Roger And Hitch, Together Forever [May 18, 2004]
Those readers who go back to 1991, when this website first started, will fondly recall the character of Roger, who was “Neal Pollack’s” loyal but beleaguered manservant, who stood beside our narrator as the tides of history washed over and around them. Roger was the practically minded liberal foil to Pollack’s conservative pseudointellectual, and, for plot convenience, was also gay.
Since I removed “Pollack” from this picture, replacing his voice with my actual careerist wanna-be hipster iconoclast one, Roger has been without a home. Fortunately, he’s found a new job that eerily mirrors his old one: He’s Christopher Hitchens’ butler. Roger realizes that living with a self-styled dissident to the stars is a carnival of Scotch-drenched comic possibility. He and I have been in touch now for weeks. Of late, he’s been secretly audiotaping his conversations with Hitch and sending them to me via Priority Mail. Dorothy, my reliable personal assistant, transcribed the latest just last night. I present it to you now in Technicolor:
“Roger! Roger! Come quickly, Roger!”
“I’m already here, sir.”
“Right. How do you do that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Are you aware, Roger, that my bedpan is empty this morning?”
“Yes, sir. I took the liberty last night of fitting you with a catheter.”
“Oh. Right. Perhaps that explains the strange dream I had.”
“Sir?”
“It’s the most vexing thing. I dreamt that the United States had set up its own torture chambers in the very place where Saddam Hussein had committed his most horrible crimes.”
“Very true, sir.”
“And that the torture chambers were created by a direct order from the Secretary of Defense himself.”
“Go on, sir.”
“Thank God it was just a dream.”
“But it wasn’t a dream, sir. Those things have actually happened. We’ve been watching them unfold on television for weeks.”
“Why, that can’t be! Over the last two years, I spent thousands upon thousands of words accusing liberals of moral weakness as regarded the Hussein regime. I accused many people of being unwitting Islamist sympathizers. If the United States really committed torture, and even if it's on a much smaller scale than Hussein why, then, I’ve been a hypocrite, and a cocky one at that. Perhaps even a dupe.”
“May I suggest something, sir?”
“Certainly.”
“Perhaps, sir, and this is just a supposition, you are less like your intellectual hero George Orwell than you’d like to think.”
“Impossible! Intellectual courage is my hallmark! I never back down from my positions, and either did Orwell.”
“That’s not entirely true, sir. Orwell occasionally admitted that he’d been wrong.”
“No he didn’t! Because he wasn’t! And I’m not either! I still believe that invading and occupying Iraq, installing an ineffectual and patronizing interim administrator, bombing religious sites, and killing thousands of civilians was the right thing to do! For democracy! Orwell would have said the same thing.”
“Oh, most certainly, sir.”
“If you only knew my dear Iraqi dissident friends, one of whom is a doctor, a man who’s undergone more suffering than a thousand Western liberals will ever experience. If you’d only seen the joy on their faces the day American tanks rode into Baghdad. Together, we lit cigars and danced jigs on the metaphorical corpse of the old leader.”
“You’ve made that very clear in your writing, sir.”
“Long live the Independent Republic of Kurdistan! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah for the pipe dream, fueled by grand-scaled corporate corruption and Millennialist Christianity, on which I’ve staked my credibility!”
“Sir, I believe it’s time for your medicine.”
“Right. May I have it with soda today?”
“Most certainly, sir.”
“And Roger?”
“Sir?”
“Help me out of these pajamas, please. My moral courage has left its usual ghastly stain.”
“Sir?”
“Roger?”
“Change your own damn pajamas.”
