, and of the idea that the
> United States military could be a force for positive change. Most
> fundamentally, Hitchens has had a long-stated and intense hatred for
> organized religion—and for unorganized religion as well—an aspect of
> his personality that many commentators miss, but one that plays a
> central part in his political worldview. September 11 gave focus to
> these already present convictions.
>
> In another sense, however, there has been an obvious shift in the
> nature of Hitchens's discourse. Though his work remains as biting, as
> committed to Enlightenment ideals, and as elegant as ever, it has also
> become decidedly and self-consciously single-minded. During the run-up
> to the 2004 election, Hitchens proudly declared himself a "one-issue"
> voter. That issue was Iraq, and his obvious scorn for those who
> opposed military intervention. Very little has seeped through this new
> scrim—not critiques of economic globalization, nor of American
> imperialism, nor of the Bush Administration's evasiveness and
> mendacity. And these conspicuous absences have lent critics of
> Hitchens's work a great deal of fuel, and their criticisms a
> noticeable, often condescending, anger.
>
> If the Hitchens backlash and Hitchens's own combativeness are in part
> emblematic of the riven state of leftist politics, they have also
> served to drown out a great deal of Hitchens's other work. Though he
> is first and foremost a political writer—well-known for his polemics
> on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa—Hitchens is also
> an accomplished literary critic (he is a reviewer for this magazine,
> among other publications). It is a role the eclipse of which he
> sometimes laments. But not too loudly. With Hitchens there are always
> more pressing things to shout about, and very little into which
> politics does not enter.
>
> I spoke with Hitchens by phone on December 20 on the occasion of the
> publication of his latest book, a collection of essays and reviews
> titled Love, Poverty, and War.
>
> —Daniel Smith
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> Christopher Hitchens
>
> I have several subjects I want to ask you about—for example, Mayor
> Bloomberg, politics, God. But first I want to ask you about Mayor
> Bloomberg playing God. In a Vanity Fair essay that's reprinted in this
> volume, you call New York a "nanny state." More pointedly you call
> Bloomberg a "picknose control freak." Are your complaints regarding
> New York politics rooted in the city's recent smoking ban, or are they
> based on a broader complaint about mayoral policies?
>
> In the essay you're talking about I accuse Bloomberg of "penis envy"
> for Rudy Giuliani and the former New York police chief William
> Bratton, both of whom made a point about zero tolerance in the matter
> of crime and delinquency. Bloomberg hoping, I think, to gain some
> reputation, applied that attitude to behaviors that are not really
> antisocial—old people feeding pigeons, for example, or people sitting
> on milk crates on the sidewalk, or standing outside their own place of
> employment. Those policies demonstrate a mentality of insecurity and
> ambition and pseudo-zeal. But undoubtedly you're right. The thing that
> more than symbolizes Bloomberg for me is the ban on smoking. It's
> moved a sensible aim—namely, the protection of nonsmokers from
> smoke—into behavior modification.
>
> At one point, for instance, Bloomberg actually sent police around to
> the Vanity Fair offices, on what must have been a tip-off from someone
> in the building, to stop [Editor-in-chief] Graydon Carter and I from
> having a cigarette. At a later time they came when Graydon was on
> vacation because on his unoccupied desk, in his empty office, was a
> receptacle that might have been usable for an ashtray. Now, this is
> the sort of thing one laughs about. But if they'd had cops to spare
> for this sort of thing, and if they're going to rely on anonymous
> informers and do this to people who aren't even present, then it
> doesn't take much alteration to that anecdote to make it sound rather
> nasty. You tip things just a little further and you're living in a
> very unpleasant country.
>
> A lesser objection I have is simply that it makes bar owners and
> bartenders and waiters into de facto enforcers of the law. The law
> inverts the relationship between host and guest. It's a small thing,
> but it has kind of spoiled New York for me. I went out to a restaurant
> recently in Union Square—it was a very cold day, but my friends and I
> decided we would sit outside anyway so that we could have a smoke and
> not bother anybody. They said, "You can't do that." Why not? "Because
> you're underneath an awning. We have a table that's completely
> unprotected from the weather, just outside the awning. You can sit
> there if you like." And this all occurred before they told us what the
> specials were! Now, if you can't put up a shingle that says, "This is
> McShane's Old Irish Lodge, and if you don't like cigarette smoke you
> can stay the fuck out of my bar," then something essential about the
> whole idea of New York is gone.
>
> But wasn't it Mayor Giuliani who introduced that authoritarian
> atmosphere into the city?
>
> Yes, but he had the justification of law and order. Or at least what
> he did had an aura of defensibility. Bloomberg's is simply
> state-enforced behavior modification. I'm appalled by that. The whole
> point of moving to New York used to be that there wasn't anyone
> saying, "Don't wear this," or "Don't smoke that." It was nobody's
> business.
>
> In general I've found that over the past few years what you might call
> libertarian issues mean more to me. Something has gone wrong with the
> liberal mentality. What used to be diversity, or could claim to be,
> has mutated into conformism in a rather sinister way.
>
> The way you're speaking about the New York smoking ban as
> government-sponsored behavior modification seems very much in line
> with your writings about totalitarian states. But I'm tempted first to
> ask whether you think the Bush Administration has anything to do with
> a wider undercutting of libertarian concerns.
>
> The Republican coalition appears to have created a new political
> constituency that's made up of quite a number of free-market
> libertarian types. Many of those people were anti-authoritarian types
> in the sixties, and they now make up part of the new right. Another
> part of the new right is made up of moralists, and another—as
> always—is made up of law-and-order types. (Some members of that third
> category have been attracted to it as a result of jihadism.) But there
> the problem is the willingness of people to surrender their rights
> rather than the state's eagerness to take them away.
>
> So you don't put any stock in the contention that the Bush
> Administration has watered down civil rights in the name of protecting
> America?
>
> The antiwar left made a huge thing about saying that Bush ignored too
> many warnings before September 11. But from the way they've reacted
> since, one would presume that they would have protested if he had
> taken the steps necessary to forestall the problem. I think what
> everyone ought to do at the basic minimum here is admit that there are
> contradictions in their position.
>
> I recently wrote a review in The New York Times of professor Geoffrey
> Stone's book, Perilous Times, about free speech in wartime. His book
> shows, among other things, that a lot of the liberal panic is just
> that, because wartime incursions into free speech never last very
> long. Very often they are repealed in such a way that one has more
> freedoms than one had before, not less. There hasn't been a speech
> prosecution in a time of war in the U.S. for a very long time now, and
> not one since September 11. The precedents that were established in
> the sixties with the antiwar movement would be very, very hard to
> overturn. The presumption now is that you can say whatever you like in
> wartime. That was not the case at all, for example, in the thirties.
>
> But there is no foreseeable end to this particular war.
>
> Once it's defined as terrorism that's true. But I'm against defining
> it as a war on terrorism. And I also insist that the most oppressive
> piece of legislation, the one under which most of the more arbitrary
> prosecutions have occurred, is the Clinton Administration's so-called
> Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which, among other
> things, put capital punishment on the fast track so as to shorten the
> appeals procedure. It led to a terrible speedup of executions. That
> very oppressive piece of legislation was done merely in response to
> the Oklahoma City bombing. So what I said in my review of the Stone
> book is that it ought to be a principle that no legislation should be
> passed within six months of any atrocity.
>
> Staying with Iraq and your support of the war there, what about other
> regimes that clearly pose a risk to the United States? North Korea,
> for one. How do you apply the logic of regime change in Iraq to the
> rest of the world?
>
> North Korea has threatened the invasion of South Korea; it's starving
> its own people to death; it's repeatedly caught sponsoring
> international terrorism; and it's obviously violating the
> Non-Proliferation Treaty. But North Korea has us in a stranglehold
> that Saddam didn't. We've let things get to the point where North
> Korea can—and might, given what we know of the nature of its
> regime—destroy the capital city of South Korea if we make a move
> against it. If we were an imperialist state we wouldn't give a shit
> about that. We'd just say, It's in our interest if the North Korean
> regime ceases to exist—too bad if South Korea ends up getting blown
> up. But we can't do that.
>
> So essentially it's a military calculation?
>
> Yes. The calculation made by the Administration—in my opinion, quite
> rightly—was that we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get to the
> point where he could say, like Kim Jong Il, "Come and get me if you'd
> like, but look what I've got." Of course, Saddam was continually
> trying to get into that position.
>
> Does your belief in the validity of the military effort in Iraq pose
> any problem to your belief in the importance of the military effort in
> Afghanistan? Do you think, as many people argue, that the war in Iraq
> has distracted from the military effort in Afghanistan?
>
> I've simply never heard anyone say that the job in Afghanistan needs
> more people. And it doesn't look as if it does. I mean, the Taliban
> and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan are totally negligible militarily.
> It's a police operation. Afghanistan is now run by NATO. It's the
> strongest military alliance in the history of the world. That's the
> first thing. The second is that it would have been very unwise to say
> in advance that, "Given our engagement in Afghanistan, alas we are
> unable to do anything about Iraq." I don't think that's exactly what
> one should have been telling Saddam Hussein. Many people seem to think
> now that there was no threat of weaponry or terrorism from that
> quarter. I regard that belief as utterly fantastic. Because I'm an old
> left-sectarian street fighter, I happen to remember that most of the
> people who are saying this are the same people who were not in favor
> of invading Afghanistan either. They said it would be a quagmire like
> Vietnam and a graveyard of ambition as it was for Russia and Britain.
> I remember thinking that was nonsense at the time. Everyone now says
> that of course they thought all along that military action in
> Afghanistan would be great. No, they didn't! They hope that people
> will forget. They hope in vain in my case. I will never let them
> forget what they said.
>
> I know you won't. But setting aside whatever one believes about the
> military rectitude of the war in Iraq, what about the argument, which
> seems well-founded, that it has increased opportunities for terrorism
> in Iraq?
>
> Well, that's based on the assumption that al-Qaeda is in itself a
> response to the sins of omission or commission by the West. That's not
> true. The Administration had to find a legal and international
> justification for kicking out a keystone regime in the Middle East in
> order to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world. It needed to
> be done. But one couldn't just say, "Well, after an attack like
> September 11 we're going to have to alter the balance of power in the
> region." I wouldn't have minded if they had said that, but if you're
> going to go to the UN, you have to phrase it as if you're talking
> about something else. But let's just recognize, without being too
> Straussian or Machiavellian, that all politics is a bit like that. I
> do not believe, for example, that the First World War was declared
> because of the British belief that Belgian neutrality should be
> guaranteed. I don't think so.
>
> But my question was about the success of the occupation, about the
> so-called liberation of Iraq. In recent weeks, the attacks on the
> Administration have been growing in this regard. Do you think the
> occupation is working?
>
