A Queer Wedding

Evidenced every so often—most recently with President Obama's support of homosexual marriage—the hardly different sets of major ideologies still give each other enough rub to create an intense amount of friction. Your author offers a libertarian compromise for the popular issue of the day.

by Christopher Zimny

"There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are 'just' because the law makes them so." — Frederic Bastiat, The Law

"Isn’t that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?" — Richard John Santorum

Apparently, for Rick Santorum, the various laws of the land which "preserve" traditional marriage between one man and one woman are so sacred that if they were changed, they would violate the entire "sanctity" of marriage as we know it. During the heat of the primaries before he suddenly suspended his campaign, he served as the latest flair in a long list of defenders of the "traditional values" staple of the Grand Old Party.

Whatever the phrase "traditional values" really means might be subjective (as culture has shifted significantly over the years), but maybe it is not; maybe it does have some kind of objective meaning. I don't call myself an expert in these matters.

Clear on the other side, as it were, of the political spectrum are the challengers of these values. Social liberals claim that marriage may as well be between a man and a man (or the same of two females); after all, what difference does it make? They make the argument that in respect to government recognition of marriage and the benefits that flower from this which married couples enjoy, same-sex couples who earnestly love each other should also be put under such laws. Perhaps this is a fair point, but insofar as it is up to the government to sort this out, one should not consult me.

With all the fervent attack on and defense of traditional values—and the laws which codify them—as oppose to liberal ones, one might rightly suspect that, in fact, the reverse is true: it is instead the laws that give meaning to the values, instead of the other way about.

One might picture a social conservative responding to this theory by saying it is the value of marriage itself that will be threatened with the outcome of these debates (and, they may as well add, with the debates themselves). In fact, this is what one hears time and time again from the religious right. But threatened with what, exactly? If the laws are changed, your author contends that nothing of grave importance will change with them.

Take this idea for instance, Robert Murphy uses it to show how consumer demand ultimately shapes the consumer good: If Webster defined the word ‘up’ as ‘moving toward the ground,’ people would see right through it and the dictionary company would go out of business. Similarly, in the business of marriage, if the Obama administration (or indeed all the social liberals in the world) espoused that homosexual marriage is indeed ‘marriage’, this would not redefine ‘marriage’ as such, and it should not affect, in truth, what the term or what the ceremony really means to those who hold it to a certain traditional standard. In short, even if the doctrine were to be made official law, the meaning of marriage would not change.

Proponents of same-sex marriage usually have arguments along these lines. (For example, "If gay people get married how does that affect your marriage?") The conservative response goes something along the lines of the "degeneration of society" (as if a change in the law itself is the only thing stopping society from changing). It is maintained that letting homosexuals in on the marriage scene (i.e. government benefits, tax breaks, the works) would muddle up the heterosexual monopoly on the practice.

But the law itself is our concern. Instead of this sophomoric bickering between the parties, the libertarian proposal gives a way out for both sides: removal of government from the practice of marriage. Do away with the official benefits and all of that nonsense and let the institution marriage be taken over by the Churches or whatever other place of meaning; get it out of City Hall. The fact that the state has its hands in the business has led to the erroneous debate that was mentioned above. Our compromise is to privatize the institution of marriage. This would be the only idea in practice in which homosexuals would be on equal footing with their neighbors. As we have seen, it should not affect the God-fearing conservative’s idea of marriage (if it does, there might some unseen problem in their own lives).

It might remain a mystery on how to get the two sides to actually agree to such a proposal without some kind of strong emotional resistance, but if these fiercely fighting foes could come together on this long-standing issue, it might ironically be the queerest wedding in our society to date.

This article was originally published by The Libertarian Review.

A Deplorable Compromise: The Price of Obama's Reforms

When many on the left voted in 2008, they did so under the auspice of decreased warfare in the Middle East. The Democratic nominee offered to meet these demands with an Iraq drawdown, which he (eventually) did. But since becoming President, he has increased other parts of the “War on Terror” and his supporters pledge their allegiance anyway.

by Christopher Zimny

"Tell me straight out, I call on you—answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears—would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth."

