The Wild Colonial Boys

The 101st Fighting Keyboarders have been in need of a new way to signal their toughness; baying for blood in Baghdad from Washington DC or Provincetown tends to run into diminishing returns after a while. So the fearless Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens make their latest leap for Orwellian flights of rhetoric via their explicit use of the F*CK word on the web. Hitch has an article about the word in Slate, and Sully links to it and gets in an additional usage along the way, and doubtless both feel thoroughly pumped up afterwards.

Sully follows with the latest of several approving nods to Hitch's bashing of Michael Moore, about which we'll have more to say below, but let's consider Hitch's Slate piece first. As he has long since completed his shift to the reactionary right of his brother Peter (the latter having been against the war in Iraq), his writing has become strained of any coherent substance and all that remains is the withered invective, much like the leftover botanicals used to make a batch of Bombay Sapphire gin. He does try one actual anecdote, and botches it:

The following anecdote appears in one of Niall Ferguson's absorbing studies of the British Empire. On the eve of independence for the colony of South Yemen, the last British governor hosted a dinner party attended by Denis Healey, then the minister for defense. Over the final sundown cocktail, as the flag was about to be lowered over the capital of Aden, the governor turned to Healey and said, "You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things." What, Healey was interested to know, were these imperishable aspects? "The game of soccer. And the expression 'f*ck off.' "

This is classic lazy hack journalism. Notice that he couldn't even be bothered to say which Niall F book it is. As it happens, the story appears on page 358 of Empire, but Hitch has thoroughly embellished it. Ferguson simply reports it as a remark made by Richard Turnbull, the penultimate governor of Aden (not the last governor) to Dennis Healey. And of course, Turnbull used the expression "Association Football" but we'll give Hitch a pass on his translation of a supposed direct quote. Because everything else Hitch relays about this anecdote is made up. Ferguson reports no time or context for the apercu -- no dinner party, no flag lowering, no to-and-fro between Dennis Healey and the governor.

Since he made such a hash of a something that he must have known someone could look up, how seriously can we take his other anecdotes, which rely entirely on his own memory? And the tone -- references to Kingsley Amis and the botched foul language of an Egyptian trader in the colonial days -- suggests a particular persona that Hitch seems to want to project for himself: that of the 1950s era cynically wise ex-colonial officer now posted to the UK Embassy in Washington and the life and soul of the State Department WASP dinner parties. Which is quite a journey for the 1960s radical.

And what of Hitch's volunteer duty as lead basher of Michael Moore? He and Sully are on the same page on that one too:

[Sully] "The man is openly on the other side in this war, and the film shows it in every frame." - Hitch, on CNN, telling it like it is. Actually, I think Moore may be objectively on the side of the Jihadists. But subjectively, he simply loathes American market capitalism more than Islamist fundamentalism.

Here we see the return to the "objectively pro-X" terminology of the early post 9/11 days; in this case, the two Oxbridge boys tell the Michigander that he's a traitor. Sullywatch will have plenty to say about Sully's pathologies on this one, but Hitch's fury seems in a class of its own. Basically, we think he's jealous of Moore. Remember what Hitch used to be known for -- the iconoclastic treatments of Mother Teresa and Princess Di. Now the sacred figure is Dubya, but it's Hitch leading the mob to protect the church. Somewhere deep down, he knows that he used to be on the other side.