[In the following review of Prepared for the Worst, Miller commends Hitchens's journalistic skill, but faults his one-dimensional rationality and tendency to conjure conspiracy theories.]

Christopher Hitchens, in his new collection of essays, is, as always, a fine prose stylist. His sharp, analytical wit cuts through the absurdities and double-speak of so much contemporary journalism and takes a principled stand for “secularism, libertarianism, internationalism, and solidarity.” His anticlerical, irreverent, and rational approach recalls the intellectual criticism of the Enlightenment, and this recollection is consciously, if subtly, cultivated throughout the entire book. It is no accident, then, that Prepared for the Worst opens with an essay on “Thomas Paine: The Actuarial Radical,” nor that the book jacket quotes Oliver Stone saying “a breath of Tom Paine for our time.” For, like Paine, Hitchens prefers the critical vantage point of “common sense.” Indeed, he sums up both his own and Paine's literary virtues when he writes, “Everything [Paine] wrote was plain, obvious, and within the mental compass of the average. In that lay his genius.” For Hitchens, then, like the eighteenth century, reason is transparent.

One of the collection's most effective pieces is “Chorus and Cassandra,” a defense of Noam Chomsky. Here, Hitchens takes two of the most common accusations levelled against the famed linguist and political dissident and shows them to be based on half-truths and distortion. Thus to the widely disseminated charge that Chomsky's writings minimized the extent of Pol Pot's atrocities in Cambodia, Hitchens responds that Chomsky never denied that atrocities occurred, nor did he ever in any way endorse the Khmer Rouge. What he did do was object to the slipshod and ideological way in which events in Cambodia were reported and to the press's amnesia with regard to the thousands of deaths the United States caused in Indochina. It is, of course, no small irony that many of the same people who damn Chomsky also support American aid to the current coalition of forces to which the Khmer Rouge belong. To the charge that Chomsky had written a preface to a book which denied the factuality of the Holocaust, Hitchens responds that in reality what Chomsky wrote was a defense of even the vilest person's right to research and publish in his chosen field. This defense was intended for use in court proceedings against the author of the book and was only later used, without Chomsky's permission, as the book's preface.

Other high points of the collection are found in the section entitled “In the Era of Good Feelings.” Here there are a number of shorter pieces, culled from Hitchens' coverage of the Reagan administration. The section begins with a column which claims that the great communicator's verbal miscues were not just the product of a likable but dim old man, but were often conscious lies. The most damning evidence is Reagan's claim to have personally “assisted in the liberation of the Nazi death camps,” when, in fact, he never left California. An equally interesting essay from this same section is “Bitter Fruit,” an article on a little known, but highly influential group, the Social Democrats U.S.A. This elite circle, though claiming descent from Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs, is actually the base of Jean Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams and other luminaries of the neoconservative movement. As a group, they represent the core of what used to be known as the Humphrey-Jackson Democrats, cold-war hawks pretending to be social progressives.

In all of these articles, Hitchens' method is the same—clarification and factual discovery. His theoretical arsenal is, for the most part, limited to empiricism and faith in the powers of human reason. He leaves aside the thornier questions of ideology and epistemology. This is not a great fault in a journalist. Yet it leads to problems with regard to his claim of being a Marxist. Not that his socialist sentiments and his knowledge of a number of Marxist texts are in doubt, but rather his intellectual approach remains in many ways not only pre-Marxist, but pre-Hegelian. Thus, to return to the essay which opens the collection, Hitchens, without a theory of ideology or an understanding of dialectics, is helpless to explain how it is that Paine discovered what Hitchens labels “the obvious,” or why these “facts” had remained hidden prior to his uncovering them.

Hand in hand with Hitchens' emphasis on the powers of human reason goes a certain formalism. For if reason is ultimately sovereign, then an adherence to its forms, in spite of the threats and blandishments the state and the media may send our way, will ultimately lead to liberation and the establishment of a just society. If people would shake off their blinders and see the truth, the truth would make them free. Thus, in his defense of George Orwell, Hitchens writes, “The essence of Orwell's work is a sustained criticism of servility. It is not what you think, but how you think that matters.” This facile separation of form and content, with its rationalist resonances, betrays a pre-Marxist cast of mind. How is it that this servility arises? Is it a formal or substantive condition? Are the “facts” of the servile the same as those of their masters? If these facts are obvious, then why are they so hard to see?

The only answer to such questions for one who accepts the primacy of human reason is some form of conspiracy theory: if the facts are not here to be seen, somebody must be hiding them. This unfortunately is precisely the trap into which Hitchens falls when he argues for the “Secret Team” theory of United States involvement in Central America, a theory which forms the basis of a recent Christic Institute lawsuit. The problem with conspiracy theories is not that they are necessarily incorrect, but that they collapse complex social and political problems into the products of a few individuals' malevolent actions. Thus, the evil which is perpetrated on the world is seen as the responsibility of select individuals who choose to act well or ill. Within this paradigm, the preconscious social and historical determination of patterns of thought and action has no place.

It is indicative of these problems that the least successful part of Prepared for the Worst is that devoted to book reviews. Many of the reviews are dated, the authors relatively obscure, and the books, according to Hitchens, bad. This makes for tiresome reading. But the fundamental problem is Hitchens' basic approach. He shows little appreciation of the complexities of textuality or of its transpersonal dimensions. We are, instead, treated to the familiar picture of autonomous individuals sitting at their desks, expressing their conscious intentions, and revealing the world. What this portrait depicts, however, is not the act of writing itself, but the ideological stance contemporary journalists are expected to assume, and which in turn Hitchens has projected onto others.

Such, in sum, are the limits of “common sense” in a multidimensional world. Hitchens' book is most satisfying when he practices the politically engaged, scrupulously accurate reporting at which he excels. There are any number of useful, thought-provoking articles in Prepared for the Worst, filled with things we did not know, but should have. Nonetheless, to the reader searching for a more profound analysis of contemporary politics and literature, Hitchens' book may ultimately prove disappointing.