Best Example Of War Hawk Narcissim Yet: Christopher Hitchens' Brave And Heroic Iraq Confession
December 28, 2007 -- 12:24 PM EST // //
Okay, everyone, let's give a hearty round of applause to Christopher Hitchens for the long piece he's now published in Vanity Fair. War-supporter Hitchens did a very brave and heroic thing: He admitted that he feels really, really bad about the death of a soldier in Iraq -- and devoted an entire magazine article to his own feelings about it.
Now, most people go about their lives enduring their most painful burdens in private. Not Hitchens. He fearlessly went public with it in paragraph after paragraph, and even courageously admitted that his guilt places him in the same class of great writers like William Butler Yeats and George Orwell, who also confessed to such feelings. This must have been very, very difficult for Hitchens to admit indeed.
Really, we should immediately put Hitchens' essay into the time capsule as the most perfect expression that we've seen yet of the narcissism and extraordinary delusions of historical grandeur that our war hawks keep revealing themselves capable of.
Hitchens' piece is all about a young soldier named Mark Daily, who had initial misgivings on the war but was turned in favor of the war by Hitchens' writings and was subsequently killed in Iraq. Upon learning this, Hitchens confesses in his article, he felt dismayed, asking himself if it was "possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D."
Hitchens then recounts in great detail the horrific emotional journey he then endured.
Hitch tells us he thought of Yeats, who "was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths" quoting his work. Hitchens assures us modestly that he "abruptly" dismissed any comparison between himself and the great poet (though of course Hitchens went out of his way to explicitly float this comparison in his article). He tells us he had a similar thought about Orwell. And he assures us in the article that "I don't intend to make a parade of my own feelings here" -- before going on to do just this at great length. He even went to meet the family of the dead young man, and to his tremendous relief, they treated him well.
Now, a few points immediately present themselves. Why does Hitchens feel so much more angst-ridden about this young man than he apparently does about the other 3.899 Americans who died in Iraq? After all, the case he and other hawks made for the war is also indirectly responsible for lots of other deaths and injuries, too. The key difference here is that this one kid...read Hitchens' writings, creating a jumping off point for this narcissistic little Yeatsian fantasy and subsequent act of self-aggrandizing emotional exhibitionism in the pages of a glossy magazine.
I'm sure Hitchens does harbor some genuine emotions about this somewhere. But really, Hitch -- show some decency and keep them to yourself. You want to write long articles about the Iraq War dead or about how devastated the parents of the dead are? I'm all for it. But let's focus exclusively on them and how they feel, not on you. Writing about them, and only them, would be a genuine gesture towards these people. Neither they nor the rest of us really give a crap about your heroic self-cleansing efforts or about where you think they place you in the pantheon of immortal writers.
Oh, and here's the perfect coda to all this: Hitchens' courage and heroism was lauded today by -- who else -- David Brooks, another war-supporter obsessed with the intellectual bravery of his rarefied war hawk class. It's a nice little club they have going there. It works for them.
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