> The forces are in a position where they could withdraw if they wished,
> which is an unusual position for an occupier. They could say to the
> Iraqis and their neighbors, "We don't have to be here if we don't want
> to. It's not absolutely essential to us. We can leave. Do you really
> want this to happen? If you unanimously say that you do, and you want
> it to happen now, we could accommodate you. Are you sure that's what
> you want?" I think the same should be said to those who characterize
> this as a debacle. I think they should be forced to ask themselves
> very carefully, Do we in any way secretly hope that the occupation
> fails? Are we aware of what that would mean?
>
> One thing we definitely know is what would happen to Iraq if the
> coalition withdrew or were defeated. I don't believe I would get any
> argument from anyone about that. And it would not just be a defeat for
> Bush and Cheney. It would not just be a defeat for the
> neoconservatives. I think it should be taken a lot more seriously than
> it is.
>
> You're referring to the possibility of defeat?
>
> Yes, and the wish on the part of many people who claim to be
> antiwar—and who therefore presumably are also humanitarians—that the
> occupation fail.
>
> I was quite shocked by the number of people in mainstream Democratic
> politics who said to me, "I don't mind what happens in Iraq so long as
> Bush is defeated" without any ambivalence. I find that very
> objectionable. I spend a good deal of my life at the moment fighting
> that mentality. It's very common here—it's extremely common in Europe.
>
> I suppose we should move on to other issues. A lot of the book—
>
> I can see we haven't gotten past the "War" section yet.
>
> No, I had a feeling that was going to happen. I probably shouldn't
> have started with "War."
>
> I'm used to it, but it makes me slightly sad.
>
> What does?
>
> That most of my interviewers want to do this, though I realize I can't
> really complain. I have advertised a certain view of the situation,
> and banged on about it a lot.
>
> I'd hoped to avoid that trap. This book, after all, is only partially
> about Iraq.
>
> Well, what I hope I was telling you was not what I thought, but how I
> thought, which is more important.
>
> Well, that's a good segue into one of the big subjects of this
> collection, which is religion. You've been trying to argue against the
> dangers of religious belief for many years. But reading this book, it
> strikes me that your critique of religion is based much more on the
> hypocrisy of its adherents—and perhaps on a sort of Enlightenment
> desire for evidence—than on the experience of faith. Do you have any
> respect for the individual who professes a more personal faith based
> on, say, the "oceanic feeling"?
>
> Well, first off, I'm not, as people sometimes claim me to be, an
> atheist. I'm an anti-theist. I think the influence of religious belief
> is horrible. Take Garry Wills, for example. I have read him with great
> profit on many subjects (and have learned from reading him and from
> disagreeing with him on quite a number of topics). But when he gets
> into writing about, say, the spirituality of St. Augustine, it becomes
> white noise. All his standards completely collapse. He's not scholarly
> about it, and he's not even expected to be. How could he know about
> St. Augustine's spirituality? But there he is writing about it, as
> though it were something we all agreed about. And what's true of him
> is true of our species in general—we are only partly rational. We do
> have the reasoning faculty, but when we abandon it for a second, the
> result is something like Garry Wills's driveling on about St.
> Augustine.
>
> Your basic objection to religion, however, seems less experiential
> than it is political. You object in this book not to individual
> belief, but to the politicization of belief.
>
> Listen, if a child tells me he's seen a ghost, I'll say, "Well, I'm
> sure you did, but I don't think I'll be able to see it myself, and I
> don't think it's really there, though I do think you must have a very
> vivid imagination." However, if a grown-up says "I've just a heard a
> voice telling me what to do," what they really mean is "I can now tell
> you what to do." That's what I don't like. What I noticed when I was a
> kid wasn't just that what the headmaster was preaching at sermon time
> was rubbish (which was easy to see), it was also that it seemed very
> important that the headmaster be able to invest his otherwise rather
> feeble authority with religious authority. In other words, I could see
> already when I was eight that religion is used to say, "You better
> listen to what I say. My power is not just of this world. I have
> divine right." That's where you have to say, "Say that again and I'll
> burn your church." That's fascism. I loathe it. And I tend to loathe
> the people who believe it, because they are making a claim on me.
>
> This is how I explained your so-called defection from the left to a
> friend recently—that in order to understand your political views one
> has to understand your views of religion.
>
> Actually, it makes my day to hear you say that. The thought that
> someone else was there to say it for me cheers me up. It means that I
> haven't wasted my time completely. I don't see how anyone who reads me
> could miss that. But they do.
>
> It seems hard to miss. You refer in the introduction to this book, for
> example, to your "cold, steely hatred" for religion.
>
> It's the root of my whole existence as a writer—to destroy the
> illusions that arise from faith. And only some of those illusions are
> religious, which means that I'll never be out of business. There'll
> always be work to do.
>
> And yet, in an exchange with Jim Fallows elsewhere on this Web site
> you complain about being called an "attack dog." Is that an epithet
> that continues to bother you?
>
> I guess I shouldn't really complain, because at least it means I have
> a reputation for something. It must be the same if you're a
> politician—you make one remark and it ends up being the thing that
> people remember about you. I suppose Dan Quayle must have to force
> himself to laugh along with all those people who make potato jokes.
> When people introduce me by saying something like, "This is the guy
> who said Mother Teresa is no good," I just have to suppress a sigh.
>
> I just thought one day, after I'd run into Mother Teresa in Calcutta,
> Has anyone ever taken a second look at this woman? Is it possible that
> what we believe about her isn't in fact true? And then it was just too
> easy. I couldn't believe that people had left this field to me.
>
> My book about Clinton was another case. I was writing strictly as a
> left polemicist, trying to point out to liberals, If you think this
> guy is your friend, you're setting yourself up for a terrible beating.
> I wrote that book essentially as an appeal to the left to see that
> this guy is a reactionary and a thug and that in the end he would do
> immense, lasting damage to what was left of the American liberal and
> democratic constituency. And I think I will be vindicated on that if I
> haven't been already.
>
> And Henry Kissinger ... I mean, good grief! The idea of his
> tolerability has long been—intolerable. It was right when I finally
> decided to write a book about him that I found out by accident that he
> was afraid of being prosecuted in the course of the Pinochet
> investigation. And I thought, Well, now I know how I can write it—as a
> trial document.
>
> Any closer to prosecutorial success?
>
> Oh, yes, all the time. I can say this for myself: I know that I have
> slightly inconvenienced Henry Kissinger and caused some changes in his
> schedule. And I think I may also have changed how his obituary will be
> written. He will die realizing that the obits he was once certain of
> will not be written in that way anymore. Judge Le Loire, the
> magistrate who summoned him to Paris in 2001, did so as a result of my
> book being translated into French. The authorities decided to try to
> get a hold of him for questioning, and he had to run for it. And I
> know further that he was very upset when I sued him.
>
> For calling you an anti-Semite.
>
> Yes. He actually apologized with amazing alacrity on that. It was a
> very grudging apology, but it was enough. He was made to retract his
> statement. First, through his lawyer, he said, "Okay, I promise never
> to say it again." And I said, "That's not good enough; you have to say
> you shouldn't have said it the first time."
>
> Publicly?
>
> Well, I published the correspondence. It's on my Web site. I didn't
> put an ad in The New York Times. Maybe I should have. The truth was
> that I was hoping he wouldn't apologize, that he'd say, "I'll see you
> in court." Because in court I could have produced witnesses from
> Cambodia and Cyprus and Chile and asked, "Well isn't it true that
> you're a habitual liar, a falsifier of documents, and so on?" I've
> actually been to Chile to testify in front of the judge who has just
> lifted the immunity of General Pinochet: Judge Guzman, who's a heroic
> magistrate—an ultra conservative, by the way; a member of the hard
> right in Chile, but an absolutely honest gentleman. He's lifted the
> immunity of Pinochet now and he's on the trail of the Condor cases and
> I think he also has jurisdiction in the case of the murder of Charles
> Horman. [Operation Condor was a campaign of political assassinations
> sponsored by South American governments in the 1970s; Horman was an
> American journalist murdered by the Chilean regime in 1973.] He knows
> very well that this will lead—can lead, should lead, appears to
> lead—into an inquiry into Mr. Kissinger. I've testified before this
> judge, and it's a very proud moment of my life. The second proudest
> was appearing at the request of the Vatican against the sainthood of
> Teresa.
>
> You describe that in the book. How remarkable an experience was it?
>
> It could have been more remarkable, if for example they had invited me
> to Rome and had me testify in some wonderful old building. They made
> it as banal and as grudging as they could, but they did know that they
> had to do it and that they had to listen to me. And I thought, Well,
> okay, it means that I haven't been completely wasting my time. I have
> lived to be taken seriously. These were not just balloon-puncturing,
> publicity-seeking operations, which is what's implied in the idea that
> I'm an attack dog. They were fairly well-organized reconsiderations of
> what these people have really been responsible for—such that it has
> forced several quite important review bodies to seek my testimony.
> That's not a bad thing. And I'm hoping I have a few more such
> opportunities. It would be nice to be able to go to the trials of
> Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, too.
>
> Do you find yourself channeling your energies into less polemical work
> at all as the years move on? I'm thinking especially of your review
> work for The Atlantic.
>
> Well, after the Clinton book, I realized that I'd failed to persuade
> the majority of the left. And I thought, If you argue on their terms
> and they say, "No, we don't agree," maybe you're wrong in assuming
> that you do share a point of view. I'd wondered even before that
> whether maybe I belonged in the libertarian camp. Then I did the
> Kissinger thing, which obviously a lot of people on the left
> liked—though a lot of conservatives liked it as well. And then I went
> off to write the Orwell book, which I had been wanting to do all my
> life and was finally asked to do for the centennial. When that was
> over I sort of sat down and felt very tired. Politics was losing its
> flavor for me. I decided I would take on a reading project—pick up
> something serious to read. So I decided that it was really time I read
> Marcel Proust properly. I made that my work for the whole of 2001. I
> finished it in September, wishing it had been longer. I had a vague
> idea of writing a reply to Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change
> Your Life—as if to take him up on it and say, "Here's how it has
> changed mine." But then my wife woke me up one morning—I was on the
> West Coast and she was in Washington—and told me to turn on the TV.
> And of course I saw what everyone else saw. And I realized that
> politics was back in my life. It was stupid to think I could avoid it.
> I had always been telling people you can't get out of politics—it will
> come and find you, and here's the absolute proof. And I've been doing
> that ever since.
>
> But the rest of the time I'd far rather be writing about Joyce.
>
> ---
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>
> --
> David Livshiz
> Symposium Editor
> Annual Survey of American Law
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>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
To: American Constitution Society at NYU Law
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:32:19 -0500
Subject: Hitchens interview
It's been brought to my attention by a couple of people that the
Christopher Hitchens interview I forwarded earlier is only available
to subscribers to the Atlantic. If you're interested, I've pasted the
text below.
Regards,
JJB