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov

One might be tempted to take one facet of the general "progressive" ideology at face value: their generally antiwar sentiment. A lack of a warfare state means a more prosperous economy and significantly less blowback than that state might otherwise see. In some cases, wars may be justified; when they are not, the ugly deaths or injuries suffered should be seen as having been needless, and immediately followed by an examination of the leaders, policies, and morality that went into making such a decision. The corollary to this, of course, is that the leader of the aggressing state ought to be held accountable for his actions. Why, then, after continuing and stepping up activity resulting from the Bush era conflicts, does the left venerate President Obama on the one hand, and with the other wave off his deadly deeds as if they were irrelevant?

Progressives are no doubt to some degree proud of the President's fiscal agenda; some wish he would do more. Some deplore, too, his military activity in the Middle East and elsewhere, rightly admonishing him for resources unduly spent, money unwisely spent, and the tragic consequences of it all. But for whatever reason one might give, they nevertheless hold true to him. Though his fiscal (and monetary) policies are unsound to a terrible degree, my contention here is with the left’s tacit support of Mr. Obama's war doctrine.

Transforming President Bush's "War on Terror" into perhaps a slightly more precision-oriented one, the military activities of the U.S. under Mr. Obama include placement of troops in Uganda, large drone campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, "leading from behind" in Libya, troop increases in Afghanistan and Iraq (and a later "shifting of resources" from the latter to the former), troop operation and drone strikes in Pakistan, and more, including foreign aid given to, but not limited to, any of these countries for purposes of military conflict.

There are consequences to these conflicts, of which those that have followed them are undoubtedly aware. These include an untold number of people who have had their life's work of making a better life for themselves or for their family obliterated. For whatever reason—their homes destroyed, their place of living having been engulfed by violence, etc.—many casualties of war are refugees who find themselves torn away from regular life, and are then subject to destitution. Deaths from violence number in the hundreds of thousands, civilian and combatant casualties included, which is not to mention the many more that have been injured that would have otherwise been in healthy shape had the wars not taken place. These are the natural results of war. The point to impress upon the reader is that these casualties of war are real. They may be thousands of miles from your front yard, but these people really are dead or injured or thrown into destitution, and despite one's best efforts to put these people out of sight and out of mind, they are still casualties resulting from U.S. actions, whether one chooses to acknowledge them or not.

The actual amount spent by Mr. Obama's administration on his military ventures is immaterial, at least for our purpose here, because we are looking at a matter of principle. So let us assume a conservative arbitrary estimate for the total amount of the President's spending on conflicts overseas: $1 million. (We might assume that the war contractors, weapons manufacturers, plus all the rest were feeling generous since 2008.) This wealth, rather than being used for purposes of war, might have been funding put into Medicare or Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, subsidies for green energy that provide or will provide employment, bailouts for companies going under that would preserve employment, and much more.

To make a clearer example of this principle, let us reduce the figure of refugees from war to a mere 100 people. Say this figure is an aggregate of all the countries the long arm of the U.S. has touched, which undesirably produced this result. What can be made of it? To begin with, the money used to make the location of these peoples' homes so hazardous might have been used to put 100 U.S. citizens in homes, and both the people affected by U.S. foreign policy and citizens of the U.S. would have had a better life. At the cost of displacing civilians elsewhere, we put up with continued homelessness here.

There exists a laundry list of government responsibilities that progressives have drawn up, and spending on any one of those items would be money better spent than on destruction in war. It might even be excusable if this sort of spending wasn’t expressly commissioned repeatedly by Democrats in the Congress or the White House—alas it has been. The declaration of a wish for war expenditures means precisely that the elected leaders of the United States prefer to use our $1 million figure on death and destruction than on the domestic needs of the poor or restructuring our economy for the better.

But setting the consequences of war spending aside, let's even grant that it is indeed possible to continue with war expenditures and simultaneously make in the United States a better economy through rightly placed spending or inflation. Say our leader can do both, as he is presently purporting to do. Your author's point is that even if one could have both, many, in practice, prefer to have a leader that does both—for whatever reason—because it means having domestic social or economic “reforms” resulting in Americans leading better lives. Said in more direct words, supporters of Mr. Obama will have thousands put into poverty, thousands needlessly killed, and billions spent on these operations, in order that they might have this same administration institute progressive restructuration for a better society in the United States.

