Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

  The subconscious mentality of the uncontrollably well-off was deftly caught by the novelist Joyce Cary (a chap, despite his name), who evolved the phrase “tumbril remark” to catch the essence of polite upper-class incredulity at the sheer inconvenience of having to put up with other people. My preferred example of the remark was once given by the late British Tory politician Julian Amery, who described an acquaintance of his (was it Lady Diana Cooper?—there’s an element of the apocryphal to some of these tales) as she waited under an umbrella outside the Dorchester hotel in the 1930s and tapped her foot with impatience as the Rolls was brought round to the front. Seizing his chance, a ragged man approached her without the courtesy of an introduction and announced that he had not eaten anything for three days. The outraged Lady Diana drew herself up. “Foolish man that you are,” she instructed him. “You must try. If need be, you must force yourself.”

  Wilde’s Lady Bracknell could hardly have bettered this. (“Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever,” she says. “If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.”) Yet it’s easy to cull non-apocryphal tumbrilisms. Let me introduce George Orwell, who was writing a wartime diary in 1940 as London braced for the Blitz. He noted:

  From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:

  “Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining … In any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”

  Commenting on these perfectly wonderful uses of “most,” Orwell noted, “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exists.” Lady Oxford, by the way, was the title of the great socialite and memoirist Margot Asquith. And the decade then just closing—the 1930s—was the scene of some splendid tumbril stuff. The diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon provide an especially rich seam, as he describes toddling off to Savile Row to spend a king’s ransom on socks and scarves, before lunching at the German Embassy with the divine Herr and Frau Ribbentrop—the dessert consisting on one occasion of lobster ice cream. What a nuisance, though, to have to step over dirty and unwholesome people as one makes one’s rounds.

  “I see no point at all in being poor,” the late Queen Mother is supposed to have said while being driven through some slum. “Mind you, that was a lot of money in those days,” an English duke once told an interviewer known to me, while recalling the loss of some [GBP] 150 million by one of his ancestors in the goldfields of South Africa. These are the real thing: the failure of the upper crust and the cream of society to have the remotest glimmer of an idea of what life is like for others. (The “cream” was described by Samuel Beckett as “thick and rich,” while nobody seems to know who defined the “upper crust” as “a lot of crumbs held together by dough.”) Sometimes you can make an educated guess that the speaker is joking at his own expense. “I would not have The Times,” remarked the late Duke of Devonshire in speaking of the decline of that newspaper, “in any of my houses.” While making a documentary in Liverpool about how the other half lived, Auberon Waugh addressed a group of proles and breezily told them that his own manor in Somerset “probably costs more to heat than most of you people earn.” Mark Boxer, that effortlessly superior and dandyish cartoonist, once drew a scene of two people in a restaurant during a coal miners’ strike. “Do you mind the carafe wine?” says the host, looking up over a hugely ornate and tasseled menu. “I’m faintly unhappy when the bill gets too close to the miners’ take-home pay.” Mr. Humphry Berkeley, an Englishman whose ancestors came over with the Norman conquerors, left the Conservative Party partly in protest at its Africa policy and eventually ran for Parliament as a Labour candidate. Asked what was different about the experience, he replied with apparently perfect gravity that “I’ve been meeting the working class and I simply must say that it’s absolutely the nicest class I’ve so far met.”

  But then there are old jokes—most of them also English for a reason that barely needs explaining—that are based more on Schadenfreude. Example: Two extremely rich men are sitting in companionable silence in their overstuffed armchairs in the upstairs window of the Carlton Club, in London. The silence is broken when the first man calls attention to the situation outside and says, “It’s raining.” “Good,” replies the second man without looking up from his newspaper. “It’ll wet the people.”

  Auberon Waugh’s father, Evelyn, was a tremendous snob in many ways, but was generally rather careful to avoid such direct class combat. Indeed, in his masterpiece Scoop he gives a tumbril character to a radical type—Mr. Pappenhacker of the Daily Twopence, who is rude to waiters at a restaurant that must be the Savoy Grill. “He seems to be in a very bad temper,” the shy William Boot observes of Pappenhacker to his host, Mr. Salter:

  Not really. He’s always like that to waiters. You see he’s a communist. Most of the staff at the Twopence are—they’re University men, you see. Pappenhacker says that every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping bolster up the capitalist system. He’s very clever of course, but he gets rather unpopular.