The hostility toward Christopher Hitchens from certain members of the
political left is presently immeasurable. The writer and activist
Tariq Ali has called him a "vile replica" of his former self.
Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation—a position Hitchens
himself held until he quit in 2002—has accused him of "frothing
crudity." The writer Dennis Perrin has published an "obituary" of his
former mentor in radical politics. And the leftist critic George
Scialabba has written that Hitchens has been making an "egregious ass
of himself."

What has made Hitchens—the journalist, critic, lecturer, and
self-proclaimed "contrarian"—into the object of such vociferous scorn
is his muscular support for the war in Iraq. Soon after September 11,
with the Pentagon (not far from his Washington home) in ruins,
Hitchens became arguably the most prominent American journalistic
opponent of Saddam's regime. And since that time he has focused the
bulk of his famously voluminous energy on making the legal, moral, and
political case for war. Coming from a mainstay of the radical press,
this turn has been perceived by some as apostasy and by others as
symbolic of the ideological differences that currently divide the
American left—and gallons of ink have therefore been spilled in an
attempt to analyze the political "defection" of Christopher Hitchens.

In one sense, the Hitchens-watchers see a great deal more
discontinuity than actually exists. In 1989, when the Ayatollah
Khomeini sentenced Hitchens's close friend Salman Rushdie to death,
Hitchens became finely attuned to, and repulsed by, Islamic
fundamentalism. He was a supporter of the American bombing of Serbia,
in 1999, when many on the left opposed it, and of the idea that the
United States military could be a force for positive change. Most
fundamentally, Hitchens has had a long-stated and intense hatred for
organized religion—and for unorganized religion as well—an aspect of
his personality that many commentators miss, but one that plays a
central part in his political worldview. September 11 gave focus to
these already present convictions.

In another sense, however, there has been an obvious shift in the
nature of Hitchens's discourse. Though his work remains as biting, as
committed to Enlightenment ideals, and as elegant as ever, it has also
become decidedly and self-consciously single-minded. During the run-up
to the 2004 election, Hitchens proudly declared himself a "one-issue"
voter. That issue was Iraq, and his obvious scorn for those who
opposed military intervention. Very little has seeped through this new
scrim—not critiques of economic globalization, nor of American
imperialism, nor of the Bush Administration's evasiveness and
mendacity. And these conspicuous absences have lent critics of
Hitchens's work a great deal of fuel, and their criticisms a
noticeable, often condescending, anger.

If the Hitchens backlash and Hitchens's own combativeness are in part
emblematic of the riven state of leftist politics, they have also
served to drown out a great deal of Hitchens's other work. Though he
is first and foremost a political writer—well-known for his polemics
on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa—Hitchens is also
an accomplished literary critic (he is a reviewer for this magazine,
among other publications). It is a role the eclipse of which he
sometimes laments. But not too loudly. With Hitchens there are always
more pressing things to shout about, and very little into which
politics does not enter.

I spoke with Hitchens by phone on December 20 on the occasion of the
publication of his latest book, a collection of essays and reviews
titled Love, Poverty, and War.

—Daniel Smith

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Hitchens

I have several subjects I want to ask you about—for example, Mayor
Bloomberg, politics, God. But first I want to ask you about Mayor
Bloomberg playing God. In a Vanity Fair essay that's reprinted in this
volume, you call New York a "nanny state." More pointedly you call
Bloomberg a "picknose control freak." Are your complaints regarding
New York politics rooted in the city's recent smoking ban, or are they
based on a broader complaint about mayoral policies?

In the essay you're talking about I accuse Bloomberg of "penis envy"
for Rudy Giuliani and the former New York police chief William
Bratton, both of whom made a point about zero tolerance in the matter
of crime and delinquency. Bloomberg hoping, I think, to gain some
reputation, applied that attitude to behaviors that are not really
antisocial—old people feeding pigeons, for example, or people sitting
on milk crates on the sidewalk, or standing outside their own place of
employment. Those policies demonstrate a mentality of insecurity and
ambition and pseudo-zeal. But undoubtedly you're right. The thing that
more than symbolizes Bloomberg for me is the ban on smoking. It's
moved a sensible aim—namely, the protection of nonsmokers from
smoke—into behavior modification.

At one point, for instance, Bloomberg actually sent police around to
the Vanity Fair offices, on what must have been a tip-off from someone
in the building, to stop [Editor-in-chief] Graydon Carter and I from
having a cigarette. At a later time they came when Graydon was on
vacation because on his unoccupied desk, in his empty office, was a
receptacle that might have been usable for an ashtray. Now, this is
the sort of thing one laughs about. But if they'd had cops to spare
for this sort of thing, and if they're going to rely on anonymous
informers and do this to people who aren't even present, then it
doesn't take much alteration to that anecdote to make it sound rather
nasty. You tip things just a little further and you're living in a
very unpleasant country.