How grotesque could any voter be? Perhaps it is not truly purposeful behavior, but ignorance or apathy, or a light-minded pragmatic decision that results in a vote of this kind. In any case, any person on the left that espouses antiwar ideology and continues to support Mr. Obama must thoroughly examine their own principles if he or she is to vote with a clear conscience come November.

This article was originally published by The Libertarian Review.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

“I am. I think. I will.”
— Equality 7-2521, in Anthem

Ayn Rand was—and is—an intellectual revolutionary. Throughout a lifetime of observing the minds of men, she steadily formulated and added to her philosophy of rational being—which was, in short, that in order to truly affirm life, one must live proudly and unwaveringly for oneself. Rand was the author of an immense amount of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, that advanced her philosophy of Objectivism and unquestionably changed the face of modern political thought.

Best known as a compelling, lucid, and intelligent novelist, as well as a screenwriter and editor The Objectivist magazine, Rand boldly declared, in the midst of the worldwide conflict between individualist and collectivist thought, that man’s first and only duty is to himself. From We the Living—her first and semi-autobiographical novel against Communism—to Atlas Shrugged—her timeless classic espousing her refined worldview—Rand turned the tables on collectivist philosophies of all stripes. Through these works, she was, and continues to be, a stout contrarian in the face of those who wish to claim control over the individual.

Born in 1905, Rand was raised and educated in Russia where she felt the reaching effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917. She left for America in 1925, where she was intent on writing freely and became a moderately successful screenwriter. The Fountainhead marked her first true success as a novelist, and her political activism brought her into friendship with several well-known libertarian thinkers—such as Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt—who, like her, continue to be regarded as great. Throughout her later life she focused on many nonfiction publications, lectured, and actively spread her philosophy until her death in 1982. Her legacy remains prominent today.

This article was also published by The Libertarian Review.

A State of Plunder

Obama’s newest Executive Order—“National Defense Resources Preparedness”—is the most blatant tax to ever be decreed in American history.

By Christopher Zimny


“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”
— Mark Twain

“‘Cause I’m the taxman,
And you’re working for no one… but me.”
— The Beatles, “Taxman”


With a stroke of the pen, March 16, 2012 became a day that historians will regard as a major strike to the foundation of the Republic. Words of this sort have been spoken throughout American history upon occasion, but in no sense on as large a scale or with as much meaning as in the past four years. To give a short sketch of the recent thefts of individual liberty all the direct subjects of the United States have been made to endure: the Patriot Act, the NDAA, the murder of American citizens and the administration’s assertion that it is lawful, and the week-old Executive Order claiming the President’s authority to take any and all resources he sees fit “for purposes of national security.”

It will do the reader well to remember that all government revenue is, by definition, compulsory payment. Government functions on resources that are not its own, thus they must be taken, ultimately, from the people.

Obama’s newest Executive Order—so-called “National Defense Resources Preparedness”—is the most blatant tax to ever be placed on the American people. This point should be made abundantly clear, because it is something that has not—to this writer’s knowledge—been acknowledged as a new tax law.

It reads thus:

[The President has the authority] to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.

The Executive Branch may do this “under both emergency and non-emergency conditions,” and in times of peace or war. This Order largely submits to no smoke or mirrors in order to seize the reader’s property and use it. It eliminates all governmental checks, declaring freely that it may tax its subjects quite seriously as it sees fit. Instead of only taking a fifth of Average Person’s income, say, it takes his income, and his house, and business facilities. It even qualifies Average Person himself to be the government’s own property, usable for its own purposes. This is the most grotesque tax one might ever see in America, but this writer fears that in time it will not be the worst.

When a person (or in this case an entity of persons) removes someone’s private property from them against their will, it is clear that this affront to freedom needs to be dealt with. Of course it is the case that taxation is theft. The seeming inevitability of this theft is the source of all the sardonic humor, the violence, unhappiness, anger or what have you that is felt when a tax is levied upon a person. But taxes are not inevitable. When the President of the United States—himself the supposed “Leader of the Free World”—declares that he himself may take anything from anyone at any time, something must be done.

This article was also published in The Libertarian Review.

