AT&T and theodicy
I no longer fear Hell, for I have spent two days dealing with AT&T customer service.
Honest, I cannot remember the last time I was so angry. It was the kind of experience that makes you think this must be a movie, or the Soviet Union. And it’s still not over! How are these people still in business?
In November, Julie set up phone and Internet service through AT&T for our Louisiana house, and asked it to be activated on December 12 — this, even though we didn’t arrive till December 19. When we got there, there was no phone service, and no Internet. Yesterday, Julie spent two and a half hours on the phone with AT&T customer service, trying to sort out the problem. I’m going to spare you the exceedingly dull ins and outs, but Julie kept being passed around from machine to person, having to start over from the beginning every time. At one point, AT&T’s wireless service, which we also have, dropped the call — it’s unbelievably bad here; if you walk from one room to the next in my house, the call will drop. Unless it doesn’t. Sometimes it drops while you’re sitting still.
Anyway, as Julie later told me, she thought at one point they had gotten so good at artificial intelligence that she was talking to a machine that sounded like a real person. Then she figured the customer service person — or persons, as she ended up talking to a few of them — must be a foreigner. She said they spoke English words, but didn’t seem to understand clearly what they were being told. I heard her in there finally giving up talking to them in a normal tone of voice, and rather enunciating as if she were talking to a small child. And still! Finally someone she talked to said yes, it was their fault. They screwed up. They would have it up and running within 24 hours.
Well, the deadline came and went, and no phone service, and no Internet. I phoned AT&T myself. It took four minutes and 56 seconds of navigating through the automated customer service system before I finally got put through to a human being. And off we went again. It was as if the entire set of conversations Julie had had the day before had never occurred! After 45 minutes or longer on the phone with this particular person, and getting absolutely nowhere, my head was throbbing, and I lost my temper. I asked to be put through to a supervisor … and was transferred back to the automated system, at the very beginning.
I really do lack the words to describe how incandescently angry I was at this point. I had to give the phone to my wife to handle from that point on. I heard her say the words, “What do you mean it won’t be on till Friday?! That is unacceptable. You all have had over a month to make this work!”
I took the phone at that point. At least 30 minutes later, and three different customer service representatives (“Sir, I don’t know why they transferred you to me; this is not my area”), I reached the end of the line. The man told me there was nothing to be done. He said if it didn’t come on by midnight, that I should call this particular number. I realized there really was nothing else I could do at that point. There was no one left to talk to. He told me he lacked the authority to transfer me to a supervisor. I believe he was lying, but at that point, all I was capable of was screaming. (Julie had already asked me to go to the back of the house to carry on these conversations, because I was frightening the children). I gave up.
I decided to drive the six miles to my mom and dad’s house so I could update this blog. On the way out the door, I checked for the umpteenth time to see if we had a dial tone — and lo, we finally do. But the Internet was still dead.
Here’s the thing: I am not that angry at AT&T’s initial screw-up. It happens. One has to be tolerant. The absolutely gob-spittingly infuriating aspect of the whole experience was the customer service. I have never, not once in my life, dealt with a more dysfunctional system. AT&T has made a permanent enemy of me. I’m stuck with them for some time, but the very moment I can sign up with someone else, I’m gone. Let me repeat: This is because of horrible customer service, not the original error. No wonder people hate them. I hate myself for having ever gotten involved with AT&T. There ought to be business school graduate theses written about AT&T’s special gift for alienating customers.
I find myself taking mean satisfaction in the frustration and misery AT&T executives may be feeling over the Justice Department stopping their planned merger with T-Mobile. T-Mobile customers, you dodged a bullet. Analysts say consumers win by the merger failing. So do I! Lord have mercy, so do I.
I apologize to all of you for the light blogging. It’s AT&T’s fault.
