Christopher Hitchens, Argumentative Sportsman, Hates Sports

Make no mistake: Christopher Hitchens is a hater of all things fun, silly and whimsical. His recent targets include Harry Potter (in the New York Times Book Review), as well as John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Al Franken (in the Atlantic). Oh, and lest we forget, he is not a big fan of that thing called ‘God.’

Given that Hitchens pulls no punches, it’s not surprising that he’s now turned his laser sights on the Olympics, an event he deems “the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality.” Ouch.

Still, his evidence is for the most part pretty compelling. He discusses an incident last month in Angola where an armed gang shot up a bus carrying Togo’s national soccer team. He talks about “waves of resentment and disruption that are sweeping through the lovely city of Cape Town as the start of the World Cup draws near.” There’s even time for a little Orwell:

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

But missing from Hitchens’ argument is even the faintest whiff of self-consciousness: his blunt argumentative techniques, which always leave zero space for compromise or ambiguity, run perfectly parallel to the cutthroat competitive mindset he is supposedly critiquing. One-upsmanship is fine, it seems, as long as it’s taking place on the page and not the pitch.

The tone of the essay is especially telling. After presenting his initial argument, Hitchens begins to write as though he’s yelling at the back of someone no longer interested in what he has to say:

I’m not done. Our own political discourse, already emaciated enough, has been further degraded by the continuous importation of sports “metaphors”: lame and vapid and cheery expressions like “bottom of the ninth,” “goal line,” and who knows what other tripe…

…

Wait! Have you ever had a discussion about higher education that wasn’t polluted with babble about the college team and the amazingly lavish on-campus facilities for the cult of athletic warfare? …

For Hitchens, arguing isn’t necessarily about discovery or complexity; it’s about winning. The lines are already drawn. Hitchens, ever the hater of sports metaphors, has unwittingly become one himself.