North Korea: Pain on a Train

With the demise of Kim Jong-il, the author wonders about the future of the people in North Korea. Will the Dear Leader’s death be a fatal blow to the iron-fisted regime, or will the authorities continue in their way? The author expresses hope for the people confined inside the country’s walls.

By Christopher Zimny

When  one reads the brutal story of the justly paranoid Winston Smith, one is confronted soon enough with a telescreen filled with the face of the Stalin-like image of Big Brother. Never ceasing its indelibility, the image fades to the background where it looms, while three phrases instead take its place—the three slogans of the Party:

    WAR IS PEACE

    FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

    IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

These absurd statements, penned in the 20th century, and the totalitarian idea that led to Orwell to pen them, actively survive in only one place on earth today— North Korea. In her 2009 book, Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick makes note of a few propaganda signs that line the unused roads and are plastered ostentatiously on North Korean buildings:

    WE WILL DO WHAT THE PARTY TELLS US.

    WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.

    KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY.

Overt propaganda in North Korea is not taken as such by the people there; instead, statements like these are not only purported to be, but believed to be, self-evident. Kim Jong-il received ultimate control after the death of his father (who is still, technically, the president of the state) in 1994, and for nearly 20 years this said sun hath shown its awful light. On December 18th, however, it went out; it apparently was not impervious to train rides.

Kim Jong-il, the aberrant, ludic, sadistic creature-despot claiming ownership of every living being between the 38th Parallel and the Chinese border, suffered a heart attack from exhaustion on his way to an area outside the country’s capital, ending his life. Rid of their principle dwarf, North Koreans have the faintest—yet simultaneously the strongest—glimpse of freedom they've had in over 60 years. The state-run media reports that Kim Jong-un—the “Great Successor”—is to step up to the only successful Communist dynastic throne in history; the second handing of the baton, as it were; but perhaps those few secretly apostate souls of the country, who willingly commit thoughtcrime and illegal acts of freedom (such as speaking ill of either the Dear Leader or Great Leader (as Kim Il-sung is there known), or are in possession of unapproved books), will have a chance to see the wretched state disintegrate in their own lifetime. If this doesn’t seem the case on the outset, a somewhat closer look reveals a more positive picture.

The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (as it calls itself), through various measures, has coup-proofed itself by selecting the most loyal supporters to occupy its inner circle. However, now that the Dear Leader—as the middle Kim is called—is dead, struggles over who may fill the power vacuum may indeed be the straw to break this sickly camel’s back. Some say that Kim Jong-un is far too inexperienced and still rather obscure in the eyes of the North Korean people, having only been assigned to be Kim Jong-il’s successor about one year ago—contrasted with the 20 years spent by the eldest Kim preparing his son for the role. If this is indeed the case, Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind of Harvard Kennedy School point out that a succession may be the only plausible event that could make the regime fall to pieces.

There is, of course, an alternate timeline North Koreans may face—the same road on which Oceania was driven: the inner party effortlessly moving past any troubles and continuing boldly in its drive for power over the individual (for its own sake). It is possible that this handover from capricious father to untried son may succeed in one way or another; if this happens, unless something markedly different changes in our policy toward the government of that country, we may be condemned to watch North Korea for a long time thereafter, while thousands of North Korean defectors and secret dissenters still inside its borders hope, then wait, for something to be done.

These escaped dissenters and quiet renegades have lived or continue to live the life of an average North Korean—a bleak, dreary one, always with an undertone of real perpetual fear. Speaking with citizens of another country on a cell phone (or until recently, even owning a cell phone), for instance, may earn a person a place in front of a firing squad, as will selling DVDs or being repatriated from China, or defacing currency if either Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il’s porcine faces are displayed on the note; these “criminals” also face another fate: being dragged to the country’s notorious prison camps. Some 200,000 human beings are interned and confined in North Korea’s gulags—modern day concentration camps. For a crime one commits, one’s entire family is punished—three generations over, an appealing (and appalling) terror tactic begun by Kim Il-sung.