Home, at last
A quick note to you all to let you know we made it to St. Francisville yesterday at noon — frazzled and backachey from the long drive, but … here, and happy to be so. Lucas made Julie stop the minivan shortly after we turned into my parents’ driveway so he could run the final yards and throw himself into his grandmother’s arms. It was a teary and joyful reunion. Above, a photo of Roscoe and me, and my very Southern breakfast — a Moon Pie — taken at a gas station south of Jackson, Miss. After gathering ourselves at my mom and dad’s house, we drove into town to show the kids their new house. It took about a minute and a half for Lucas to barrel through the thing, run out the front door, take a flying leap off the front porch, body-slam his mother and hoot, “I love it! It’s perfect!”
We unloaded the minivan and busied ourselves figuring out where the furniture would go when the unloading crew came over on Sunday morning. It really is a great old house — I’ll post photos later — and we’re lucky to have it. The camellias are in bloom in the yard. My cousin Melanie brought over a coffee maker and some Loisie cookies. Our great-great-great aunt Lois Simmons was known for making these fantastic pecan cookies, about the size of a quarter. I haven’t tasted them since my childhood (Loisie died when I was 10), but Melanie still makes them. I bit into one and it was a Proustian madeleine. I told Julie, “This is what my childhood tastes like.” The only thing missing was the aroma of a sweet olive tree, which Loisie had in her yard. (Here is a post about Loisie, including a photo of Loisie’s cabin, and of Loisie at her sink). I cannot imagine a better welcome-home gift than that jar of Loisie cookies.
Last night Hal, a neighbor in Starhill, the little community where my folks live, had a big jambalaya-cooking and bonfire at his camp by the pond. Julie was too worn out to go, but Lucas and I turned up to see folks and eat well. It was great — great to eat, great to see folks (“Are you thinking of moving this way? Wait, you moved here already? Today?!“), and great to be around a bonfire with Louisiana people drinking beer and eating jambalaya. Good times. Here’s Hal at work last night:
This morning I woke up and drove out to Starhill to meet the unloading crew, which is on its way as I type this (I’m having to update this blog at my mom and dad’s place; we won’t have Internet at the new house till sometime on Monday). Julie just texted from town to say that Lucas and Nora were bundled up and playing in the front yard, and came in to say, “We met this really nice man who told us to tell you that church starts at 10.” Love it. I walked Lucas and Nora around the block in our neighborhood near sundown yesterday. Nora held my hand and declared, in that policy-setting way of hers, “I’m going to say it for the third time: It’s BEAUTIFUL here!” Lucas sang, skynrdishly, “Sweet home, Loozyana… .” I think they’re going to be fine. Last night at the camp, it took five minutes for Lucas to make his first friend, an eight year old boy who’d just shot a coyote. Lucas thinks that’s the coolest thing he’s ever heard. Like I said, they’ll be fine.
It’s cold, crisp morning here. A gorgeous white blanket of frost covers the bottom below the cabin where my dad grew up, above Grant’s Bayou. I passed on by, turned off at my folks’ road, and stopped at the graveyard to say a word to my sister Ruthie, whose passing in September occasioned this homecoming. A vigil candle burned on her grave. I thanked God for her life and witness, and asked His help — and Ruthie’s prayers — that we may be good servants to Him and to her family. Our family.
Ours.
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Why (some) Christians loved Hitch
… in spite of himself, and in spite of themselves. Ourselves. In his great column today, Ross Douthat recalls a personal encounter with Hitchens demonstrating that Hitch’s commitment to atheism was as dogmatic and as closed-minded as any fideists. But unlike Hitch’s godless confreres, e.g., Dawkins, there was something human in the man that some believers were drawn to, even as he despised the things, and the One, that they loved. Ross identifies it:
In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”
Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.
My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.
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The Church and the Dirty War
As you know, on this long drive to Louisiana, I’ve listened to Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, “Hitch-22,” and been challenged by it in several ways. Mostly the challenges are along the lines of, “How can you like a man who says these things?” and the more pleasant, “How can you not like a man who says those things?” But having finished the book last night, on the outskirts of Meridian, Mississippi, I’m waking up this morning sensing that there’s one aspect of his book, and his outlook, that will linger with me a while.
