Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Pugilist vs Popinjay: conflagration downtown New York. posted by Richard Seymour
Mr Galloway has gone to Washington, but tonight he stops off at New York City to debate a sweaty mound of belligerence known as Christopher Hitchens. It is going to be broadcast live tonight on Journey Radio and KPFTX, starting at 7pm Eastern Standard Time, which is five hours behind London. That means it starts at 12am in the UK, and I shall be burning the midnight oil to catch it - reports will appear in the comments boxes if I can get it, because we don't that 'live-blogging' shit at the Tomb. This debate partially results from a challenge from Labour Friends of Iraq, whose chairperson, Jane Ashworth, assured people that Galloway would not have the guts for it.One or two articles have appeared, building this confrontation up. The Times reports Christopher Hitchens as saying that Galloway is a "wide boy" because he wears expensive suits and chomps cigars. Interesting to note the association that automatically occurs to Hitchens, since his other expression is working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it. As in "nothing's too good for the working class". Unto which, Galloway says:
I noticed he reached for the phrase “working class” when describing me. That seemed to be the thing that stuck in his throat, that unlike him I had no gilded youth or Oxbridge education, I left school and went to work in a factory, and I learned my trade in the labor movement ... He is the perfect definition of Ernest Hemingway’s description of a popinjay in Death in the Afternoon. I commend it to you--the word could have been invented for Christopher Hitchens, possibly with prescience, was. But I don’t honestly take him seriously.
The effete middle class Oxonian dullards despise Galloway as much for being a working class man with big ideas about himself, who insists on speaking in complete sentences and making sense, as for his politics. For this reason among others, I suspect many who don't even hold any particular brief for Galloway will be cheering him on against Hitchens.
Update: Ah, it's a laugh. Here's a 'live-blogging' account from Justin Raimondo, a libertarian conservative at Antiwar.com. Here's a disappointed Hitchens fan. I'm afraid I missed it last night. Looks like there was a great deal of heat and rhetoric, and therefore a lot of fun: for Galloway fans. Hitchens mumbled and stuttered like a schoolboy, I hear. Trouble for Hitchens is this: he relies too much these days on being conventionally bourgeois and acceptable, otherwise he has no audience. So when one mentions his views on supporting Palestinian hi-jackers, a 'terrorist' resistance in Algeria and a quite hardcore Stalinist one in Vietnam, he stutters, claims he's being misrepresented. And he does like his throw-away one-liners: "you picked the wrong city to say that in, and the wrong month" (which is true if your only purpose is point-scoring but false if you are actually making a perfectly obvious point that many prefer to disavow). Unfortunately for Hitchens, Galloway does the mud-slinging, point-scoring and arrogant disdain every bit as good as he does. And he has the advantage of not being obliged to cobble together a pile of bollocks to support war crimes.