How I Learned That Mother Teresa's Nobel Acceptance Speech Was A Hate Crime

While I enjoyed Hitchens, he lost his way.  Or found it.

Whatever.  We diverged when it came to Iraq, and man, O man, has it not come down to Iraq, in the determination of so many things (things in the right now of so many things)?

That has to be said, given the smallness of this honorific, given that I don't drink anymore, though I daydream about single malt scotch, given that Hitchens up and died, damn it, at only 62, damn you, cancer, given that I am Queen of Equivocation, frequently wrong, and fervently so, only 62, still full of suave spittle, what was it like to be so right?

Stupid cancer.

I still think "John Ashcroft a greater menace than Osama bin Laden,"  but could totally get behind Hitchens' disdain for Mother Teresa:

[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

I just reread her Nobel acceptance speech and my disgust at it is turning my stomach. And it has been years since I last read it, you'd think something in me would've changed -- tempered like bitter chocolate -- maybe even matured.

But just as lovely, silky smooth chocolate will seize at the hint of cold water, I still die to read that "[t]he poor people are very great people. They can teach us so many beautiful things."

This nun stood in Bhopal and begged us to forgive Union Carbide.*

Not only do I no longer drink, I no longer smoke as well, which virtue was much harder to attain.  Most people are saying, index aside the nose, that cigarettes and booze predisposed Hitchens to esophageal cancer -- certainly they must have assisted him in denying the cancer's symptoms until it had reached such an advanced stage at diagnosis.  I don't know.  Cancer sucks.

Forget the nun.  Move along.

Why add to the Hitchens ink on the occasion of his death?

Because Henry Kissinger is a war criminal and we all know it.
Because Ronald Reagan truly *was* "as dumb as a stump."
Because he was probably right about Bill Clinton, too -- but I cannot admit that, cannot discuss that, since Bill Clinton still has his uses to me, and by his atonement, the world will benefit. Like most everyone, I will treat Hitchins-on-Clinton as a bunch of [hauts] bons mots.

But really, why this late post, full of nothing new?  Why more in a week full of a lot, already, about Hitchens, about reading Hitchens?

Because when I read Hitchens then, when I read him now, my hate ignites. Not my conscience, not really (that's my pretension, my particular torque on the truth), but my perky, oh-so-courageous hate.

I can clothe hate in facts, discuss the failure of Mommy Dearest to provide pain relief for the agonized dying** -- never mind treatment for the sick -- while hoarding money. [There is that damned nun again!]  I can accessorize my hate with as many instances as anyone of the crimes of religion, and I'm equipped to snark on God all the livelong day.

This is no obituary, there is no summary "at the end of the day" kind of finish.  My queasy stomach is as equally turned by those praising Hitchens' "brave" and "humanistic" death.

But I do so tire of the automatized contrarian, mostly because rigor is no comfort, and rigor's largest and most hate-filled lie is that rigor is truth.  I don't know where the lie is best knotted, where it is knit together, but I suspect it is at the juncture of rigor and our notions of consistency.

We praise that which is internally consistent.  We reject that which jars.
The iconoclast, too, is held to our schoolkid's standard, and fervently so when the iconoclast needs transformation into a curmudgeon.

If we cannot do that, if we cannot work transformatory magic on Christopher Hitchens and his deep well of hatred, if I cannot do that, and so acknowledge my own profoundly deep well of hatred, then every false step becomes a conscious choice, a studied betrayal.

Reading over this, I am so glad that I know what I mean, and extend you my best wishes for comprehension!

Has the left forgiven Hitchens for his post 9/11 stances?  Can we forgive him what he called his biggest "paradox"?  Does the left feel the twinge of hate at his inconsistency, at his finger poking the puffed chest of its romantic nature?

If we admit we hated Hitchens, must we, like Tariq Ali, be draconian about it, and saw the man in half?  Is it impossible that the Old Hitchens holds an internally consistent structural logic to the Wrong Hitchens of the post-9/11 world?

These are, as they say, interesting questions.

Because it is hate that I think most about when I think of Christopher Hitchens, dead at 62.

**********     *****     **********

* From Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict by Aroup Chatterjee:  

In December 1984, three and a half thousand people died in Bhopal from inhaling toxic gas, leaked by the multinational giant Union Carbide, in the worst industrial accident the world has ever seen. The number of people actually affected cannot be logged as the effects are long-standing and future generations would probably continue to suffer.

Mother Teresa, whose post-Nobel reputation within India was then very high indeed, rushed in to Bhopal like an international dignitary. Her contribution in Bhopal has become a legend: she looked at the carnage, nodded gravely three times and said, 'I say, forgive.' There was a stunned silence in the audience. She took in the incredulity, nodded again, and repeated, 'I say, forgive.' Then she quickly wafted away, like visiting royalty. Her comments would have been somewhat justified if she had sent in her Missionaries of Charity to help in any way. But to come in unannounced, and make an insensitive comment like that so early on, was nothing short of an insult to the dead and suffering. In the wider world however, her image became even more enhanced, as she was seen even more like Jesus Christ, who would turn the other cheek, although in this instance the cheek was not hers. People in Bhopal were not amused; it is said that the only reason Mother escaped being seriously heckled was by dint of being an elderly woman.

Mother Teresa's propaganda machinery handled her Bhopal trip in the following way:

As she was present to the agony of Calcutta, and that of India's other great cities, so Mother Teresa was present to the anguish of Bhopal, a city four hundred miles to the south of Delhi, when a cloud of smoke enveloped a crowded slum on the night of December 3, 1984. The Missionaries of Charity, who had long been working in Bhopal, escaped being among the victims because the death-bringing gas was blown by the wind in a different direction... Even while the dead were being cremated or buried, Mother Teresa rushed to Bhopal with teams of Missionaries of Charity to work with the Sisters already on the scene. 'We have come to love and care for those who most need it in this terrible tragedy,' said Mother Teresa, as she went from centre to centre, from hospital to hospital visiting afflicted people. 7

This is an extremely clever play of words, as 'Mother Teresa was present to the anguish of Bhopal' means literally that; 'teams of Missionaries of Charity' means the couple of nuns who accompanied Mother to Bhopal; but the verb 'work' is employed in a very broad sense. 'The Missionaries of Charity (who) had long been working in Bhopal' is however entirely true, as they have had a small but neat home for destitutes (called Nirmal Hriday, like the one in Calcutta) for many years.

Another of Mother's biographies has a photograph in it with the following caption:'Helping A Survivor of the Chemical Leak at Bhopal, December 1984'⁸.

The photograph concerned shows Mother daintily offering a marigold flower to a woman moribundly lying in a hospital bed.

** I retch, I retch:

The poor are very wonderful people. One evening we went out and we picked up four people from the street. And one of them was in a most terrible condition- and I told the Sisters: You take care of the other three, I take of this one that looked worse. So I did for her all that my love can do. I put her in bed, and there was such a beautiful smile on her face. She took hold of my hand, as she said one word only: Thank you - and she died. I could not help but examine my conscience before her, and I asked what would I say if I was in her place. And my answer was very simple. I would have tried to draw a little attention to myself, I would have said I am hungry, that I am dying, I am cold, I am in pain, or something, but she gave me much more - she gave me her grateful love. And she died with a smile on her face. As that man whom we picked up from the drain, half eaten with worms, and we brought him to the home. I have lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for. And it was so wonderful to see the greatness of that man who could speak like that, who could die like that without blaming anybody, without cursing anybody, without comparing anything. Like an angel- this is the greatness of our people.