A lesser objection I have is simply that it makes bar owners and
bartenders and waiters into de facto enforcers of the law. The law
inverts the relationship between host and guest. It's a small thing,
but it has kind of spoiled New York for me. I went out to a restaurant
recently in Union Square—it was a very cold day, but my friends and I
decided we would sit outside anyway so that we could have a smoke and
not bother anybody. They said, "You can't do that." Why not? "Because
you're underneath an awning. We have a table that's completely
unprotected from the weather, just outside the awning. You can sit
there if you like." And this all occurred before they told us what the
specials were! Now, if you can't put up a shingle that says, "This is
McShane's Old Irish Lodge, and if you don't like cigarette smoke you
can stay the fuck out of my bar," then something essential about the
whole idea of New York is gone.

But wasn't it Mayor Giuliani who introduced that authoritarian
atmosphere into the city?

Yes, but he had the justification of law and order. Or at least what
he did had an aura of defensibility. Bloomberg's is simply
state-enforced behavior modification. I'm appalled by that. The whole
point of moving to New York used to be that there wasn't anyone
saying, "Don't wear this," or "Don't smoke that." It was nobody's
business.

In general I've found that over the past few years what you might call
libertarian issues mean more to me. Something has gone wrong with the
liberal mentality. What used to be diversity, or could claim to be,
has mutated into conformism in a rather sinister way.

The way you're speaking about the New York smoking ban as
government-sponsored behavior modification seems very much in line
with your writings about totalitarian states. But I'm tempted first to
ask whether you think the Bush Administration has anything to do with
a wider undercutting of libertarian concerns.

The Republican coalition appears to have created a new political
constituency that's made up of quite a number of free-market
libertarian types. Many of those people were anti-authoritarian types
in the sixties, and they now make up part of the new right. Another
part of the new right is made up of moralists, and another—as
always—is made up of law-and-order types. (Some members of that third
category have been attracted to it as a result of jihadism.) But there
the problem is the willingness of people to surrender their rights
rather than the state's eagerness to take them away.

So you don't put any stock in the contention that the Bush
Administration has watered down civil rights in the name of protecting
America?

The antiwar left made a huge thing about saying that Bush ignored too
many warnings before September 11. But from the way they've reacted
since, one would presume that they would have protested if he had
taken the steps necessary to forestall the problem. I think what
everyone ought to do at the basic minimum here is admit that there are
contradictions in their position.

I recently wrote a review in The New York Times of professor Geoffrey
Stone's book, Perilous Times, about free speech in wartime. His book
shows, among other things, that a lot of the liberal panic is just
that, because wartime incursions into free speech never last very
long. Very often they are repealed in such a way that one has more
freedoms than one had before, not less. There hasn't been a speech
prosecution in a time of war in the U.S. for a very long time now, and
not one since September 11. The precedents that were established in
the sixties with the antiwar movement would be very, very hard to
overturn. The presumption now is that you can say whatever you like in
wartime. That was not the case at all, for example, in the thirties.

But there is no foreseeable end to this particular war.

Once it's defined as terrorism that's true. But I'm against defining
it as a war on terrorism. And I also insist that the most oppressive
piece of legislation, the one under which most of the more arbitrary
prosecutions have occurred, is the Clinton Administration's so-called
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which, among other
things, put capital punishment on the fast track so as to shorten the
appeals procedure. It led to a terrible speedup of executions. That
very oppressive piece of legislation was done merely in response to
the Oklahoma City bombing. So what I said in my review of the Stone
book is that it ought to be a principle that no legislation should be
passed within six months of any atrocity.

Staying with Iraq and your support of the war there, what about other
regimes that clearly pose a risk to the United States? North Korea,
for one. How do you apply the logic of regime change in Iraq to the
rest of the world?

North Korea has threatened the invasion of South Korea; it's starving
its own people to death; it's repeatedly caught sponsoring
international terrorism; and it's obviously violating the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. But North Korea has us in a stranglehold
that Saddam didn't. We've let things get to the point where North
Korea can—and might, given what we know of the nature of its
regime—destroy the capital city of South Korea if we make a move
against it. If we were an imperialist state we wouldn't give a shit
about that. We'd just say, It's in our interest if the North Korean
regime ceases to exist—too bad if South Korea ends up getting blown
up. But we can't do that.

So essentially it's a military calculation?

Yes. The calculation made by the Administration—in my opinion, quite
rightly—was that we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get to the
point where he could say, like Kim Jong Il, "Come and get me if you'd
like, but look what I've got." Of course, Saddam was continually
trying to get into that position.

Does your belief in the validity of the military effort in Iraq pose
any problem to your belief in the importance of the military effort in
Afghanistan? Do you think, as many people argue, that the war in Iraq
has distracted from the military effort in Afghanistan?

I've simply never heard anyone say that the job in Afghanistan needs
more people. And it doesn't look as if it does. I mean, the Taliban
and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan are totally negligible militarily.
It's a police operation. Afghanistan is now run by NATO. It's the
strongest military alliance in the history of the world. That's the
first thing. The second is that it would have been very unwise to say
in advance that, "Given our engagement in Afghanistan, alas we are
unable to do anything about Iraq." I don't think that's exactly what
one should have been telling Saddam Hussein. Many people seem to think
now that there was no threat of weaponry or terrorism from that
quarter. I regard that belief as utterly fantastic. Because I'm an old
left-sectarian street fighter, I happen to remember that most of the
people who are saying this are the same people who were not in favor
of invading Afghanistan either. They said it would be a quagmire like
Vietnam and a graveyard of ambition as it was for Russia and Britain.
I remember thinking that was nonsense at the time. Everyone now says
that of course they thought all along that military action in
Afghanistan would be great. No, they didn't! They hope that people
will forget. They hope in vain in my case. I will never let them
forget what they said.

I know you won't. But setting aside whatever one believes about the
military rectitude of the war in Iraq, what about the argument, which
seems well-founded, that it has increased opportunities for terrorism
in Iraq?

Well, that's based on the assumption that al-Qaeda is in itself a
response to the sins of omission or commission by the West. That's not
true. The Administration had to find a legal and international
justification for kicking out a keystone regime in the Middle East in
order to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world. It needed to
be done. But one couldn't just say, "Well, after an attack like
September 11 we're going to have to alter the balance of power in the
region." I wouldn't have minded if they had said that, but if you're
going to go to the UN, you have to phrase it as if you're talking
about something else. But let's just recognize, without being too
Straussian or Machiavellian, that all politics is a bit like that. I
do not believe, for example, that the First World War was declared
because of the British belief that Belgian neutrality should be
guaranteed. I don't think so.

But my question was about the success of the occupation, about the
so-called liberation of Iraq. In recent weeks, the attacks on the
Administration have been growing in this regard. Do you think the
occupation is working?

The forces are in a position where they could withdraw if they wished,
which is an unusual position for an occupier. They could say to the
Iraqis and their neighbors, "We don't have to be here if we don't want
to. It's not absolutely essential to us. We can leave. Do you really
want this to happen? If you unanimously say that you do, and you want
it to happen now, we could accommodate you. Are you sure that's what
you want?" I think the same should be said to those who characterize
this as a debacle. I think they should be forced to ask themselves
very carefully, Do we in any way secretly hope that the occupation
fails? Are we aware of what that would mean?

One thing we definitely know is what would happen to Iraq if the
coalition withdrew or were defeated. I don't believe I would get any
argument from anyone about that. And it would not just be a defeat for
Bush and Cheney. It would not just be a defeat for the
neoconservatives. I think it should be taken a lot more seriously than
it is.

You're referring to the possibility of defeat?

Yes, and the wish on the part of many people who claim to be
antiwar—and who therefore presumably are also humanitarians—that the
occupation fail.

I was quite shocked by the number of people in mainstream Democratic
politics who said to me, "I don't mind what happens in Iraq so long as
Bush is defeated" without any ambivalence. I find that very
objectionable. I spend a good deal of my life at the moment fighting
that mentality. It's very common here—it's extremely common in Europe.

I suppose we should move on to other issues. A lot of the book—

I can see we haven't gotten past the "War" section yet.

No, I had a feeling that was going to happen. I probably shouldn't
have started with "War."

I'm used to it, but it makes me slightly sad.

What does?

That most of my interviewers want to do this, though I realize I can't
really complain. I have advertised a certain view of the situation,
and banged on about it a lot.

I'd hoped to avoid that trap. This book, after all, is only partially
about Iraq.

Well, what I hope I was telling you was not what I thought, but how I
thought, which is more important.

Well, that's a good segue into one of the big subjects of this
collection, which is religion. You've been trying to argue against the
dangers of religious belief for many years. But reading this book, it
strikes me that your critique of religion is based much more on the
hypocrisy of its adherents—and perhaps on a sort of Enlightenment
desire for evidence—than on the experience of faith. Do you have any
respect for the individual who professes a more personal faith based
on, say, the "oceanic feeling"?