This says nothing of their abject poverty: The purposeful and ludic currency wrenching done in late 2009 decimated what semblance of a middle-class the people could muster through a somewhat bustling, if still severely stifled, illegal market, and plunged everyone who wasn’t in the capital into acute destitution. Two nuclear tests and the sinking of a South Korean naval ship (leading to a short-lived recantation of the Sunshine Policy by South Korea) have not stopped foreign aid to North Korea. The massive amounts of foreign aid and billions of dollars in imported wealth are used on three things only: the political class, the military, and propaganda—which the regime feeds its starving people in place of food. Indoctrinated children sing praises of their deified leaders, learn “official” history, and are subtly inculcated in every aspect of their schooling—nay their life—to say nothing of their widespread malnourishment, their diseases, or their being stunted both in mind and body (eight-year-old children appear to be three or four, for instance). The average North Korean is six inches shorter than his South Korean neighbor due to lifelong food deprivation.

Such is life in North Korea.

The most deranged aspect of this abhorrent, grotesque picture is that these conditions are preventable. When one sees satellite imagery of the Korean peninsula, the southern half is positively gleaming and China produces its fair share of light—but between the two: nothing. Darkness covers every meter with the exception of the capital city that houses the government and politically loyal: the prop showcase city for foreigners. Once the brutal authoritarian dynasty of dwarfish martinets is brought to an end, as may happen in the near future with Kim Jong-il’s demise, North Koreans will be rid of their chains—and be free at long last. May they finally be free to do as they please and their free market shine in the night like their South Korean brothers and sisters.

We should hope that the death of North Korea’s infallible Dear Leader, fatally exhausted from a train ride, is the beginning of the end for this repugnant regime.

This article was also published in The American Reporter.

Of His Experiment

I've made this poem to be precisely phrased (I had Ben Jonson in mind) and borrowed Sir Walter Scott's famous lines from Marmion for the first two lines. The purpose is to satirize an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God. My poem discusses the Old Testament, New Testament and Koran, human knowledge and struggle, the exploration of the universe as well as philosophy, and facing the fact that we may never gain a full and true answer, all from the point of view of an objective observer seeing the human race as if it were in the midst of a sadistic and ludic experiment.

"Of His Experiment"

Oh, What a tangled web we weave!
When first we practice to deceive.
Plant the seed of evil early on
So they know not as time goes on
Deus ex machina makes no remark,
But give an inkling, a hope, a spark.

Then steal the knowledge from their minds!
To watch them squabble and war and find
That from their nascence they did not know
And never will, too strong the row:
The inquisition which they explore,
Is but a contraption, and nothing more.

This poem was also published in The Libertarian Review.

Christopher Hitchens, Not Arguable

One simply does not dispute with Christopher Hitchens, especially if his newest selection of essays is anything to go by.

By Christopher Zimny

In his time, Eric Arthur Blair saw the publication of two anthologies of essays he had written, both of them curiously terse in content, granting too little justice to the mind of the author himself. Though he did indeed have other publications (radio broadcasts, pamphlets, and novels to boot), none vindicated the man quite like the progressively fuller publications to be produced after his death, or the delightful trove of complete Orwelliana presently available for the curious eye on the Internet. Perhaps Orwell’s unluckiness will lead one to appreciate the many volumes of Christopher Hitchens’ equally wonderful literary lore (at least of the non-fiction kind) made readily available for the learning or otherwise interested mind today.

It should be said on the outset what Hitchens values most in the world; he notes of John Brown, the God-fearing abolitionist who led the failed storming of Harper’s Ferry:

Our world might be a good deal worse than it is had not numberless African-Americans, from that day to this, taken John Brown as proof that fraternity and equality, as well as liberty, were feasible things and could be exemplified by real people.

Add to that list explicitly the implied word “justice” and one has a good picture of his purpose for writing in the first place. The means he advocated throughout his career have changed (and have become more refined, as we should expect, with experience), but his ends have not. Using the timeless tool of the written word, independence of the mind and individual sovereignty are what he has always fought for.

