Hitchens for the Hall of Fame?
by Omar Waraich
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 21, 2005



 

The May edition of Vanity Fair nominated The Nation magazine publisher Victor Navasky for the Hall of Fame with the following tribute:

"BECAUSE someone had to keep the left flag flying, and when Victor Navasky took over the editor’s chair of The Nation, in 1978, it had the sort of subscription list that could have been erased by a hard winter. BECAUSE he reached out from the fading Garment District left and embraced Hamilton Fish III, scion of anti-Roosevelt Republicanism, for the heavy lifting of being his publisher. BECAUSE when he signed up Calvin Trillin, prince of miniatures and rhymes and recipes, he offered him something “in the high two figures.” BECAUSE he was able to seduce other scribblers, from Gore Vidal to Ed Doctorow, on similar terms. BECAUSE he pirated the only passage of Gerald Ford’s memoirs that could be read without catatonia, and rode the issue to the Supreme Court. BECAUSE he kept alive the memory of the victims of Joseph McCarthy in his book Naming Names. BECAUSE, although faced with the most ornery and righteous readership in the country, he would (almost) never ask a writer or an advertiser to tone it down. BECAUSE he got Annie Navasky to marry him. BECAUSE he traded on being schoolmate to Michael Dukakis and still survived the 1988 election. BECAUSE he nurtured the always dying flame of the small journal of opinion, from Yale’s Monocle to I.F. Stone’s Weekly. BECAUSE he managed to persuade Paul Newman and Robert Redford to pick up the slack of a Nation deficit that they had to know would outlast salad dressing and Sundance. BECAUSE his new memoir, A Matter of Opinion, exhibits malice toward none. BECAUSE he prefers being furry to being spiky."

I believe that the author of the eulogy should have a similar accolade bestowed on him. Why?

BECAUSE someone had to keep the neocon flag flying, and after Christopher Hitchens vacated his column at The Nation, in 2002, its subscription soared. BECAUSE he reached out from the ascendant anti-imperialist left and embraced Ahmed Chalabi, convicted scion of a wealthy Shia family, for the heavy lifting of being his guiding light. BECAUSE when he signed up to the Tenth Crusade, Slate offered something probably “in the low six figures” for his rants. BECAUSE other rags were able to seduce him on similar terms. BECAUSE he pirated a breasts-martinis line and deployed it to justify his catatonia. BECAUSE he snitched on Sidney Blumenthal and rode the issue to the courthouse. BECAUSE he kept alive the memory of another snitch in his book Why Orwell Matters. BECAUSE, although faced with the most onerous of hangovers, he would (almost) never tone his pomposity down. BECAUSE he traded on being a supporter of Bush and still survived the 2004 election. BECAUSE he has traduced the vibrant flame of the small journal of opinion, from The Nation to CounterPunch. BECAUSE he managed to persuade David Horowitz and Ann Coulter to lock arms with a portly and thirsty hack. BECAUSE, only weeks before the old sage’s passing, he exhibited malice toward Edward Said. BECAUSE he prefers being belligerent to being cogent.

Omar Waraich is an undergraduate at SOAS, University of London. He can be reached at: omar.w@soas.ac.uk.

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