Well, first off, I'm not, as people sometimes claim me to be, an
atheist. I'm an anti-theist. I think the influence of religious belief
is horrible. Take Garry Wills, for example. I have read him with great
profit on many subjects (and have learned from reading him and from
disagreeing with him on quite a number of topics). But when he gets
into writing about, say, the spirituality of St. Augustine, it becomes
white noise. All his standards completely collapse. He's not scholarly
about it, and he's not even expected to be. How could he know about
St. Augustine's spirituality? But there he is writing about it, as
though it were something we all agreed about. And what's true of him
is true of our species in general—we are only partly rational. We do
have the reasoning faculty, but when we abandon it for a second, the
result is something like Garry Wills's driveling on about St.
Augustine.

Your basic objection to religion, however, seems less experiential
than it is political. You object in this book not to individual
belief, but to the politicization of belief.

Listen, if a child tells me he's seen a ghost, I'll say, "Well, I'm
sure you did, but I don't think I'll be able to see it myself, and I
don't think it's really there, though I do think you must have a very
vivid imagination." However, if a grown-up says "I've just a heard a
voice telling me what to do," what they really mean is "I can now tell
you what to do." That's what I don't like. What I noticed when I was a
kid wasn't just that what the headmaster was preaching at sermon time
was rubbish (which was easy to see), it was also that it seemed very
important that the headmaster be able to invest his otherwise rather
feeble authority with religious authority. In other words, I could see
already when I was eight that religion is used to say, "You better
listen to what I say. My power is not just of this world. I have
divine right." That's where you have to say, "Say that again and I'll
burn your church." That's fascism. I loathe it. And I tend to loathe
the people who believe it, because they are making a claim on me.

This is how I explained your so-called defection from the left to a
friend recently—that in order to understand your political views one
has to understand your views of religion.

Actually, it makes my day to hear you say that. The thought that
someone else was there to say it for me cheers me up. It means that I
haven't wasted my time completely. I don't see how anyone who reads me
could miss that. But they do.

It seems hard to miss. You refer in the introduction to this book, for
example, to your "cold, steely hatred" for religion.

It's the root of my whole existence as a writer—to destroy the
illusions that arise from faith. And only some of those illusions are
religious, which means that I'll never be out of business. There'll
always be work to do.

And yet, in an exchange with Jim Fallows elsewhere on this Web site
you complain about being called an "attack dog." Is that an epithet
that continues to bother you?

I guess I shouldn't really complain, because at least it means I have
a reputation for something. It must be the same if you're a
politician—you make one remark and it ends up being the thing that
people remember about you. I suppose Dan Quayle must have to force
himself to laugh along with all those people who make potato jokes.
When people introduce me by saying something like, "This is the guy
who said Mother Teresa is no good," I just have to suppress a sigh.

I just thought one day, after I'd run into Mother Teresa in Calcutta,
Has anyone ever taken a second look at this woman? Is it possible that
what we believe about her isn't in fact true? And then it was just too
easy. I couldn't believe that people had left this field to me.

My book about Clinton was another case. I was writing strictly as a
left polemicist, trying to point out to liberals, If you think this
guy is your friend, you're setting yourself up for a terrible beating.
I wrote that book essentially as an appeal to the left to see that
this guy is a reactionary and a thug and that in the end he would do
immense, lasting damage to what was left of the American liberal and
democratic constituency. And I think I will be vindicated on that if I
haven't been already.

And Henry Kissinger ... I mean, good grief! The idea of his
tolerability has long been—intolerable. It was right when I finally
decided to write a book about him that I found out by accident that he
was afraid of being prosecuted in the course of the Pinochet
investigation. And I thought, Well, now I know how I can write it—as a
trial document.

Any closer to prosecutorial success?

Oh, yes, all the time. I can say this for myself: I know that I have
slightly inconvenienced Henry Kissinger and caused some changes in his
schedule. And I think I may also have changed how his obituary will be
written. He will die realizing that the obits he was once certain of
will not be written in that way anymore. Judge Le Loire, the
magistrate who summoned him to Paris in 2001, did so as a result of my
book being translated into French. The authorities decided to try to
get a hold of him for questioning, and he had to run for it. And I
know further that he was very upset when I sued him.

For calling you an anti-Semite.

Yes. He actually apologized with amazing alacrity on that. It was a
very grudging apology, but it was enough. He was made to retract his
statement. First, through his lawyer, he said, "Okay, I promise never
to say it again." And I said, "That's not good enough; you have to say
you shouldn't have said it the first time."

Publicly?

Well, I published the correspondence. It's on my Web site. I didn't
put an ad in The New York Times. Maybe I should have. The truth was
that I was hoping he wouldn't apologize, that he'd say, "I'll see you
in court." Because in court I could have produced witnesses from
Cambodia and Cyprus and Chile and asked, "Well isn't it true that
you're a habitual liar, a falsifier of documents, and so on?" I've
actually been to Chile to testify in front of the judge who has just
lifted the immunity of General Pinochet: Judge Guzman, who's a heroic
magistrate—an ultra conservative, by the way; a member of the hard
right in Chile, but an absolutely honest gentleman. He's lifted the
immunity of Pinochet now and he's on the trail of the Condor cases and
I think he also has jurisdiction in the case of the murder of Charles
Horman. [Operation Condor was a campaign of political assassinations
sponsored by South American governments in the 1970s; Horman was an
American journalist murdered by the Chilean regime in 1973.] He knows
very well that this will lead—can lead, should lead, appears to
lead—into an inquiry into Mr. Kissinger. I've testified before this
judge, and it's a very proud moment of my life. The second proudest
was appearing at the request of the Vatican against the sainthood of
Teresa.

You describe that in the book. How remarkable an experience was it?

It could have been more remarkable, if for example they had invited me
to Rome and had me testify in some wonderful old building. They made
it as banal and as grudging as they could, but they did know that they
had to do it and that they had to listen to me. And I thought, Well,
okay, it means that I haven't been completely wasting my time. I have
lived to be taken seriously. These were not just balloon-puncturing,
publicity-seeking operations, which is what's implied in the idea that
I'm an attack dog. They were fairly well-organized reconsiderations of
what these people have really been responsible for—such that it has
forced several quite important review bodies to seek my testimony.
That's not a bad thing. And I'm hoping I have a few more such
opportunities. It would be nice to be able to go to the trials of
Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, too.

Do you find yourself channeling your energies into less polemical work
at all as the years move on? I'm thinking especially of your review
work for The Atlantic.

Well, after the Clinton book, I realized that I'd failed to persuade
the majority of the left. And I thought, If you argue on their terms
and they say, "No, we don't agree," maybe you're wrong in assuming
that you do share a point of view. I'd wondered even before that
whether maybe I belonged in the libertarian camp. Then I did the
Kissinger thing, which obviously a lot of people on the left
liked—though a lot of conservatives liked it as well. And then I went
off to write the Orwell book, which I had been wanting to do all my
life and was finally asked to do for the centennial. When that was
over I sort of sat down and felt very tired. Politics was losing its
flavor for me. I decided I would take on a reading project—pick up
something serious to read. So I decided that it was really time I read
Marcel Proust properly. I made that my work for the whole of 2001. I
finished it in September, wishing it had been longer. I had a vague
idea of writing a reply to Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change
Your Life—as if to take him up on it and say, "Here's how it has
changed mine." But then my wife woke me up one morning—I was on the
West Coast and she was in Washington—and told me to turn on the TV.
And of course I saw what everyone else saw. And I realized that
politics was back in my life. It was stupid to think I could avoid it.
I had always been telling people you can't get out of politics—it will
come and find you, and here's the absolute proof. And I've been doing
that ever since.

But the rest of the time I'd far rather be writing about Joyce.

More on the Mac as a DVR. I think Cringely nails it.

The idea is pretty simple.

Jobs at MWSF Keynote: 2005 is the year of HD.

Both competing HD DVD formats (Blu Ray & HD-DVD) allow the use H.264 encoding.

Jobs at MWSF Keynote: Quicktime 7 has H.264 support (which comes out with OS X 10.4)

Apple testing playing of movie trailers in iTunes through itunes music store, which tests the basic functionality of playing movies through the same.

Several online movie distribution companies have suddenly "disappeared" themselves.

The Mac Mini looks suspiciously like something that would sit in your entertainment center. (Note that it has the same shiny aluminum as Sony HDTVs.)

Oh, and the Sony CEO was at the Apple keynote you say?

It all seems to make sense...

I am going to wait on getting a mac mini until after Tiger comes out.

Now about the audio on my powerbook finally dying... What's that? New Powerbooks possibly next month?