Measuring in at 749 pages of commentary, Christopher Hitchens’ largest and latest published work, Arguably, is the fifth anthology of the veteran journalist’s articles and essays, containing one hundred-seven works spanning roughly the past decade. Not a single one—as one might well expect—is worthy of the term “boring”. Plastered on the cover of the assemblage itself is an intent and glaring face that may only be described as someone who one does not wish to cross with. (It is interesting to note here, by the way, that Hitchens ironically and quite strongly resembles a certain figurehead in the film production of Nineteen Eighty-Four, de-mustachioed.  I can’t be the only one to have noticed this.) The photograph almost creates a feeling contrary to the book’s title: that in fact, no issue is safe for argument when Hitchens is watching. Indeed, through the use of lively, elevated and distinctly characteristic prose, Hitchens illuminates his own view of the world, commenting on everything from the life-affirming martyrs of recent Middle Eastern rebellions, to the faiths of the Founding Founders (or lack thereof), to the scarce literary magic of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, and the true humor of the female (and lack thereof). In his introduction he writes, “Since an essential element of the American idea is variety, I have tried to celebrate things that are amusing for their own sake, or ridiculous but revealing, or simply of intrinsic interest.” And through six aptly-named parts, he does exactly this without missing a beat.

Having been granted citizenship in 2007, the first part’s title, “All American”, seems a quite fitting completion to his love of American culture, values and history. To use two old expressions, he shows his true colors right off the bat. On a different note than Kurt Vonnegut’s defense of atheists in the foxholes (“I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.”), Hitchens writes a pointed piece on the (nothing but) ill effects that the high-ranking promulgation of religious zeal has on the secular warriors our military houses, and the subversive attacks it mounts on the Constitution. The rather innocent author of The Singular Mark Twain, Fred Kaplan, comes under Hitchens’ fire for publishing a work that apparently does next to no justice to the man it concerns. Worse (but perhaps this victim is less innocent), Hitchens covers Gore Vidal’s dissent into lunacy. “I have no wish to commit literary patricide,” he writes after doing very nearly exactly that, “or to assassinate Vidal’s character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.” Even worse here, and to the dismay of our government officials, he says virtually the same thing of the federal government in his polemic on the bailout-business it concerned itself with in 2008. Coining quite amusing derivatives of the term ‘banana republic’ (itself coined by O. Henry), he lambastes the whole rotten happening from the private companies who lobbied for other people’s wealth in the first place to the President himself who became “a despot”, so characteristic in these types of places. He also writes about our Founding Fathers who he so much admires. Too, he includes pieces on many American authors he reveres, and after taking “decades to dare the attempt,” he writes about the great Russian and English prose artist, Vladimir Nabokov.

Part two comprises mostly of book reviews, but by no means let that be a deterrent. Making notes on authors from Dickens to Rowling, he illuminates much of the writing world using the books in review as a means and a tool to provide his own thoughts of the subject at hand and the history of the authors themselves and their times. For instance, using Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse, he discusses his obvious affinity for Wodehouse’s works and wit. With Samuel Johnson, he visits the dark side of the man’s mind and whether or not Johnson really had masochistic tendencies. Always one to make use of Orwell’s works in his own (with due reason, mind you), his preface for Animal Farm reviews both the history and aftereffects, and simultaneously gives an appraisal of the great “Fairy Story” (as Orwell called it) itself, along with a nearly thirty-page introduction to the massive travel history Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Of Edward Upward, he gives a frank analysis of his life and works and makes mention of an interview he had with the great writer. Isaac Newton, he notes, was not all the man is presently cracked up to be; he seems to have been a nutcase that happened to produce the laws of gravity. Though it must not escape the reader, as he is never one to avoid the truth, Hitchens spares no rod on any character in question; revealing their bright points as well as their dark ones, one feels they’ve gained a fuller picture of each persona after every brief biography one reads of Hitchens’. Also included near the end of this portion is an absolutely wonderful piece of journalistic nostalgia entitled “Fleet Street’s Finest” where he recounts not only his days in the field but others’ as well. This, to me, is sincerely one of the best essays the book has to offer.

As if serving as a small break from the other short works of selected pen, he inserts an unusually, but wisely placed group of miscellaneous essays into the third slot. From his exposition on the male-comedy-adopting female and destruction and reconstruction of the Decalogue (both articles featuring accompanying videos on the Internet) to his discourse on the blowjob, the act being “As American as Apple Pie” (which I couldn’t help thinking was misnamed as such, and that the title of a later essay concerning the French ban on veils—“In Your Face”, as it is headed—would have been a better fit), to gay politicians and waiter complaints, Hitchens provides some welcome and warming personal insights of the random pursuits of his own mind.