The most consistent quality I detect in Hitchens’s character was a loathing of bullies (a quality that did not prevent him from behaving like one on occasion, though in one instance he recounts with remorse, he led a group of left-wing student thugs who shut down a Tory minister’s speech at college). I love this short anecdote told by Jane Mayer, recounting his embarrassing members of a supposedly anti-Semitic country club in Florida. This resonates with me at a fairly deep level, though I only wish I had even the tiniest portion of Hitchens’s rhetorical power to deploy against them. Though, let me note before I go further, I heard him once use his gifts in a way that struck me as, well, bullying. Back in 2002, he argued on the radio about some religious topic with a friend of mine, a man who was not a journalist or a public person, but a simple, pious Catholic who objected to some position of Hitchens’s. My friend was soft-spoken and respectful, and Hitchens made a fool of him. It was painful to listen to, ugly, and unwarranted. Hitchens had clearly made his mind up that this stranger, because he was a believing Catholic, deserved no respect or mercy, and Hitch didn’t give it to him. It was like watching Muhammad Ali beat up a postman, and did Hitchens no credit. To witness that kind of power — moral force and matchless articulation — deployed against a deserving target was an awesome thing to behold, but to see it used against someone who is weak and undeserving of such contempt was much less edifying. Given that Hitch was a moralist above all else (he was even moralistic in his immorality), the temptation to divide the world into Good and Bad, and to make no exceptions (except when it suits you, as he did quite rightly in Borges’s case), is a terrible temptation to abuse power.
But I digress. Anyway, I had not realized until listening to this book how despicable the Argentine junta was in terms of its human rights violations. For some reason, I was under the (false) impression that this was a facet of Chile under Pinochet. I know so little about Latin American history that I thought the imprisoned and tortured dissident journalist Jacobo Timerman had been Chilean. In fact, he was Argentine, and Argentina’s history of right-wing torture and human rights abuse appears to have been as bad as Chile’s under Pinochet. Last night before going to sleep, I spent some time online reading about what was called (by the junta itself!) the “Dirty War,” and confirmed, generally, the things Hitchens said about the place.
The tortures they subjected their prisoners to included forcing children to watch their parents tortured, and vice versa. They would in some cases insert starving rats into the orifices of prisoners. Think about those things for a moment. Of course they did many, many more things that most decent people couldn’t dream of. The thing is, the generals did these satanic acts under the guise of cleansing the country of atheistic Marxist rabble. Truth to tell, there really had been left-wing terrorism; the generals didn’t come from nowhere. As we know from history, when radical left-wing governments have taken power, they’ve done the same thing. There is something in our nature that renders us capable of all manner of disgusting evil once we’ve decided that our cause is sufficiently righteous. Hitchens says in his book that religion is responsible for that, but I don’t know how any remotely honest accounting of history can sustain such a judgment.
The point I want to bring up here is how unsettling it is to confront the role the Catholic Church in Argentina — unlike the Church under military dictatorship in Chile or Brazil, for example — played in justifying and sustaining this regime of torture. From a 2007 NYT story:
In Argentina, however, there was a much tighter relationship between the clergy and the military than existed in Chile or Brazil. “Patriotism came to be associated with Catholicism,” said Kenneth P. Serbin, a history professor at the University of San Diego who has written about the Roman Catholic Church in South America. “So it was almost natural for the Argentine clergy to come to the defense of the authoritarian regime.”
Those days may be over. After he finished his testimony on Monday, Father Capitanio was surrounded by a sea of elderly women from the Mothers of May Plaza, a group that has pushed successive Argentine governments for answers since the dirty war began in 1976. They wore white scarves in their hair bearing the names of family members who disappeared. Dabbing away tears, they clung to the priest, kissing him on the cheek and whispering their thanks.