Yummy

White people beware:

1. (FOUO) TEXAS: Bomb Threat, Alleged Explosives Transported on an AFB. Background: According to Texas State Operations Center (SOC) reporting, on 10 January, in Del Rio, Laughlin AFB received a bomb threat. Security Dogs alerted to a truck entering the base; base security isolated and searched the truck with negative results. Reportedly, the truck and the driver, who was possibly of Middle Eastern descent, were subsequently released after the truck was cleared. Update: According to an 11 January Phone conversation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) in Del Rio, the truck driver in this incident was not of Middle Eastern descent. Reportedly, the truck driver was a white male U.S. citizen who is a retired U.S. Air Force veteran with psychological problems. He was taken to a local hospital for evaluation and subsequently released. The man returned to the base security gate where authorities arrested him as a public nuisance. The local sheriff’s department and the federal authorities were notified. (Phone call Del Rio USAO, 11 Jan 05; HSOC 0109-05)

A very very interesting idea... If this does work well, I'm all for it. Apple's great (read easy to break) DRM plus their business acumen in dealing with the media companies could make this very very useful...

Mac DVR on Cards?: "

Jonathan Greene: ‘Helixent can’t say why it’s gone but many a bird are whispering of another SoundJam into iTunes maneuver by Apple. This would certainly fill the iApp box when connected with a box to capture and record from a variety of sources. iFlicks had Netflix integration as well which may also add the addition of a download service in the same manner as Tivo plans.’

"

(Via Om Malik on Broadband.)

Great TF headline:

Al-qaeda publishes online women's magazine. Strong enough for a jihadi, but made for a woman

The article from the moonie rag itself contains some fantastic bits:

ROME — Al Qaeda has introduced an online women's magazine with articles including dietary advice for suicide bombers and tips on how to "dominate the passions" before blowing yourself up, according to Italy's SISDE secret service.

Fucking insane...

What's the birthday boy's email?

kcmahone: User has no email address registered.

Name, title, postal address and phone for: kcmahone
Keegan Mahoney, Esq.
GROUNDSKEEPER (TEMP), Nichols Arboretum
PROGRAM ASST (TEMP), Refuse & Recycling
Student, Undergraduate L S & A
No postaladdress registered
No phone number registered

hahahahaha

Dilbert for 19 Jan 2005: ""

(Via Dilbert.)

[Edit: Sorry. The template makes it look sucky and not fit in the page. Just click to see.]

For the record, CSI: Miami is the best of the breed.

The Roomies beat me to the Hawaiian fast food restaurant L & L on Fulton today.

Bastards. I hear they have suckling pig...

I also saw Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou this weekend. It gets two thumbs up with my trademark silly grin.

Note that if you make a tsunami related donation before Jan 31st, you can claim it as a deduction on your 2004 returns.

So the Pentagon decided to research a "gay bomb."

The idea was that an extremely strong aphrodisiac would make soldiers irresistible to each other and thus destroy unit cohesion.

What's that? There's already gays in the military? Having people like each other can increase unit cohesion?

Now I see why they canceled it.

Imagine dropping a gay bomb on a civilian center. What places come to mind? The effects?

So the refrigerator is chock full of food, but I'm not quite sure what I bought, and I'm afraid of eating other people's food. How do you deal with this?

I am not sure if a guff/ng system is the right one. Does labeling something guff imply pressure to do the same? Keep in mind that some members of our household eat out much more than others, so inevitably end up buying little for the house.

I am also worried about a tragedy of the commons situation, but less for me. I think I am worried about taking advantage of other people's coerced generosity.

In the meanwhile, I need to go find some food.

We saw Napoleon Dynamite and Mad Max last night. The first was much easier to get through than the second, and I do have to say, what a fantastic dance sequence.

Are the 80s back? Evil Empires, crazy republican presidents, funky dancing - all trends seem to point in that direction.

Yuri Gagarin quote.

Thursdays at 11:30, THE CHARP ANTHOLOGY on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

Strap on Speak and Say.

Palestrina's Sicut Cervus.

All together.

My dearest Cassandra:

Fear of a Candy Planet.

mugshot (in my kitchen)

There's a game of chicken going on with the quite full (two days ago) kitchen trash can.

Even better, the sink has Ajax on one side of the faucet, and hand soap on the other.

My laundry costs me $.70/pound. They fold it for me too.

I think this is the only way not to feel guilty about having your laundry folded for you.

Wil blogging about his first mac experience.

I don't remember the first mac I used. In middle school, we had SE/30s that I faithfully played Dungeon of Doom on in typing classes. This is why I never learned to type properly.

To this day, I am betting on the arrival of subvocalized input into a computer before my wrists succumb to some carpal tunnel syndrome.

You think Wil Wheaton is old? I was at the diner at the corner the other day and we saw Sanka on the menu. What is Sanka Jeanne & Antonia asked.

Sanka, the first decaffeinated coffee (the name comes from sans caffeine), ushered in the era of orange signifying decaf.

An instant coffee, many of us grew up to Sanka ads, which sadly or not, must have dissappeared by the late eighties. Alas, I can't seem to find any commercials online to link for you.

Sanka makes me feel old. Well, that and reading Love in the Time of Cholera anyways.

To bed.


[Edit: Yes, sub-vocalized input like Jane in Children of the Mind. If you look at bluetooth headphones these days, the cultural changes required to have people talking through something permanently attached to their ears are already happening.]

Dorkbot-NYC.

They meet monthly down the street from me.

And they have theme songs!

Imagine when Cop shows came on TV, everybody yelled Bobbies!

I WANANANANANANANANA mac mini.

Prudence dictates waiting for this until OS X Tiger comes out, though the first half 2004 date indicates it may not ship until June 30th. Generation 2 products are always better.

Also, the iPod Shuffle was announced, with this little gem on the product page:

The fridge now has LISTS on it.

Intellectual pissing contests make me feel at home.

whee

On Wankers.

A very compelling argument...

(Via Eschaton.)

Also, I now have a Matrixesque jacket. Donations of weaponry to fill the interior pockets are now being solicited.

Low Culture points out a curious fact about the upcoming Iraqi Elections.

Fourteen out of Eighteen iraqi provinces are considered to be safe environments for elections.

The other four hold 50% of the Iraqi population.

I'm not sure if those provinces are overwhelmingly Shiite or Sunni.

Brent Simmons is also the person responsible for NetNewsWire & MarsEdit, which I am posting with. (Dare you complain about me ending a line with a preposition...)

Email: "Email is like TiVo for chat.



I’m not sure why I felt like writing that sentence, except that I’m a big fan of the ‘blank is like TiVo for blank’ comparisons. At some point, everything is either like TiVo or like a thing being TiVo’d.



I sometimes enjoy making up absurd comparisons. Clouds are like TiVo for rain. Soup is like TiVo for vegetables. That kind of thing."

(Via inessential.com.)

NYC PBS station 13 playing Annie Hall.

It is hard to work with it in the background, and yet...

From Dearest Wil:

this one goes to eleven: "

The always hilarious BBspot hits it out of the park again. Today, they give us The Top Eleven Geek Break Up Lines.

My personal favorite is number eleven:

(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? R

(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? R

(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail? F

Relationship failed.

"

(Via WIL WHEATON DOT NET: Where is my mind?.)

I got my new replacement phone today from the tmobile insurance company.

Hopefully this V300 has better battery life, and a more stable interface. The device also came with an extra charger, aside from the charger in the box. So now it appears that I have three different chargers for this phone.

Perhaps I will actually be able to feel the vibrator on this phone when ringing, but I doubt it.

Let that be a lesson for those of you who ski (if that is what I would call the pseudo random arrangement of limbs and metallic implements on the snow flying about) with a phone in your pocket.

Also, best Holy Grail Story Evah.

Jon makes a good point in bringing up the difference between Consulting and Professional Services, even though many people (myself included) have used the terms interchangeably.


It makes sense to treat them differently, as then you are not providing consulting in order to sell professional services, and the client then sees you as a (perhaps more) unbiased provider of information.

Cyrus alerts me to a beautiful trailer for Sin City.

Here's a case of an alternative to getting parental consent for an abortion (getting your boyfriend to beat you with a baseball bat). The girl mentioned this at a high school leadership conference, and the police were called in.

Antonia's collection of Futurama and ST:TOS DVDs is providing an opportunity to bask in the glow of something warm and funny while we go about our evening work, be it making cookies or putting together models of human hearts with crazy glue and sandpaper.

I realized yesterday that on my last trip to Brighton Beach, I bought Low Fat Kefir (a russian buttermilk drink) instead of regular Kefir.

This is analogous to purchasing low fat bacon.

There is no excuse.

Geek Warning:

Ouch.

There's an interesting story on regulatory capture here.

There exists a stealth spy satellite program called MISTY that can only be discussed at government levels by people with security clearances. Of course the lobbyists for this program have the necessary clearances, and those that are against the program tend not to...

The question then is, how to achieve effective oversight of classified programs.

It seems very much the "military industrial complex" in the original meaning.

A testament to those who have fought in the defense of Americans of (recent) foreign ancestry, and to a country which learns from its mistakes.

Atrios on the late Robert Matsui:

Robert Matsui:

I'd like, if I may, to take a moment to read something that I was able to get through the Freedom of Information Act in 1992. Individual number, 25261C. File number 405986. Your birth, '41, relocation center Tule (?) Lake, assembly center Pinedale. Home address, Sacramento, California.

