Apologies, spook. I don’t think there’s a “point” so much as a trajectory. If I’m to be clear, I’ll have to explore it, not summarize.
First, upon hearing of this tragedy, Hitchens flips to Yeats’ reflection on the influence of his play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, which Irish rebels recited on their ways to the gallows and firing squads:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
While always a patriot, Yeats became decidedly ambivalent about the use of violence, and his early role inspiring it. That’s reflected in “Man and the Echo”. It’s also echoed in Hitchen’s own statements on what this war – for which he so loudly beat the drum – has become:
“As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.”
Consider the words Hitchens later chose for the memorial service:
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
There are libraries overflowing with attempts to read into Shakespeare some grand moral, but ultimately all seem to fail, save this: Shakespeare sees great value in our virtues – truth, nobility, love. fidelity – but the full extent of their value is found in how they bind us one to another, and shape the character of our lives, because in the end, all we have is one another. We need one another: “Why are we robbed of his contribution?” And for that reason, we must be good to each other: “One thing I have learned about myself since I’ve been out here is that everything I professed to you about what I want for the world and what I am willing to do to achieve it was true. … My desire to “save the world” is really just an extension of trying to make a world fit for you.”
When one dies in service to another – in the exercise of those virtues – that’s the ultimate affirmation of those values and of the esteem in which we hold our fellows. But such recognition is but a hollow monument. Death ends the ends those virtues serve, and a corpse has no character of its own. We’re left with a hollow echo, and that’s no compensation: it only makes the absence felt. Which Hitchens --certainly no believer of justice and reunion in the afterlife – recognizes.
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end.
Shifting gears, consider the passage Hitchens cites from Daily’s letter:
Shaking his head as I attempted to articulate what can only be described as pathetic apologetics, he cut me off and said “the difference between insurgents and American soldiers is that they get paid to take life—to murder, and you get paid to save lives.” He looked at me in such a way that made me feel like he was looking through me, into all the moral insecurity that living in a free nation will instill in you. He “oversimplified” the issue, or at least that is what college professors would accuse him of doing.
Simple rustic insight, isn’t it? And true, so far as it goes. Hitchens knows how far it goes, and neither cuts it short, nor over-stretches it.
Now, that closing quote from Orwell: it’s entirely consistent with, and perfectly sums up the sentiments expressed earlier, uniting Yeats’ & Hitchens’ disillusionment with the Kurd’s overly-simple truth –
For the fly-blown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
– and also with Shakespeare’s sorrowful affirmation of the truth of virtues professed, forgotten, rediscovered.
But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
And that too is true. It’s nobility incorruptible, utterly lost, naive, and no conclusion at all.
Hitchens knows this is a tragedy, not a romance or comedy. There is no happily-ever-after, no deus ex machina to untangle the threads. He’s far too intelligent not to see that – when his intelligence is checked, that is, slowed, and made to consider all (not merely all he thinks he knows). And I believe he acknowledges as much in this article: “I don’t exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war.[…]I don’t remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.”
No conclusion, no point, but a purpose: to eulogize and do justice to the man, and his family. Given my reading of the article, and drawing on Shakespeare myself, I think the opening of Sonnet 94 captures that well:
They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The final lines also apply: to “the degeneration… the sordid news of corruption and brutality… the paltry politicians… who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean. It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say…”, to those who have forgotten or abused whatever virtues they once possessed:
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
I don’t believe Hitchens’ characterization of Daily is meant to glamourize or ennoble the colossal failure of the war in Iraq, nor to excuse his own part in the prelude to this personal tragedy. If anything, Hitchens is clear that pure gold’s been paid, willingly; that the goods sought were (nearly?) worth the price; that those goods have not been delivered; and that specific men are culpable, both for promising too much, and for their utter failure to deliver.
Having written all that, I now realized I could have said it much easier referencing Vonnegut:
You’ve got to be kind.
So it goes.
I’m sorry.