Father Capitanio said that he felt that a weight had been lifted — and that he was not alone. “Many men and women of the church, bishops as well, have come to agree with my way of looking at the reality of the church’s role,” he said. “We have much to be sorry for.”
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Riding with Hitch
Well, we didn’t make it to St. Francisville tonight. We’re crashed at a hotel in Meridian, Miss. — four, four and a half hours from our destination, but we were just too fried to keep driving. When I was 27, I once drove a similar-sized van the 21-hour trip from Washington, DC, to my hometown in a single stretch. I’m 44 now, and, um, not so resilient. So be it.
I finished listening to “Hitch-22” today, and prayed for Hitchens’ soul several times throughout the journey. I cannot settle on an opinion of the man, except to hope, to sincerely hope, that he has been very pleasantly surprised by both God’s existence and His mercy. Some of what he stood for — his attack on Mother Teresa, for example — was unbelievably appalling. I thought his extreme vulgarity about Jerry Falwell upon the man’s death was simply unspeakable. I don’t begrudge him despising Falwell or anyone, but I hope to hear or read no one spiting Hitchens upon his passing as Hitchens spited Falwell. There is something so unshirted in Hitchens’ capacity to hate that I find it almost unnerving.
And unless I missed a chapter or two — as I might have done there at the end, fumbling around with the iPhone controls at a gas station, Hitchens, the great sniffer-outer of hypocrisies and frailties in others, never came to terms, at least not in this memoir, with his agitation on behalf of the Iraq War. It was eerie to hear his voice making the case for the Iraq War in 2008, invoking the same arguments that I and so many others found so persuasive in 2002. How could he be so certain he was right when things subsequently went so wrong? How could he have had such a fine and nuanced mind on some questions, but be possessed by the rankest simple-minded bigotry about religion? (I’ll have more to say about this a bit later, but I must confess in all fairness that some of what Hitchens said challenged my own somewhat settled views in one area of religion.) I started to write that Hitch rarely seemed to have second thoughts, but then again that isn’t true either. He was a bundle of contradictions (an utterly banal observation, I know, but I find it difficult to trace a logic to his life and passions, except possibly a hatred of bullying). But he does say, on at least two occasions in “Hitch-22,” that one of the great pieces of wisdom he has learned over his years is that life requires the keeping of two sets of books.
He also says, borrowing a line from a friend, that one finds that the worst sort of people are sometimes quite right. It’s also true, he observes, that the best sort of people are sometimes very wrong. In a lengthy section of the book about the Argentine military dictatorship. he discusses in detail so shocking that I audibly gasped (I was driving through Knoxville at the time I heard this, and won’t forget it) the various hellish tortures the Argentine regime inflicted on its prisoners, especially Jewish ones. The specific torture that made me gasp was so vile I can’t bring myself to write it here, because you won’t ever be able to get that image out of your head, but let me say that according to several sources I’ve just found online, Hitchens is neither inventing nor exaggerating this thing. Anyway, Hitchens recalls having visited the elderly Borges in his Buenos Aires apartment at the time. Borges praised the military regime. Hitchens forgave him that, invoking the “best people have the worst ideas” line, and pointing out that Borges repented. One surmises that Borges’ gifts as a novelist, and his robust secularity, earned him from the memoirist graces that he would never have considered extending to Mother Teresa. I don’t respect him for that.
