Until he reinvokes his virulent self to attack Said. And does it in a way that ridicules himself.
Roger L. Simon, in his Blog today, sums up my thinking.
HITCHENS ON HIS GAME AGAIN
I have written several times that the journalist I most admire today is Christopher Hitchens. The man has influenced my thinking to a larger degree than anyone presently active. The new Atlantic Monthly contains another exceptional article by him pointed out to me by my wife Sheryl Longin: Where the Twain Should Have Met . It is a lengthy discussion/review of Edward Said's "Orientalism," a work of great influence in its imputation of pervasive cultural imperialism in the West's view of the Islamic world. In the last section of his article Hitchens dissects the introduction to the latest edition of Said's book (in which the author bizarrely ascribes the looting of the Iraqi Museum to American troops despite all evidence to the contrary). This is particularly telling in the way it reveals the mendacious gyrations of Said's language and thought.
Edward Said:
In the process the uncountable sediments of history, which include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad's libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that "our" East, "our" Orient, becomes "ours" to possess and direct.
Christopher Hitchens:
This passage is rescued from sheer vulgarity only by its incoherence. The sole testable proposition (or nontautology) is the fantastic allegation that American forces powdered the artifacts of the Iraq museum in order to show who was boss. And the essential emptiness of putting the "our" in quotation marks, with its related insistence on possession and appropriation, is nakedly revealed thereby. We can be empirically sure of four things: that by design the museums and libraries of Baghdad survived the earlier precision bombardment without a scratch or a splinter; that much of the looting and desecration occurred before coalition forces had complete control of the city; that no looting was committed by U.S. soldiers; and that the substantial reconstitution of the museum's collection has been undertaken by the occupation authorities, and their allies among Iraqi dissidents, with considerable care and scruple. This leaves only two arguable questions: How much more swiftly might the coalition troops have moved to protect the galleries and shelves? And how are we to divide the responsibility for desecration and theft between Iraqi officials and Iraqi mobs? The depravity of both is, to be sure, partly to be blamed on the Saddam regime; would it be too "Orientalist" to go any further?
Game, set and match -- Hitchens.
rogerlsimon.com |