Country of birth of father U.S. mainland, country of birth of mother, U.S. mainland. Birthplace, California. Year or arrival, American born, never in Japan. Marital status, single. Languages, not applicable.

Race, Japanese and no spouse. Highest grade, no schooling or kindergarten. Military service, no military nor naval service and no physical defects, and no public assistance or pension program.

Alien registration and Social Security number, none. Did not attend Japanese language school. Has neither alien registration number, nor the Social Security number.

Length of time in Japan, none. Age in Japan, never in Japan. Schooling in Japan, and number of years, none.

That happened to be my file that is still in the defense Department of the United States government. I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento, California, and placed in internment camps in the United States.

I was never given a trial. I never went before any magistrate, nor did my parents. To this day, I do not know what the charges that were lodged against me or my deceased parents at this time.

I spent approximately three and a half years of my life there, although I have no personal memory of it. I do know that many of my friends of Japanese ancestry suffered a great deal.

My mother and father refused to talk about it with me until they were nearing their death, separately, obviously. I remember when I was in the fourth grade at William Bland School in Sacramento, California, I was asked by a very well intentioned teacher, because we were studying American history and World War II. She said, 'Bob, weren't you in one of those camps, those camps for Japanese during the war? And maybe you can describe this to the classmates.'

I'll never forget it. I shuddered. I must have turned color and I said 'I don't know what you're talking about.' She says, 'Are you sure? You were in one of those camps. I know your mother and father were.' I said 'I don't know what you mean.'

Then we went out later in the playground and I remember one of my friends, a very good friend, going like this to me as if it were a gun or something, and saying, 'Were you a spy? Was that why you were in jail?'

What our problem was was that there was this specter of disloyalty that hung over us as Americans of Japanese ancestry, those of us that were interned during World War II, 115,000, Americans, basically, of Japanese ancestry.

...

And the U.S. general, John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of the internment and incarceration of the Japanese Americans, stated a few months later 'The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third Japanese born in the United States soil possessed of U.S. citizenship have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted. It therefore follows that along the virtual Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today.'

And the reason I call your attention to this, and what happened in the comments and before December 7, is because there was an anti-Asian sentiment. There was a strain throughout the West Coast, and particularly the state of California. Pearl Harbor merely triggered the sentiment to become a sign of action. It is my believe that the internment was for that reason. It was the triggering event of deep seated feelings that existed in the state of California, and Washington, and the entire west coast of the United States.

As I said, this was something that we had a very difficult time talking about, and it wasn't until 1981 when the Congress of the United States actually set up a commission to look into the causes of the internment, and also whether anything should be done, such as apologies, or redress, or reparations for those that were interred.

I was personally stunned, because of the seven or eight hearings throughout the United States, many Americans of Japanese ancestry who at that time were in their 60's, began to speak out. And it was stunning because as they were testifying, they would immediately break down and begin to describe their ordeal; the fact that they were isolated and ostracized from their own communities, their own state, and obviously the nation.

I recall going back and finally having the opportunity to talk with my parents. And my mother, who was at that time dying, said that yes, she woke up all of the time in the middle of the night thinking that she was in one of the camps.

My dad finally began to speak about it. It was an event that kind of opened up for us the opportunity to begin to discuss what had actually happened. Instead of saying that it was our fault, we were then able to finally say that it wasn't our fault. It was the government, a failure of leadership in the United States that caused the internment.

...

Let me conclude, and then we'll have questions and a discussion, if I may make one other observation, if I may. This is a great and wonderful country, because what happened in 1987 is that the House, the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate passed legislation for a presidential apology for the internment for the surviving Americans of Japanese ancestry who were interned, plus compensation of $20,000 per survivor.

President Reagan signed the legislation, and I have to say that I brought the letter from the president, by that time President Bush, Sr. had signed the letter and given it to my father, who was 21 years old at the time of the internment, and he broke down and cried, and he indicated what a great country we had.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one. Hopefully as a country, that we learn from our mistakes of the past.

"

(Via Eschaton.)

More Abortions!: "This is great:

The U.S. Department of Justice has issued its first-ever medical guidelines for treating sexual-assault victims - without any mention of emergency contraception, the standard precaution against pregnancy after rape.

The omission of the so-called morning-after pill has frustrated and angered victims' advocates and medical professionals who have long worked to improve victims' care.

Gail Burns-Smith, one of several dozen experts who vetted the protocol during its three-year development by Justice's Office on Violence Against Women, said emergency contraception was included in an early draft, and she does not know of anyone who opposed it.

'But in the climate in which we are currently operating, politically it's a hot potato,' said Burns-Smith, retired director of Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services.

The 'morning after' pill if taken soon enough will prevent conception from even occurring, or failing that it will prevent implantation. Whatever moral qualms one has about abortion generally, the morning after pill is far less 'icky' than IVF treatments frequently undergone by our happy natalists. The consequence of keeping raping victims from the pill will inevitably be more actual abortions.

But, they don't really care...
"

(Via Eschaton.)

If this were an issue created by a Democratic Administration, you can be sure that Karl Rove would have already be running ads talking about the Administration wanting you (the white ad target) being expected to carry Willie Horton's baby. But this response also indicates a level if disconnection from red america. Red Americans aren't concerned about reducing the abortions of rape victims. Red America overwhelmingly supports abortion for rape victims. Another wedge issue opportunity, being squandered.

Now to take this a step farther, why not use this as a wedge to push back by fighting for law mandating the notification of parents of raped minors of morning after pill and abortion options?

Now it becomes a victims' rights issue.

Would it be too hard to find somebody to testify who could say she was not told about her options?

There is an exceedingly obese woman across from me with a crying toddler on her knee and a child next to her who desperately wants to go to the Mcdonalds in the terminal.

If there is a god, it will ensure that these folks are on another flight.

Overheard on the intercom at Cincinnati just now:

"You will not see the flight on the screen, as we are having computer problems."

I called into Delta this morning to switch my flight from one leaving Lansing at 1:30pm and getting into JFK at 6 something to one leaving at 10:46am and getting in at 3:30pm. If you call 3 hours before a flight, the fee to switch is only $25.

The reservation agent (what is the preferred nomenclature these days? Schedule engineer?) told me that no seats were available.

I called back two minutes later, and got connected to a better reservation agent, who took care of getting me booked on the earlier flight.

Author Arthur C Clarke (who has lived in Sri Lanka for many years now) recommends giving to Sarvodaya if you are considering places to send donations.

The amount the US government has allocated for this event is equivalent to the amount spent in a morning in Iraq.

Time for another Pentagon Bake Sale.

Just saw Pather Panchali for the second time. Or is it the first time all over again when you only vaguely remember the first time?

Beautiful Beautiful Koyaanisqatsi moments. Emotion earned, unlike that trite Spielberg crap. (If you saw The Terminal, you know what I'm talking about.)

sigh

Julie dug up some interesting stuff for the Tolstoy discussion for tomorrow night.

Finally!

According to the news, Diaryland is about to get RSS feeds.

No more having to load http://members.diaryland.com/edit/buddies.phtml to see if somebody updated.

The Bro got me Garden State for Christmas. Rock.

The afternoon with Shana and Alexis and Valerie ( + boy ) and two dogs and cats and bunny and pistachios and the radiology of trauma victims and a beautiful redone bathroom.

Dinner with Brendan and Tim and Justin and Sara and Trudeau (+ girl) and Eric.

Pinball Pete's with Brendan and Tim and Justin and Sara and Suj and Dave.

Heidelburg with Brendan and Suj and Sara and Tim and Justin.

Slumber Party at Mich with Brendan and Sara.

Unforwarded mail found at Mich from a Blockbuster on Broadway, one in the Village.

I'm glad I stopped by.

There's word of apple releasing a $500 computer at MacWorld SF in a few weeks.

Does anybody else look at this and automatically think Set Top Box?

Quote of the day: My sweet little autistic nerd boy.

Bram Cohen, the guy who invented BitTorrent, the program that the MPAA hates, the one that is responsible for 30% of the traffic on the internet, apparently has Asperger's syndrome.


They are discussing Aspergers on Wired. Forget the rash of Autism stories on the NYT, just another one today. Autism is now not just cool, but hip.

Oy.

Jared Diamond has a new book.

And my Amazon Wishlist.

Forget Soup or Juice, tonight I had dinner at Saginaw's Super Buffet!

They had frog legs, crab legs, and bacon wrapped shrimp.

I am sad to report that all of the food tasted wholly mediocre.

The establishment had a sign up announcing that people who were members of a frequent dining club would get a free meal after dining for 14 paid meals.

The free meal can not be redeemed on Valentines day.

Ponder the person who takes their date to an all you can eat buffet for Valentines day, and then thinks they can get by with a free meal for said date.

TeeHee.

My fortune cookie taught me that in Chinese the word for sugar is "Tang."