And yet, I wanted to cheer for him as I recalled his having stood up for Salman Rushdie during the Khomeini crisis — this at a time when many other political, literary, religious and cultural figures of consequence were equivocating or actually criticizing Rushdie for being multiculturally (from the left) or religiously (from the right) insensitive. He was right early and often about Bill Clinton’s slimy character. His articulate appreciation of American liberties, especially freedom of speech and of the press, was thrilling to listen to, and his chapter meditating on the death of an American soldier who volunteered to go to Iraq after reading Hitchens’ work was intensely moving. I find it hard to imagine any person listening to or reading the entirely of Hitchens’s memoir, or as few as five of his essays, without finding something offensive, deeply unfair, or uncharitable to the point of perversity. Nor can I imagine any person doing same without finding something extraordinarily brave, brilliant, challenging, or beautifully expressed. I never met Hitchens, but I have conservative friends who disagreed with him about much, but who cherished his friendship. I get this. Maybe I’m guilty of the same inconsistency I accuse him of in going soft on Borges (as I likely would have been even quicker to have done): cutting him all kinds of slack because he was an extremely gifted writer of prose and was in some ways the best sort of person. Fine. As I have recently heard it said, so much of life consists of keeping two sets of books.
I commend to you for your edification the remembrance of the English traditionalist conservative writer Peter Hitchens, paying tribute to his late brother, with whom he quarreled for most of his life, but plainly admired:
He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.
This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to.
My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.
Yes, this comes through very clearly in “Hitch-22.” The courage, sometimes put to bad use, but always there, as clear and as bracing as the clang of a church bell on a cold winter’s morning.
OK, to bed now. Home in the morning, to a house in which I’ve never lived. A strange feeling. But in a day or two, I’ll be looking once again at my books on my bookshelves. And that’s a comfort. Having Christopher Hitchens as my traveling companion for these two days (well, not counting faithful Roscoe, who rides along on the seat next to me, keeping his own counsel) has made me want to do nothing more than be very still and quiet and read, read, read.
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Christopher Buckley on Hitch
Wonderful, wonderful reminiscence of Christopher Hitchens by his friend Christopher Buckley. You must read it all. Excerpt:
Lunch—dinner, drinks, any occasion—with Christopher always was. One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
When we made a date for a meal over the phone, he’d say, “It will be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.” I never doubted that this rococo phraseology was an original coinage, until I chanced on it, one day, in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse, the writer Christopher perhaps esteemed above all others. Wodehouse was the Master. When we met for another lunch, one that lasted only five hours, he was all a-grin with pride as he handed me a newly minted paperback reissue of Wodehouse with “Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.” “Doesn’t get much better than that,” he said, and who could not agree?
Buckley goes on to recall his final meeting with Hitch, in the critical care unit at M.D. Anderson. A very frail Hitch was making his way through the collected letters of Wodehouse, and making notes in the margins. How can you not forgive a guy like that most anything?
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If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy?
A few years ago, I had a friendly argument with a colleague who believes same-sex marriage ought to be legalized. I made the standard argument that if our current marriage laws — this was before gay marriage had spread to some states — were based on nothing but irrational prejudice, as he maintained, then there was no reason to deny some sort of marital union to polygamists and polyamorists. Ridiculous, he said.: “Marriage is between two people.”
“But why?” I pressed. “Isn’t that arbitrary?”
He honestly didn’t understand my objection. He thought it inconceivable that any court would grant what to him was sheer crackpottery. The very idea of polygamist marriages being sanctioned in law! Inconceivable! Which is what they said not 20 years ago about same-sex marriage. Anyway, I’ve found over the years that people who argue that restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples is wrong because bigoted and because mutual consent should be the only barrier to marriage often do not know what to say when the slippery slope to plural marriage is mentioned. They don’t seem to appreciate how the premisses and the logic that leads them to back same-sex marriage — particularly the belief that marriage is merely a social institution — makes it difficult to make a principled argument against other alternative marital arrangements.
This conversation came to mind just now reading, via First Things, Matthew J. Franck’s piece emerging out of a public debate he had with a same-sex marriage proponent. Excerpt:
She had begun, in her prepared remarks, by calling on a standard of “rights” that cannot be defeated by appeals to “tradition.” And she had mocked judges who, in the early decisions on the case for same-sex marriage, had simply turned to a dictionary definition of marriage.
