Richard “Lenin’s Tomb” Seymour– who regularly tries to prove his solidarity with ordinary people by sneering at the sorts of things that touch them– is promoting his forthcoming book “Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens.”
Putting an unflattering or ridiculous photo of the subject of a hatchet-job book on the cover? What a brilliantly original idea!
Seymour writes:
Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist.
Among the forgettable ranks of ex-Leftists, Christopher Hitchens stands out as someone determined to stand out. Rejecting the well-worn paths of hard-right evangelism and capitalist “realism,” he identified with nothing outside his own idiosyncrasies. A habitual mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a “Marxist,” the role he adopted late in his career—as a free radical within the US establishment—had ample precedents from his earlier incarnation. It wasn’t the Damascene conversion he described. His long-standing admiration for America, his fascination with the Right as the truly “revolutionary” force, his closet Thatcherism, his theophobia and disdain for the actually existing Left had all been present in different ways throughout his political life. Post–9/11, they merely found a new articulation.
For all that, the Hitchensian idiolect was a highly unique, marketable formula. He is a recognizable historical type—the apostate leftist—and as such presents a rewarding, entertaining and an enlightening case study.
Admiration for America and theophobia? Well, then, that cover photo is just too kind.
Elsewhere Seymour finds much to admire about Gore Vidal and about Alexander Cockburn, while noting the latter’s “deviations and mystifying enthusiasms – for the militias, for global warming denial, for paleoconservatives.”
Perhaps Seymour could explain why– despite these highly disturbing deviations and enthusiasms (I could also mention antisemitism, even if Seymour won’t)– Cockburn deserves to be remembered as a genuine leftist while Hitchens is strictly an ex.
Update: It’s not entirely clear that Seymour himself wrote the passage quoted above– although based on available evidence (his previous writing), he must at least have had a hand in it.
See also Tendance Coatesy.
