For the Sake of Argument.

Respectively, so his work was fairly new to me when I began reading this series of essays. In some corner of what's left of the Catholic ghetto--our kitchen, maybe--I'd heard about Hitchens's denunciation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, so I turned to that essay first. And there, sure enough, that little old Albanian nun familiar to most of us for her uncompromising devotion to the poor, sick, dying, and despised is described as "a dangerous and sinister person" who whores after power, stolen money, and the affections of the powerful; whose "ostensible work of charity" is really "propaganda for the Vatican's heinous policy of compelling the faithful to breed," etc., etc., etc.

Now, admitting that for any writer who wants to addlepate the bourgeoisie, a saint who is also a global television celebrity presents a nearly irresistible target, this piece is as good an illustration as you' re likely to find of the observation (which Peter Viereck made in these pages about forty years ago) that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of liberals. Bigotry is weird and contagious stuff, and its hard for this Irish-American Catholic to read Hitchens's simplistic, meanspirited, and slightly nutty observations on the Catholic church without succumbing to a corresponding Anglophobia. The guy's been all over the third world like ugly on a pIg and claims never to have met "modest and self-sacrificing missionaries." (But then, Brit tourists always see only what they want to see, and they always seem to think the natives will understand them if they shout.) While writing about the plight of the oppressed people of Central America, Hitchens mentions Archbishop Oscar Romero only in passing and Father Ignacio Ellacuria and his murdered companions not at all, but while trashing some admittedly foolish things Graham Greene once said about Catholicism and Marxism, he notices only one thing about the church in Latin America: that "the death squads, the Contras, and the General (Pinochet) all claimed--and received--Catholic blessing."

So the charitable thing to do is to assume that Hitchens was sick or drunk or something when he wrote these pieces. Besides, a writer in the pay of Vanity Fair who can accuse Mother Teresa, or really anyone else, of embracing "the worst of capitalism" is charmingly unencumbered by self-consciousness, and that's an advantage in a profession which includes folks like Roger Rosenblatt and Anna Quindlen. And how can any generous, tolerant person among us dislike a writer who refers to the "smirking, perjured features of Elliott Abrams," and to a recently installed Supreme Court justice as "Clarence ('Bitch set me up') Thomas," or who can say of Henry Kissinger's evolution from "a foe of Zionism when it looked like losing in 1948" to "an advocate of its most racialist and absolutist application when it was a power to be reckoned with" that "there are no ironies to ponder here, unless you consider Hannibal Lecter an ironist." With the exception of Mother Teresa, he hates all the fight people.

Introducing the collection, Hitchens announces his preference for "the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies,"' and shakes out his rhetorical skirmish line: "For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested." As a writer, he stands by this creed at least as impressively as Orwell stood by his and as Mother Teresa stands by ours.

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, wrote about how the "strongest saints and the strongest skeptics" have in common a belief in Original Sin, "which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." A sort of humanist skepticism is Hitchens's religion. His writing blends a hatred of established fatuities--whether of the Right, the Left, the New or Old Right or Left, the church, the state, the media, or the Whole Shebang--with the furtive compassion of one who loathes sentimentality and loves justice equally.

And he always manages to have fun. In a meditation on political correctitude, for instance, he goes baying after leftish linguistic silliness as enthusiastically as Rush Limbaugh ever dreamt of doing, but then wheels on the pack: "Just as those who call for 'English Only' believe themselves to be speaking English when they are mouthing a mediocre patois, and just as those who yell for 'Western civilization' cannot tell Athens, Georgia, from Erasmus Darwin, so those who snicker at the latest 'PC' gag are generally willing slaves to the most half-baked jargon." He adds that "when every newscaster in the country uses the knee-jerk term 'peace process,' or discourses about 'credibility,' or describes some bloodsoaked impostor as 'a moderate,' the deadening of language has gone so far that it's almost impossible to ironize."

One shrewd and luminous essay on anarchism begins with a memory of a Trafalgar Square demonstration during which Hitchens and others satirized apartheid by dressing up like South African policemen and demanding to see the "passes" of random, baffled Londoners. Disturbed by the fact that "everybody deferred to the strange uniform, and cursed the bureaucratic announcement they must somehow have missed," he suspected the general acquiescence "hinted at something...ghastly and servile." He concludes by commending "the indispensable anarchist who ought to dwell in all of us. The one who pushes away the proffered Kool-Aid even when it comes from the chalice of Jones the Redeemer, the one who asks the South African cop in Trafalgar Square for his name and number, the little boy in Lord of the Flies...who gazes defiantly at the latest fetish of the gang and manages nervously to get out the words: 'Pig's Head on a Stick."' The presence of that inner anarchist is a gift (whoops! pardon the smelly little orthodoxy) which agnostics and believers alike ought to celebrate, if not revere. After all, many souls inflamed with precisely that courage to speak truth to power become the very martyrs and missionaries Hitchens has managed to avoid in his travels.

The essays collected here concern topics from the Gulf War to the emerging (or surviving) literary communities of Eastern Europe to the facile and annoying cynicism of P.J. O'Rourke to the pleasures of smoking and drinking too much. When writing about politics, which is what he writes about most of the time, Hitchens almost invariably deploys his acidulous prose and intimidating erudition from the Left and at the service of the forgotten, vulnerable, and voiceless. This disposition naturally arrays him against the Kissingers, Abramses, Thatchers, Castros, Reagans, and Clintons of this world, and I can't help but suspect that it also accounts for his remarkable, if not very loudly expressed, independence on the subject of legal abortion, which he-- a Nation columnist and a contributor to Vanity Fair, for crying out loud--admits makes him squeamish.

Nearly alone among mainstream journalists, Hitchens overlooked all that Gennifer Flowers foolishness in order to consider the far more significant calculations underwriting then-Governor Bill Clinton's election year decision to "preempt any Hortonizing of his future ambitions" by having Rickey Ray Rector, a lobotomized Arkansas convict, put to death. "So what," he asks, "is all this garbage about 'the new paradigm' of Clinton's forthright Southern petty-bourgeois thrusting innovative fearless blah blah blah blah? In a test of principle where even the polls have shown that people do not demand the death penalty, he opted to maintain the foulest traditions and for the meanest purpose. As the pundits keep saying, he is a man to watch."

Amen. So, for much happier reasons, is Hitchens, even if it means reading the Nation.