Yet, in her response to my point about plural marriages, Gorenberg herself turned immediately to tradition and to received definitions. Marriage just is a “binary institution,” she asserted, and changing that fact would entail all sorts of inconveniences. (The historic existence of polygamy in many places is proof that these inconveniences are not insurmountable, but this did not slow her down.)
Why mere tradition was now owed such automatic allegiance, she did not pause to explain. Now the prospect of altering a “whole raft of laws” associated with marriage filled her with horror and incredulity. She seemed quite oblivious of the fact that she was making my argument for me. Where was her concern about changing all the details and complexities of a forest of family law planted thick with assumptions about husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, always of opposite sexes?
In her nimble way, having shed the drag-chute of principled consistency, Hayley Gorenberg demonstrated the great strength of the movement for same-sex marriage. She did not have anything to offer in answer to the questions “What is marriage? What is it for? What are its boundaries? Whom should it include?” She does not need answers to such questions. All she needs is an argument for the moment, for the cause, for the victory she wants right now. If her argument is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, that is not her concern. The cause is self-justifying.
I well understand why people of good will would want to extend marriage to same-sex couples. Many of us know gay couples, like them, don’t see why they should be denied what straight married couples enjoy. I get that. Yet I fear many of these advocates don’t understand what they concede — what they must concede — to achieve that.
Why, for example, should a brother and sister who have agreed to undergo sterilization as a condition of their marital union be denied the right to marry, if that is their wish? There would be no chance of genetically damaged issue. So why not?
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Nostos journal
Dimitra, a Greek friend, wrote this morning this morning to offer her best wishes for a safe journey, and said that in her country, they call mine a “nostos” journey — a homecoming. She’s right, though I’m too tired from the pack-pack rush-rush of this week to contemplate the emotional and philosophical implications of the journey I’m making. We finished packing everything into the minivan and into the 26-foot Penske van this morning. If you would have happened by our apartment building this morning, you would have seen two adults frantically trying to force a king-size floppy futon-ish mattress into the back of a moving van already stuffed absolutely to the gills. It was such a close call that I had to close the back partially to trap the horrible thing in the top so we could keep heaving until finally, as much of our household as could possibly fit into the land barge was secure. And the minivan is as full as it possibly can be and still be roadworthy (that is, and still enable Julie to see out the back). Some things just didn’t make it. I’ll miss that mounted deer head. But not too much.
We left this morning just after eight, which was only an hour later than we had wanted to set off — by my family’s standards on these things, excellent time. I had gone maybe one mile toward the interstate when I resolved that I had developed a Strange New Respect for truck drivers. It’s pretty hard to pilot those things, actually. Once you get going, it’s intimidating to realize how much force you represent, hurtling down the highway. You can’t stop easily, and you can’t see nearly as well as you would like to. I’m sure one gets used to driving big trucks, but I tell you, I will never crowd one again on the road.
I was barely out of Philadelphia when I started listening to “Hitch-22,” Christopher Hitchens’ memoir. I would love to be able to passages to you, because there are so many wonderful parts. I’m thinking right this moment of Hitch’s recollection of being a young assistant producer on a television show, or somesuch thing, and booking the (by then) elderly British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, for an interview. Hitch, who was at the time an ardent hard-leftist, writes that he had a pang of conscience over how he should greet the vile Mosley, whose best man at his wedding to Diana Mitford had been Josef Goebbels. In the end, Hitch did what one does in such a situation, and welcomed the program’s guest, then took him to the green room. He sat chatting with Mosley pleasantly, and then delivered the grizzled fascist to the set. When the camera came on, Mosley stiffened and delivered his standard bombastic rhetoric.
