I read over my first posts to see if the remove of time could add any insight. It’s like sitting on a “finished” poem to see if it’s still good two weeks later. Not everything that satisfies you in the flush of writing it is a keeper.
Anyway, some revisitings.
I have one more thing to say about the Penguin anthology. I find the whole controversy, in retrospect, incredibly heartening. Academics like to say how there is no canon anymore, no agreement on value, how all literary judgement is personal or subjective, how all the hierarchies are leveled, how no one “text” (they always use the word “text”) can be “privileged” above any other. And yet—mirabile dictu!—behold this near-universal outcry over the exclusion, from an anthology purportedly of 20th century poetry, of Plath (a woman) and Ginsberg (a gay Jew)! How wonderful this indignation! There is a sense of a canon after all—and it’s a canon that includes minorities and women. That’s my America!
One last word about Hitchens, too. The delight in violent speech and violent thought can be counted on, in every case, to transform into the delight in violent action. Hitchens made no secret of his hatred of religion. Yet people still listened to him about religion—as if a man proudly hateful should ever be trusted as an authority on the object of his hate! Supporters of Hitchens puzzled, and continue to puzzle, over his shift to neoconservative ideology after 9/11. How could dear old contrarian Hitch become a flag-waver for George W. Bush’s military adventurism? They wonder and wonder.
Listen: That shift became inevitable the more he cultivated his hatred of religion. Let us not forget that the Muslims, in Hitchens’s world-view, are the most stubbornly, intensely religious people on earth. Over there, the fanatical hater exhorts young men to blow themselves up in crowded places. Over here, the fanatical hater cheers on as cluster bombs drop on the Middle East. Delight in hateful thought, you will develop a taste for hateful action. Count on it. The mechanism is simple. The cultivation of hatred leads to the corruption of empathy. The corruption of empathy can lead to anything.