As a literary critic, roughly half of this bound collection consists of book reviews. Indeed, one should pay some attention to the author’s words of the subjects in review, but I have long enjoyed his personal thoughts on matters at hand or of history more than his thoughts of the written word of others. For readers of this sort, the fourth section features quite probably the best essays in the book, written by his long-practiced, deft and polemic-specialized hand.

Via two articles condemning the state, the leaders, and to an extent, the people of North Korea “where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces”, he takes the reader briefly through the brutal reality of the disgusting place and we see Orwell’s nightmarish dystopia come true (only worse). On the practice of waterboarding, there exists video footage of Christopher Hitchens going through the process, administered by anonymous and hooded figures: the article written about the experience appears here and it is titled appropriately, “Believe Me, It’s Torture”. Meanwhile, in Vietnam the effects of Agent Orange linger on and the effects on the reader’s heart and psyche of the imagery and living conditions of effected children are wretchedly dejecting—even only described in print—in another magnificent piece, indeed rivaling that of his column about the so-called “Lord’s Resistance Army” of Sudan and Uganda, yet another paramilitary group that makes soldierly use of male children and unmentionable, unthinkable use of the female kind. (On the same note, Ishmael Beah’s first-person and first-rate account of the use of child soldiers on both sides of the Sierra Leonean civil war—A Long Way Gone—comes highly recommended.)

                The next collection within this collection may be deemed its lowest point, though that’s not to say the essays it contains are not interesting (or, at the very least, made to be interesting). One feels that it is rather aimless, as if it were simply a place to dump ill-fitting articles about totalitarianism and authors who comment on the awful stripe. This does not constitute overlooking his words, however; his opinions on the facts are not only noteworthy, but are handy for presenting to any regime-affirming apologist. At the outset, he chronicles the harrowing ventures of Victor Serge (who coined the term ‘totalitarian’) and his resulting vitriolic works despoiling all things Communist. For the “Persian Version” of absolutism and despotism, Hitchens writes of the superb ability of Iran’s people to find “the cracks and gaps in the system, [and] testing its limits and transcending them.” Included also is an introduction to Isabel Allende’s semiautobiographical novel, The House of the Spirits, which recounts three generations of Chileans and the overthrow of fascism in the country. After a sharp review of Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread, we are subject to five essays concerning World War II that scathingly deplore pacifism, give moral justification to the war on the whole, and are hilariously ruthless in demeaning Adolf Hitler.

In the last portion included—so ingeniously called “Words’ Worth”—he focuses on the history and idiosyncrasies of the English language, as well as the universal right of freedom of speech and all that it entails (perhaps most notably in defense of the political cartoons—an issue he and others loudly and justly spoke of in the media and elsewhere—printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005). He begins by praising the King James Bible—not something exactly in his character, you might say, until one realizes that it is that version and that version only that he appreciates, and for no other reason than its contribution to the massive lexicon of the English language. Mentioning Terri Schiavo, he makes a fuss over the “four letter word: d-e-a-d,” as he said on MSNBC at the time, and all the needless attention paid to the situation. On the amusing side of our delightful language, ‘Fuck,’ it seems, is a very versatile word. Or so the author makes it seem: making light of this very unsanitary term used by everyone from scholarly authors to the children of Iraq. In his article “Words Matter”, he highlights the importance of the depth and variety of words and the hilarious attempts made by politicians to come up with a catchphrase for campaigns.

At times though (as the uproarious fiction writer and Hitchens’ close friend Martin Amis hinted at, but did not quite get around to fully pointing out in his forward to The Quotable Hitchens) the author’s humor can be misplaced. In “Old Enough to Die”, an otherwise deeply powerful, very humane observation of the state-sanctioned execution of mentally perturbed minors, Hitchens more than once inserts ill-timed sneers at his favorite targets, or otherwise makes use of untimely phrases or terms, disrupting the pointed mood he is trying to convey. Of the 14-year-old George Stinney, whose unusually fierce convulsions caused his mask to slip off of his face while being executed by electrocution in 1944, Hitchens describes how

The witnesses saw his wide-open and weeping eyes, and his dribbling mouth, before another two jolts ended the business and fried him for good. They may not have “burn’d him in a holy place,” but it was a reverent state occasion and you can bet there was a minister on hand to see fair play done.