  In Kingsley Amis’s Girl, 20, the radical-chic Sir Roy Vandervane tries for the same effect by plastering reactionary bumper stickers all over his limousine and driving as arrogantly as he can, honking the horn like Mr. Toad and seeking to create resentment among lesser drivers and humble pedestrians. That didn’t work. A tumbril remark doesn’t work if it’s conscious or deliberate. (Indeed, one definition of a gentleman is that of someone who is never rude by accident.) But what does work is an unmistakable, revealing, unfakable reminder of how superiors really view inferiors. The wife of a British diplomat in Saigon in the 1960s, a certain Lady So-and-So, once considered the surrounding carnage and observed soothingly that it wasn’t as bad as it might look, since one had to bear in mind that “Orientals” had a different attitude to death. My friend the poet and journalist James Fenton noted as calmly as he dared that from this you could tell one thing for certain—namely that Lady So-and-So had a different attitude toward the death of Asians.

  For some reason, the Bush family excels at this kind of thing. I remember George senior, having come in third (after Pat Robertson, of all people) in a 1987 Iowa straw poll, being asked why his own supporters apparently hadn’t bothered to turn out. Oh well, he replied, there was more to life than politics, and his sort of people “were at their daughters’ coming-out parties, or teeing up at the golf course for that all-important last round.” To be absolutely honest with you, I do not know to this day exactly what a “coming-out party” is, but it has a nice debutante, Marie Antoinette ring to it when uttered amid the corn-infested fields and pig-strewn farms of Iowa. (A bit like the distribution of free gateau to the masses, which somehow failed to occur in the inundated states of the Gulf of Mexico in September.) At a later stage, offended by the very idea that he lacked the common touch, George H. W. Bush put himself to the fatiguing effort of declaring in public his love for pork rinds and country music, and of guising himself in pleb-like clothing as if to the manner born. This is worse, in a way, because “slumming” on the part of the elite is a carefully graded insult—to the intelligence, among other things. (I knew that John Kerry was through when a friend of mine looked up from the New York Times and said, “Oh dear. He’s gone goose hunting again.”) Oddly enough, and for all the Versailles teasing that she herself had to endure, Nancy Reagan had more “class” when she turned up in rags to sing the parodic “Secondhand Clothes” at the Gridiron Club and “pre-empted” the media tumbrils that had been rumbling around the Pennsylvania Avenue district in the early 1980s.

  “Because it turns on a sixpence, whatever that is.” Thus remarked the Armenian tycoon Nubar Gulbenkian when asked why he modeled his custom town car on a London taxi. One can be reasonably certain that this is a rich man’s joke. But “The levees broke? Who knew they could do that?” is not funny for one thing, and d
oesn’t demonstrate any sense of noblesse oblige, either. It shows in a blinding flash what someone really thinks of you. It is not self-satirizing, or deflecting. It is myopic, and arrogant. It reminds one that “levee” was the word used by King Louis XVI himself, in his royal bedchamber upon rising, for the reception of his courtiers. The word “tumbril” is in our language and in our minds because of the imperishable passage in A Tale of Two Cities where the carts full of those same, now fallen, haggard courtiers come grinding their way to the Place de la Revolution, and where Madame Defarge sits knitting with her fellow tricoteuses, coldly and contentedly marking each crashing slice of the blade. But, for me, the most chilling mention is the very first one, where Dickens recalls a particularly hideous torture-execution ordered by France’s “Christian pastors” in defense of the old king’s regime:

  It is likely enough that in the rough out-houses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.

  You can feel it coming … “like the stillness in the wind / ’Fore the hurricane begins.” The reference to “mire,” incidentally, isn’t Dickens’s only euphemism. A tumbril really means a cart for the carrying away of excrement. Don’t tempt me …

  Other expressions are in our language, also. We still use the adjectives “noble” as positive and “base” as negative: terms that derive their original meaning from the Anglo-French feudal order, where every person knew their divinely ordained position. We employ the word “chivalrous” to mean honorable and gallant, when all it denotes is a noble who owns a horse, or horses, and can thus ride over the unmounted—rather as if a specialist in Arabian equines was to be appointed the head of FEMA, and raise his eyebrows politely at the distasteful news that lesser breeds were sweltering in a dome. Another expression less “commonly” used—and there I go again with another instance of the same linguistic bias—is “below the salt.” This refers to the long table in the baron’s hall, when seating was by social gradation all the way to the bottom, where sat the greasiest serfs and scullions. The precious condiment could not be passed below a certain place about halfway down. How we smile now to think of such primitive social and class prejudices. And then there came a day in New Orleans, a town named for a scion of French feudalism, when the saltwater rose up and didn’t just wet the people but drowned them, and nobody was above that salt except those who could fly over it and look down de haut en bas, while a lot of lowly people were suddenly well below it. Whatever is that distant rumble that I dimly hear?

  (Vanity Fair, December 2005)

  Stand Up for Denmark!