Hitch writes (and says — the audio book recording is in his own voice) that that incident taught him a great deal about human nature. He was able to see how Mosley was able to charm the British elites, while also possessing the ability to turn on the brutish demagogue act for different audiences. Hitch also learned that one should not miss the chance to meet people as “original” and as consequential as an Oswald Mosley, however repellent his politics and moral sense. You never know what such people have to teach you. Wise, that.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the book immensely, and, knowing that the author is now in Houston receiving intense chemotherapy, plus hearing that he’s in a very bad place right now, I’ve found myself spontaneously praying for him as I’ve bucketed southward. He doesn’t seem to miss an opportunity in this memoir to say nasty things about religion, but I do find it impossible not to like someone as, well, original and as gifted with the English language as Hitchens. I pray, literally, that he is as free from pain and fear as he can be these days, and I pray God’s mercy on him and for him. I am a bit surprised, actually, by how much his memoir, and knowing how much he’s suffering now, has made me feel affection for him.
I did take a break from “Hitch-22” at one point when the iPhone got screwy, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back on track without looking down at the device (and you don’t don’t don’t want to take your eyes off the road even for a second when you’re driving that diesel-guzzling beast). I pushed some button while not looking, and there was the lovely Diana Krall, making my day Champagne-bright by singing this version of “‘Deed I Do” from her glorious Live In Paris disc:
There is something strange about hurtling town Hwy 81 through Appalachia behind the wheel of a lorry, being serenaded by Diana Krall. But it made me happy. “You ought to be listening to Dwight Yoakam,” said my wife later at the truck stop. Yeah, but … I mean, come on, Diana Krall. Sometimes I’ll buy a lottery ticket, and think that the best thing about winning $50 million would be to be able to hire her to play a private concert. Champagne for everybody!
While slaking the beast’s thirst for money diesel this afternoon, I checked e-mail and heard from an outraged Mark Shea that Obama announced plans to break his promise to veto the defense bill with the odious habeas corpus restrictions. Andrew Sullivan:
Obama will sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects. Greenwald is right that Obama has never explicitly rejected such a power in all cases, but until now, he has not actually gone so far as to put his signature behind its codification. That matters. Just as torture was reversible until John McCain caved and signed it into law in 2006, so the executive power of indefinite detention within America’s prison system might have been quarantined to the Bush-Cheney years. No longer. This soon-to-be-legislated power will also apply to American civilians. It is a legal and indefinite abolition of habeas corpus. And you will find every so-called liberty-lover in the GOP (with Ron Paul as the exception) rushing to vote for it.
So the Obama administration can sic the Attorney General on states that require voter IDs, saying being required to prove your identity when you show up to vote is a violation of civil rights. But the president will sign away habeas corpus protections for Americans deemed to be terror suspects. Just so we know who we’re dealing with here. Glenn Greenwald:
Can any rational person review these events and try to claim that Obama is some sort of opponent of indefinite detention? He is one of American history’s most aggressive defenders of that power. As Human Rights Watch put it: “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.” There is no partisan loyalty or leader-reverent propaganda strong enough to obscure that fact.
I am politically homeless. But I have a home, and I will be there tomorrow night. And with that, good night from Abington, Virginia.
UPDATE: As some readers have observed in the comboxes, Christopher Hitchens died tonight in hospice care in Houston. Here is a collection of his journalism for Vanity Fair magazine. This awful news will make completing “Hitch-22” on the drive to Louisiana today even more moving. May the God he did not recognize receive him with mercy, and sustain his family in their grief.
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A sense of place
Because it might be several days before I can post fresh material here (though I will be approving your comments via iPhone as I am able while on the road), I’d like to post a link to The New Atlantis magazine, which has a terrific series of essays about the sense of place. This only seems fitting as I’m saying goodbye to a good place and good friends in Philadelphia, and heading to another good place to live: my hometown, St. Francisville, Louisiana. I would love to read your thoughts about the ideas and insights in the TNA essays.
Here is a passage from Bill McClay’s essay about the loss of a fixed sense of place in contemporary American life:
What Stein’s and Klinkenborg’s accounts share is their depiction of an ordinary but disquieting phenomenon: the translation of place into space — the transformation of a setting charged with human meaning, a place, into one from which the meaning has departed, a mere space. We all have experienced this, some of us many times. Think of the strange emotion you feel when you are moving, and you finish clearing all your belongings out of the apartment or the house or the dorm room you have inhabited — and you look back at it one last time, to see a space that used to be the center of your world, reduced to nothing but bare walls and bare floors.