While as handy as these sardonic statements are (and as easily as they may have arisen out of pure and justified indignation), he may have been too quick to make use of them. On the other hand, as my reader may have noticed, he quotes a line from William Blake that is rightly harsh to religion, and I have an intuitive suspicion that he went as far as inserting two quatrains of Blake’s “Little Boy Lost” into the article for no other purpose than to have an unfitting dig at the foul institution.

Make no mistake, however: the humor used throughout is often very clever and of smart placement. (Immigration seems to have no effect on wit.) In his review of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the unconscious “capitalist primer” as he calls it, he at once provides humor that is always to be found among the English-born type: “Probably no two words in our language are now more calculated to shrivel the sensitive nostril than ‘socialist realism.’” And funny gives rise to more funniness; when discussing the aphorisms and witticisms of the pseudonymously authored Poor Richard’s Almanack (obviously meant for elevated, humorous minds, but apparently read and seriously taught by unfunny half-wits), Hitchens adds his own to the mix when he notes how the collected tidbits whizzed far over the head of Mark Twain: “A point, like a joke, is a terrible thing to miss.” Later, he issues his complaint of the massive use of the term ‘like’ in the teenage lexicon:

How could one preserve what’s useful about “like” without allowing it to reduce everyday vocabulary and without having it weaken the two strong senses of the word, which are: to be fond of something or somebody ( As You, Like, Like It ) or to resemble something or somebody (“Like, Like a Virgin”)?

Have a laugh but once more at a small excerpt from his field day with the stupid slogans we hear shouted by hopeful politicians on the campaign trails:

Take "Yes We Can," for example. It's the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake. As for "We Are the People We Have Been Waiting For" (in which case, one can only suppose that now that we have arrived, we can all go home). . .

But these bits hardly scratch the surface, and he is meaner—much meaner—in other places; as in his article-length complaint about the pointless national attention given to the Virginia Tech shootings or (perhaps only a little less mean) in the first paragraph of his thoughts on the Terri Schiavo case:

all through Easter Sunday, one had to be alert to the possibility that, at any moment, the late and long-dead Terri Schiavo would receive the stigmata on both palms and both feet and be wafted across the Florida strait, borne up by wonder-working dolphins, to be united in eternal bliss with the man-child Elián González.

Such is the humor of a polemicist. Hitchens restrains himself nowhere he cannot be muzzled, always going for the throat of the matter with a jab and an uppercut for good measure.

Though, it should be said that the largest criticism to be made of this anthology—without any doubt or reserve—is of the content it doesn’t include. Essays like the superbly written account on the author’s loss of voice due to esophageal cancer, “Unspoken Truths”, for instance, published for the June edition of Vanity Fair should have made the cut; or perhaps the hilarious 2004, six-page lampoon of The Passion of the Christ entitled “The Gospel According to Mel”.  There are others that most definitely could have been bound along with the rest of the essays in this book, but unfortunately for one reason or another were not.

The acclaimed and charming essayist E.B. White, in the 1976 preface to his own collection of essays, wrote of his own breed, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." No writer from Montaigne to Huxley has thought otherwise; Hitchens—for the better—certainly has not. This volume will remain in the hands of those who wish to learn not only about the psyche of the author himself, but of the fruits of an independent mind and profoundly talented essayist. Most certainly placing among the ranks of Orwell himself, Christopher Hitchens’ collected tour de force is but one more work to add to his list.

Let us have one last thought come from the work in review: As this remarkable anthology draws too-soon to a close, its ending words are arranged in a last, all to appropriate essay on the simply unnatural amount of books in partially-arranged shelves, or stacks, or in abject mass, strewn throughout his home in Washington D.C. The imbroglio at first seems unfitting, but by the end of the essay—and thus, of the book—it seems, in a very pleasant way, to be particularly consistent with the wise and brilliant character at hand. Long live Christopher Hitchens. 
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Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

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