  PUT THE CASE that we knew of a highly paranoid religious cult organization with a secretive leader. Now put the case that this cult, if criticized in the press, would take immediate revenge by kidnapping a child. Put the case that, if the secretive leader were also to be lampooned, two further children would be killed at random. Would the press be guilty of “self-censorship” if it declined to publish anything that would inflame the said cult? Well, yes it would be guilty, but very few people would insist on the full exertion of the First Amendment right. However, the consequences for the cult and its leader would be severe as well. All civilized people would regard it as hateful and dangerous, and steps would be taken to circumscribe its influence, and to ensure that no precedent was set.

  The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary: That we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

  You wish to say that it was instead a small newspaper in Copenhagen that lit the trail? What abject masochism and nonsense. It was the arrogant Danish mullahs who patiently hawked those cartoons around the world (yes, don’t worry, they are allowed to exhibit them as much as they like), until they finally provoked a vicious response against the economy and society of their host country. For good measure, they included a cartoon that had never been published in Denmark or anywhere else. It showed the Prophet Mohammed as a pig, and may or may not have been sent to a Danish mullah by an anonymous ill-wisher. The hypocrisy here is shameful, nauseating, unpardonable. The original proscription against any portrayal of the prophet, not that this appears to be absolute, was superficially praiseworthy because it was intended as a safeguard against idolatry and the worship of images. But now see how this principle is negated. A rumor of a cartoon in a faraway country is enough to turn the very name Mohammed into a fetish-object and an excuse for barbaric conduct. As I write this, the death toll is well over thirty and—guess what?—a mullah in Pakistan has offered $1 million and a car as a bribe for the murder of “the cartoonist.” This incitement will go unpunished and most probably unrebuked.

  Could things become any more sordid and cynical? By all means. In a mindless attempt at a tu quoque, various Islamist groups and regimes have dug deep into their sense of wit and irony and proposed a trade-off. You make fun of “our” prophet and we will deny “your” Holocaust. Even if there were any equivalence, and Jewish mobs were now engaged in trashing Muslim shops and embassies, it would feel degrading even to engage with such a low and cheap stunt. I suppose that one should be grateful that the Shoah is only to be denied rather than, as in some Islamist propaganda, enthusiastically affirmed and set out as a model for emulation. But only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The memory of the Third Reich is very vivid in Europe precisely because a racist German regime also succeeded in slaughtering millions of non-Jews, including countless Germans, under the demented pretext of extirpating a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy. As it happens, I am one of the few people to have publicly defended David Irving’s right to publish, and I think it outrageous that he is in prison in Austria for expressing his opinions. But my attachment to free speech is at least absolute and consistent. Those who incite murder and arson, or who silkily justify it, are incapable of rising above the childish glee that culminates in the assertion that two wrongs make a right.

  The silky ones may be more of a problem in the long term than the flagrantly vicious and crazy ones. Within a short while—this is a warning—the shady term “Islamophobia” is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty. Thus the “soft” censorship will triumph, not from any merit in its argument, but from its association with the “hard” censorship that we have seen being imposed over the past weeks. A report in the New York Times of February 13 was as carefully neutral as could be but nonetheless conveyed the sense of menace. “American Muslim leaders,” we were told, are more canny. They have “managed to build effective organizations and achieve greater integration, acceptance and economic success than their brethren in Europe have. They portray the cartoons as a part of a wave of global Islamophobia and have encouraged Muslim groups in Europe to use the same term.” In other words, they are leveraging worldwide Islamic violence to drop a
discreet message into the American discourse.

  You may have noticed the recurrence of the term “One point two billion Muslims.” A few years ago, I became used to the charge that in defending Salman Rushdie, say, I had “offended a billion Muslims.” Evidently, the number has gone up since I first heard this ridiculous complaint. But observe the implied threat. There is not just safety in numbers, but danger in numbers. How many Danes or Jews or freethinkers are there? You can see what the “spokesmen” are insinuating by this tactic of mass psychology and mobbishness.

  And not without immediate success, either. The preposterous person of Karen Hughes is quoted in the same New York Times article, under her risible title of “Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.” She tittered outside the store she was happily giving away: “The voices of Muslim Americans have more credibility in the Muslim world frankly than my voice as a government official, because they can speak the language of their faith and can share their experience of practicing their faith freely in the West, and they can help explain why the cartoons are so offensive.” Well, let’s concede that almost any voice in any world has more credibility on any subject than this braying Bush-crony ignoramus, but is the State Department now saying that we shall be represented in the Muslim world only by Muslims? I think we need a debate on that, and also a vote. Meanwhile, not a dollar of Wahhabi money should be allowed to be spent on opening madrassas in this country, or in distributing fundamentalist revisions of the Koran in our prison system. Not until, at the very least, churches and synagogues and free-thought libraries are permitted in every country whose ambassador has bullied the Danes. If we have to accept this sickly babble about “respect,” we must at least demand that it is fully reciprocal.