The Hampton Inn in Straightlord has free Hilton WiFi.

Score.

"Science"

Tsunamis as large as Sunday's happen only a few times a century. A tsunami is a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, the waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles.

Umm, no. The waves would lose momentum over thousands of miles. Otherwise we would have had serious problems on the US west coast.

The waves will spread out over the distance.

You only gain momentum if there is a force consistently applied, right?

2004 MN4 now has a 1/40 chance of hitting the earth.

Does this make Revelations Ironic?

My rowmate on the last plane in from Cincinnati came by to interview my for the local news about our flight experiences. It goes on tonight on WLNS CBS 6, during the 5pm show.

I did my midwestern best.

I've been playing with Horde 3.0 (the framework underlying IMP, the open source webmail program that so many organizations, popular universities included, use).

The PEAR problem I had with Horde 2.x has finally been dealt with on my webhost's site, though I'm still having problems with HTTP_Request, which when activated refuses to let the rest of the PHP work.

And I'm still looking for a gmail/imap interface.

That or a host that I can host a large quantity of mail on. I've been looking at Interland's virtual hosting, since I have some experience with it, but 1and1's hosting is about the same price as well, and I wouldn't mind having a debian system to use for my mail.

In other news, Delta called me today and told me that my bag was on its way this evening, scheduled to arrive at 2am.

Yawn. I don't think I'm going to be able to stay up.

I'm going skiing. I can't ski.

There's a new york times article today about http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com.

Fantastic stuff. Very American Psycho. The November archives are superb.

Phrase of the day: Evil Coastal Godless Baal-Loving Media

Really good posts on the future of union and party membership:

Scott

Decembrist

Delta's Cincinnati Comair staffing rocks. They went out of their way to get us home despite the utter failure of their computer system.

Their management, who purchased a computer system that crashed yesterday, causing all of Comair's flights to be cancelled today, and had far fewer planes than needed on the ground as backup, are well, pretty sucky.

I still need my luggage.

Sleeping till 4 after you get home at 5am, ahhh.

Aloha from Cincinnati.

My first Meijers sighting since the summer.

My first bona fide snow sighting since last winter.

The flight attendant welcomed us to town, and then snorted and told us that if we had a connecting flight, "Good Luck."

This may be one of the worst designed airports in the country. The interior has the same layout as the Columbus GreyHound terminal, with carpet. Due to the weather situation the last several days in the Ohio Valley, the airport seems as crowded as a hurricane shelter.

I'm really looking forward to getting out of here. This place stinks of sweat, pineapple, and annoyance.

Washington, D.C.

The Stewardess on my flight here haltingly read a cheesy Christmas Eve poem about flying in the air, and the unsettling possibility of meeting Santa in the air. Being told that Santa may come in the door during the flight strangely reminds me of certain X Files episodes involving aliens visiting flying planes.

The descent into Reagan, under a dark clear sky, was unusually pretty, with house lights twinkling through barren tree branches.

I appear to be segregated into a tiny Delta commuter wing at the airport with six Delta gates reminiscent of the Northwest peninsula at Tokyo's Narita, albeit quite a but colder. DC is currently just below freezing, and NYC, just above.

Schizer. Even my city's weather is better.

The news shop in this wing has Republican and Democrat branded outerwear laid out like that of sports teams in other cities. The store has Election paraphernalia at a seventy five percent discount from the original price. You can still get your Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers ladies and gentlemen, but supplies are limited.

Ah boarding for Cin Cin. One last tidbit:

I am in REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT. The bar here, called the Federal Tavern, has a large RED STAR between Federal, and Tavern on the sign.

Perestroika indeed.

Also, we are enroute for Rendezvous with Titan. The first attempted landing by human craft on another moon. Forty years later.

Also, one in sixty-two chance of us being hit by an asteroid on April 13, 2029. Merry Christmakkahwanzaa.

Also, if you're in town on the evening of the 31st, drop me or the roommates a line. We're having a Tolstoy Appreciation Night. I am sure I have inadvertently left people off of the invite list.

Fly Away. Fly Away.

Theoden & a Ham Sandwich.

Click on Theoden Horsemaster.

Tonight
Partly cloudy. A chance of snow. Lows 5 below to 10 below zero. Southwest winds 5 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 40 percent. Wind chill readings 10 below to 20 below zero.
Christmas Day
Mostly cloudy. A chance of snow. Highs around 15. South winds 5 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 50 percent. Lowest wind chill readings 15 below to 25 below zero in the morning.

Saturday Night
Cloudy. A chance of snow. Lows 5 to 10 above. South winds 5 to 15 mph becoming southeast. Chance of snow 50 percent.

Sunday
Mostly cloudy. A few flurries. Highs in the lower 20s. North winds 5 to 10 mph becoming southeast. Chance of snow 20 percent.

Now tell me why I'm flying to Michigan again?

Lordy lordy.

I've been doing some googling to deal with some exchange issues at a client, and came across the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog, titled, in unabashed geek humor style,

You Had Me At EHLO.

Thanks to Antonia & the developer of PulpFiction for these tidbits:

An excellent review of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game on GameSpot that gets close to a perfect score.

A Burger King Christmas Song.

Cows.

I await the cable [wo]ma[-a+e]n and furniture.

At the minimum, misspellings tell us about differences in dialect over time.

I wonder if anybody has done a study tracking misspellings over time.

Nation Rests Easy...President Bush To Tackle Challanges In Second Term!: "Hopefully, he won't forget about educashun policy!





Yes, it's real.



Thanks Education At The Brink.

"

(Via Eduwonk.com.)

Warren tells it like it is:

2004: the year blogging got boring and...: "

2004: the year blogging got boring and the year commenting systems broke. The year Bit Torrent got really big and the year the Motion Picture Association Of America somehow became a world power. The year Indymedia finally managed to frighten someone and the year MoveOn.org managed to convince no-one. The year of podcasting, and the year no-one had anything to say. The year no-one paid any attention to Mperia while labels like 555 starved to death -- but that's okay, because people with day jobs tell us that art on the net should be free anyway. The year I actually read someone on a website say 'I want hospitals to compete for my business.' I find myself desperately looking forward to that man's first tumour. The year that the half of America the coasts sneer at as 'flyover country' voted George W Bush back in because, according to one of his creatures, 'they like the way he walks, they like the way he talks, they like the way he points at things.' The year the rest of us laughed at the electoral college system, while looking uncomfortably at our own stark lack of choices in our next general elections. The year I heard Air America radio and realised the left wing in America is beyond doomed. The year I saw The Daily Show and understood that Jon Stewart and his team realise that too. The year that the ambient sound of Britain became a collective mumbling noise. The year I discovered videoblogging and the year I discovered that almost no-one knows what to do with it.

2004: another step to the boneyard in the continuing Death Of Western

Culture. You're welcome.

___

Sent from handheld

"

(Via die puny humans.)

Wow! From the AP: "The...: "

Wow! From the AP: 'The head of the state Democratic Party said late Tuesday that recount results from King County give Democrat Christine Gregoire an eight-vote victory in the closest governor’s race in state history.'

"

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Today's best use of the word pirate:

Test of the Mainstream:

<snip />

Guns:

1. Are an essential tool for killing things.

2. Are an essential tool for the home which also happens to kill things.

3. Are what Jesus would've given the meek to take back the earth.

4. Are good. The gun kills men. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seed.


Sex:

1. Mostly happens on the internet.

2. Is dirty and BAD... but I LIKE it... but that makes me dirty and BAD... but I LIKE it...

3. Is a foul and terrible abomination of all that is holy until a priest/judge/clerk/pirate captain puts a ring on my finger and tells me otherwise.

4. Does not exist. Humans reproduce through budding.

Caitlin sent a musical recommendation in her stead this (last) weekend.

Lieder Von Gustav Mahler ( Christa Ludwig ) has been playing on my iPod since then.


[Update: I expect some weekend that Mahler will send Caitlin in his stead.]

There's a meme making the rounds of the story behind the guy who ended sneaking into Apple's headquarters for months after he was fired to finish the graphing calculator application for the original and most succeeding versions of the Macintosh computer.

Here's commentary from slashdot:

Cheesy college fun of the type appropriate for passing around your freshman year. (of high school)

I heard a raunchy Autism metaphor today.

My day is pretty much complete now.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes out July 16th, Reuters reports.

I should probably finish book 5 before then...


Milk & Honey was COLD last night. The Drinks were warm and good.

Bethany's in town. We have so far watched the extended RotK in two sittings, baked cookies gingerbread and meat (separately).

Is there such a thing as a savory liqueur? Should there be?

Are British Spellings cooler than American Spellings? Survey suggests maybe so.

My refrigerator has now had kefir introduced.

Who has the moral (ethical?) responsibility of making sure a guest is welcome, if they aren't technically your guest?

Google suggest is a beautiful piece of coding.

And, a former roommate is responsible for page 42 of the January 2005 Popular Mechanics.

Still not king...