Hitch-22

If I’d known how interesting Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 was going to be, I would have lined up an assignment to write a full-length review before it appeared. For blogging purposes, there is so much here that it’s hard to know where to begin.

I had read some of Hitchens’ columns in The Nation before he broke with the magazine, and his support for the Iraq war made me regard him as one of those liberals who lose their grip on reality for no apparent reason. Still, to see him speak on TV, or especially in debate, was to be impressed with his focus, erudition, and combativeness. Having read his book, I can see that the erudition was honed by an Oxford education and the combativeness by a youth spent as a Trotskyist rabblerouser.

A long time ago I overheard someone ask a young activist what party he belonged to, and he replied, “I’m a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.” It hadn’t quite sunk into my brain before that “left” and “right” are not the only ways to organize one’s political life. Hitchens’ political instincts, like those of that activist, have more to do with human rights than party platforms. Whether or not you agree with him that it was our job to overthrow Saddam Hussein, this belief is consistent with his previous positions, and based on extensive experience as a reporter around the world. (Photos show him not only in Iraq but in Kurdistan, Cyprus, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Uganda, Venezuela, Romania, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and the Western Sahara.)

Hitchens says he discovered only while on the tour for this book that he had esophageal cancer, the ailment that killed his father. But reading “Prologue with Premonitions,” which introduces this book, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have a strong sense that something wasn’t right. It begins as Hitchens picks up a copy of the National Portrait Gallery’s magazine Face to Face and sees a 1979 photo of himself with Martin Amis, captioned “the late Christopher Hitchens.” He moves on to thoughts of T.S. Eliot, Julian Barnes’ book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and to this thought:

When I first formed the idea of writing some memoirs, I had the customary reservations about the whole conception being perhaps “too soon.” Nothing dissolves this fusion of false modesty and natural reticence more swiftly than the blunt realization that the project could become, at any moment, ruled out of the question as having been undertaken too “late.”

Well, Hitch-22 wasn’t conceived or written too late, because—well, here it is. I hope that the author, too, will be around for many more years to goad, infuriate, and stimulate his readers and listeners. 

It’s the regulation, stupid

In his recent column on why Georgia leads the country in bank failures, Paul Krugman makes the same point he made in his column on the situation in Ireland.

You don’t need fancy derivatives to break the financial system. All you need is a lack of regulation.

So what’s the matter with Georgia? As I said, banks went wild, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the savings-and-loan excesses of the 1980s. High-flying bank executives aggressively expanded lending — and paid themselves lavishly — while relying heavily on “hot money” raised from outside investors rather than on their own depositors.

It was fun while it lasted. Then the music stopped.

Why didn’t the same thing happen in Texas? The most likely answer, surprisingly, is that Texas had strong consumer-protection regulation. In particular, Texas law made it difficult for homeowners to treat their homes as piggybanks, extracting cash by increasing the size of their mortgages. Georgia lacked any similar protections (and the Bush administration blocked the state’s efforts to restrict subprime lending directly). And Georgia suffered from the difference.

What’s striking about the contrast between the Texas story and Georgia’s debacle is that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issues that have dominated debates about banking reform. For example, many observers have blamed complex financial derivatives for the crisis. But Georgia banks blew themselves up with old-fashioned loans gone bad.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in New York

The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose memoir Dreams in a Time of War I recently reviewed for The Quarterly Conversation, will be appearing this week at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square. The reading is a benefit for Revolution Books.

For more about Ngũgĩ and his memoir, check out this BBC interview or one of the interviews available from the Revolution Books site.

Postcard from Zimbabwe

Postcard from Zimbabwe, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, is not as horrifying as his reports of genocide in Sudan or obstetric fistula in Ethiopia. But to anyone who has spent time in Zimbabwe, it is deeply discouraging.

“Zimbabwe is one of my favorite countries,” writes Kristof, “blessed with friendly people, extraordinary wildlife and little crime.” It is still safe enough (at least for tourists) that Kristof chose to bring his family, “and they found the scenery, people and wild animals quite magical.”

Kristof’s article is datelined Hwange, and it’s a safe bet that the Kristofs spent some time in Hwange National Park, a game preserve bigger than the state of Connecticut. On a visit there in 1990, I had the thrill of watching zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, and warthogs not from a jeep but in a small group on foot, accompanied by a ranger with an antiquated rifle in case anything more dangerous appeared.

Zimbabwe was doing a good job protecting its wildlife. Along the Zambesi near Victoria Falls you could see a particular kind of palm tree lining the Zimbabwean side of the river but not the Zambian side. The seeds of that palm would only germinate after passing through the bowels of an elephant, and the trees were the living symbol that Zimbabwe had prevented poachers from destroying its elephant herds.

Robert Mugabe’s government hasn’t done as good a job looking after its people.

Zimbabwe has come very far downhill over the last few decades (although it has risen a bit since its trough two years ago). An impressive health and education system is in tatters, and life expectancy has tumbled from about 60 years in 1990 to somewhere between 36 and 44, depending on which statistics you believe.

Western countries have made the mistake of focusing their denunciations on the seizures of white farms by Mr. Mugabe’s cronies. That’s tribalism by whites; by far the greatest suffering has been endured by Zimbabwe’s blacks.

“Over and over,” Kristof writes, “I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite.”

Even in 1990, some black Zimbabweans told me things were better in the days of Ian Smith and Rhodesia, and I cringed too. It wasn’t true then, I think, but unhappily it may be true now.

One mango at a time

In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.

About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”

Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.

For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.

Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.