So many ways this account could have gone wrong.. and he seems to have evaded them all. It's too good to be nibbled to death by ducks. As to whether a principled mea culpa is enough, or whether he is now excused for failure to turn that massive intellect to Questioning the BS drum beat -- while it was still warm, like excrement always is -- as assiduously as in this apologia..? Guess that would be nibbling. Maybe next week.

There are all those other principled dead young ones too, exploded in their flimsy macho-consumer-grade tin cans -- sent there by the likes of Wolfowitz, Perle, Rummy, the odious Kristol and his Human Events-grade rag (still followed avidly by the same folk who believe we could have snatched "Victory" in Vietnam -- by following LeMay's Stone Age Final Solution.)

Hitchens' comment on Orwell prompts looking up in the Essays a quite different 'take' - his {unpublished, then} response to some Brit rag du jour. 3-6 August 1937:

[Response to a questionnaire sent out for Left Review by Nancy Cunard]

Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender. I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on the Spanish workers under the pretext of fighting fascism; also that since May a reign of terror has been proceeding and all the jails and any place that will serve as a jail are crammed with prisoners who are not only imprisoned without trial but are half-starved, beaten and insulted. I dare say that you know it too, though God knows anyone who could write the stuff overleaf would be fool enough to believe anything, even the war-news in the Daily Worker. But the chances are that you - whoever you are who keep sending me this thing - have money and are well informed; so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of "democracy" (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends.

This is more than six lines, but if I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish war into 6 lines you wouldn't print it. You wouldn't have the guts.

By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war-propaganda in the Great War are squrming now, I shall rub it in good and hard.

\ufffd Now we create Terror in the pretext of War-on-Terror and sell the package via the same treacly sophomoric TLAs which sell all our crap to the perpetually crap-hungry. Alas, neither an Orwell nor a Vonnegut left to assist comprehension.

Le plus s\ufffd change ... only Murica's little-G\ufffdbbels (now abandoned of the sinking ship he poked holes into) could never approach his mentor's polished cleverness. But then he had no need to polish: our gullibility appears nonpareil -- wave a flag, pin on a yellow ribbon and pewl: works here, every occasion.



But then.. now we have the Turks, Pakistan and ... merely, Of Rice and Men to spin both, \ufffd l\ufffd the platters in vaudeville skits. But that needs a real acrobat and all we have is the ersatz or just plain bogus.