Of course, such changes and transitions, however painful they may sometimes be, are part of a healthy and dynamic human existence. What is different now is not that they happen, but that they have become so normative, so pervasive, reflecting a social and psychological fluidity that seems to mark our times. As we have become ever more mobile and more connected and absorbed in a dense web of electronically mediated relations, an astonishingly rich panoply of things that are not immediately present to us, our actual and tangible places seem less and less important to us, more and more transient or provisional or interchangeable or even disposable. We increasingly draw our social sustenance from (and expend our social energies on) virtual people and places rather than from the venerable, if limiting, fixity of the actual people standing before our eyes, and the specific places beneath our feet.
Tell me about it. As I write this, the apartment that my family has lived in for the past two years is no longer a coherent place, but instead a space that contains boxes full of all our things, ready to be loaded on the truck. I have observed my children growing ever more anxious over these past few weeks, as more of our things have gone into the boxes, signaling none-too-subtly to them that our lives in this place are coming to an end. Our second child, Lucas, is the most emotionally intense one, and he’s been having headaches and stomachaches more regularly as we’ve approached our departure date. I can’t say that it doesn’t weigh on my mind what I’ve put those children through, with two moves in two years. I hope and pray this is the last one. More from McClay:
In both its literal and its figurative meanings, “place” refers not only to a geographical spot but to a defined niche in the social order: one’s place in the world. Thus, when we say that we have “found our place,” we are speaking not only of a physical location, but of the achievement of a stable and mature personal identity within a coherent social order, so that we can provide an answer to the questions: “Who are you? Where did you come from? Where is your home? Where do you fit in the order of things?” Hence, it is not surprising that a disruption or weakening in our experience of geographical place will be reflected in similar disruptions in our sense of personal identity. The two things go together.
I am going back to the place where I was born, and where I lived the first 16 years of my life. I know who’s who there, mostly (though it has changed significantly since I last lived there). At one time in my life, that made me anxious, that everybody knew who everybody was. Now it comforts me. The other night a friend from there called to say that she had taken some presents in to a local gift shop to be wrapped. The wrapping service was rather expensive, but my friend was doing it for my brother-in-law Mike, who, as regular readers will know, became a widower in September. My friend decided to go ahead and pay for the expensive gift wrapping as a present to Mike. When my friend came to pick up the presents, the people at the store had figured out that the gifts were Mike’s, to his children, and refused to take any money for their supplies and labor. Isn’t that wonderful?
The thing is, I bet something similar would happen right here in my Philadelphia neighborhood, if people knew you, and knew your people. The other day our friend Dan stopped by, and was telling us about a couple of new businesses opening in the neighborhood. He said something to the effect of “she’s married to him, and they’re related to the So-and-Sos, who own that property over on…” — neither of us could follow the connections. But Dan grew up here. He knows these people. He knows their story. He’s been around. This is his place. I love that. I really do. There was a time in my life when I wouldn’t have appreciated how something as simple as knowing that sort of thing was so valuable. Now I do. This is fairly useless knowledge, granted, but it reveals how rooted Dan is in this place. This is not a space he inhabits. It’s a place. It’s home.
I am by no means sure this is a good thing, but I find it comforting in this time of transition to have this blog community to check in with daily. Most of you I only know by your pseudonyms, but I know your voices, and I’m glad for them. I will be reading your stuff while I’m pumping diesel into the supertanker of a truck I’ll be piloting down South these next few days. And I will feel at home, kind of. Is that okay?
Whole New Atlantis series here. And, as ever, check in on Front Porch Republic, where they’re always meditating on place. By the way, just you wait till you see my new front porch. I’ll post a picture as soon as we’re on it.
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