Contra Costa Times
May 26, 2007
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Times staff writer
The tipoff came before the debate between authors Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges started: The emcee asked the Berkeley audience to restrain from heckling.
She forgot to address that comment to Hitchens, who ran away with the evening and bolted off the stage before the event officially ended.
Invited to square off over the value of religious faith, there was plenty that separated the men, even though both are best-selling authors of books about the damaging influences of organized religion.
Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America rank among a phalanx of books with sights trained on institutionalized faith.
A longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Hedges, 50, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for team coverage of global terrorism. He also won the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He holds a master's degree in divinity from Harvard University.
The iconoclastic Hitchens, 58, has written for Vanity Fair, Slate and Free Inquiry. He abandoned his post at the Nation after a falling-out with other editors over his support for the war in Iraq. Oxford-educated, Hitchens has authored several books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger and Why Orwell Matters.
Dressed in leather jacket and jeans, Hedges somehow appeared pressed and mannerly before a packed audience at King Middle School in Berkeley. Hitchens managed to look rumpled even in his boxy leisure suit.
After tearing off a 15-minute rant that trashed Islam, Christianity, and Judaism -- with asides to the "mush-headed" spirituality that blooms in Berkeley -- Hitchens offered his audience a challenge. He asked if anyone could name a moral stand taken by a religious person that couldn't be equaled by a person who does not believe in the existence of God.
"The whole extraordinary galaxy was created with us in mind?" he told a laughing, clapping audience. Ah yes: "The 'me' galaxy."
Religion comes "from the stupid infancy of our species," before people knew the world was round, he said.
He detailed a history of carnage, cruelty, and callousness leading to the present day, in which the Pope declares condoms more dangerous than AIDS and where, in Iran, "parties of God are set on wreckage."
But by oversimplifying faith, Hitchens himself has become a sort of fundamentalist, Hedges said.
"He sees only the chauvinistic, the bigoted and intolerant brand," he said. "It's a cheap way to avoid exploring the wide range of religious belief."
In fact, monotheistic faith created the concept of the individual, Hedges argued. With it, people acquired the freedom to develop and act upon individual conscience, the ability "to resist the clamor of the tribe."
God is not a noun but a verb, a commitment to transcendence, he said.
"Faith is what we do," he said. "Faith is the sister of justice. The danger is not in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, but the human heart -- the capacity we all have for evil."
Hedges said repeatedly that he shares Hitchens' disdain for fundamentalism.
But the polite and civil Hedges was no match for Hitchens, who bit off the ends of Hedges' sentences to register indignation ("It's not an interruption; it's a comment") and volleyed questions from the emcee by pontificating on other points.
The rowdy audience with an obvious appetite for an intellectual feast alternately roared, applauded, booed, and cheered each thrust and parry.
The room reached its boiling point when Hedges explained suicide bombers as people whose despair has driven them to desperate acts.
In the occupied territories in 1988, he found a "strangled" people, 1.1 million "living in what can only be described as a prison," he said, "living ten to a room, no possibility of work."
"You're rationalizing murder," Hitchens cried. "You're rationalizing murder. Shame on you."
Seeking to understand the motivations of suicide bombers represents "a new fashion among the half-baked," he said.
By the time the emcee took questions from the audience, one man accepted Hitchens' challenge. He mentioned a spiritual leader who "ministered" to the Ku Klux Klan out of love.
"It's a start," Hitchens said gallantly, before suddenly souring. Better than loving them, the religious leader should have sued them, and pushed them into economic ruin.
"Love your own enemies, don't love mine," he roared.
Hitchens drew brickbats from the crowd by defending the United States' incursion into Iraq as a mission to bring democracy to that devastated country.
"Though you sneer and jeer at them -- and you have to live with the shame of that -- these people are guarding you as you sleep," he said.
"I feel like I'm reading Rudyard Kipling's' 'The Burden of the White Man,'" Hedges quipped.
"You mean you wish you'd read it," Hitchens shot back.
The real danger, Hedges said, is the conviction of people who feel they have the "absolute truth."
"The search for the truth, the examined life, requires humility," he said.
Hitchens unleashed a final firebomb, and Hedges quietly passed on closing remarks. By then, Hitchens had darted off the stage, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
--Rebecca Rosen Lum covers religion. Reach her at 925-977-8506 or rrosenlum@cctimes.com.
1 comment:
rebecca i found you again. this is you cub reporter, ken now called kien. i wrote this film review for you to review. love, kien
Reencuentros (Reunions)Last night I attended a gallery opening of a documentary film, Reencuentros, made recently about a Oaxacan sculptor/painter, Alejandro Santiago, who, after visiting his village in the mountains that he left as a child, discovered many abandoned houses and a village filled with old people; many with sad stories. The disappeared had gone north to the USA to find work and many had never returned--some working in various parts of the states and a few that had died on the journey. He decided to dedicate a grand art project in the memory of those nameless migrants who had died. He would create a full-sized fired clay sculpture of each of those migrants from Oaxaca State. His goal would be to recreate individual faces and expressions on each one to bring them to life, each with their own reason for the journey and each ending in tragedy. He discovered that 2501 Oaxacans died in their quest and figured it would take him 2 yrs to complete his project. He started with his own money that he had made as a successful painter, but soon ran out of money. After 6 years and a grant he finished his project with the help of many local non-artist peasants who came to the work inspired by his project. They continued to help to the end although for litttle and uncertain pay. The 1 hour film was powerfully portrayed and professionally made by Oaxacan filmaker, Yolanda Cruz, who trained in US. I applauded the film and congratulated the artist as I left the showing at the Museum of Contemporary Oaxacan Art. I went home in the coutryside on my motorcycle and went to sleep.I was awaken in the early morning by my own crying as I was haunted by the memory of one of the interviews from the film. A grandmother related the story of her daughter who wanted to be reunited with her husband who had gone to the states. The grandmother pleaded with her daughter to leave behind her infant baby girl as it would be too dangerous and difficult to travel with a baby. The daughter would not listen and paid a smuggler (price: between $3000 and $8000 from Oaxaca).The smuggler proved to be corrupt and abandoned them in the Sonoran desert. She had wandered the desert with her babe-in-arms until she collapsed. Hours later, a migrant man on a similar quest had come across the bodies, both barely alive. He took up the baby and continued his journey north determined to give himself up to the INS to save the baby. Two weeks later they found the decomposing body of the mother and had sent the baby to her grandmother in Oaxaca. The film showed a healthy young girl of 6 years old left with only photos as memory of her mother. The finished art project of 2501 migrants is installed in Monterrey Mexico and awaiting visas for a world tour.
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