LIKE COMPARING PUMPKINS AND ORANGES (via John Resnick):

The Real David Brock (Christopher Hitchens, May 27, 2002, The Nation)

When incurable liberals like Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman begin using the name Whittaker Chambers as a term of approbation, we are entitled to say that there has been what the Germans call a Tendenzwende, or shift in the zeitgeist. The odd thing is that they have both chosen to compare Chambers's Witness, a serious and dramatic memoir by any standards, to a flimsy and self-worshiping book titled Blinded by the Right, by David Brock. Meyer Schapiro, one of the moral heroes of the democratic left, once said that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling a lie. That might well be phrasing it too strongly, but I have now been provoked by curiosity into reading Brock, and I would say without any hesitation that he is incapable of recognizing the truth, let alone of telling it.

The whole book is an exercise in self-love, disguised as an exercise in self-abnegation. How could he, asks the author of himself, have possibly gone on so long in telling lies, smearing reputations and inventing facts? The obvious answer--that he adored the easy money and the cheap fame that this brought him--was more than enough to still his doubts for several years. However, his publisher seems to have required a more high-toned explanation before furnishing him with a fresh tranche of money and renown. And Brock's new story--that he was taken in by a vast right-wing conspiracy--is just as much of a lie as his earlier ones.

On page 128, Brock does what many defectors do, and claims that it was his party, not he, that had changed. The tone of the 1992 Republican convention was the alleged tipping point, with its antigay, anti-1960s, Christian Coalition themes. On page 121 Brock makes the demented assertion that the GOP had "virtually launched an antigay pogrom," before sobbing, "there was far less ideological affinity between the GOP and me than when I had first come to Washington. The party had left me and many other libertarian-leaning conservatives back in Houston." So at least that fixes a date, in what is a very rambling and egocentric narrative. And the date makes it easy to demonstrate that Brock is a phony. His early hero Reagan made alliances with Jerry Falwell, fulminated against the 1960s, refused to mention the term "AIDS" in public and encouraged Jeane Kirkpatrick's veiled attack on the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. As a longtime Bay Area denizen, Brock would have had a hard time missing that last reference, or any of the others. So he's plainly still lying about his past. He's also lying about his future: the "Troopergate" allegations appeared under his name a good while later than 1992, and sometime well after that he was billed as a featured speaker by the Christian Coalition.

Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person? Brock masks his deep-seated mendacity from others and (perhaps) from himself by a simple if contemptible device of rhetoric. He switches between passive and active. Thus of one conservative smear-op, he tells us that "I allowed myself to get mixed up" in it. His masochism even permits him to say, at a reactionary award ceremony in far-off St. Louis, at which he somehow found himself, that "I was miserable. Yet this was how I made my living and it was who I had become. The conservatives had bought my brain." And paid well over the odds for it, I should say.

One interesting aspect of the invidious comparison is that Whittaker Chambers, whose moral and spiritual journey is an emblematic tale of 20th century man, overcame his own homosexuality even as he repudiated communism and embraced the cause of freedom, while Mr. Brock repudiated that cause precisely because it wouldn't endorse his homosexuality. Here's how Mr. Chambers described his story in the famous letter to his children:

At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.

But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic.

Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.

No one will ever find David Brock's story tragic in that sense--it's all reek, no struggle.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2004 6:44 PM