Foreword
During the middle of the last decade, in his great period of political apostasy, Christopher Hitchens often entertained, along with his older left-leaning pals, a sprinkling of younger conservative journalists and operatives, all of them not only thrilled to be in his company—who ever wasn’t?—but also grateful and deeply reassured to have such a blue-chip intellectual on their side of the Iraq War, that historical moment’s great divide.
I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear ’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose . I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apartfrom Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self.
Hitchens’s disdain for the “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf”—i.e., Mother Teresa—became so famous that new readers of The Missionary Position may be surprised to discover that the phrase appears nowhere in this slender volume. If the book’s main title produces a guffaw, its subhead (“Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice”) more closely tracks its spirit. Far from being some cackle of defilement, or even just a bit of bad-boy blasphemy, The Missionary Position is, in fact, a modest, rational inquiry, a calm lifting of the veil that drapes its sacred subject. “Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment,” writes Hitchens, “the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political.” The author wishes to examine his subject’s public pronouncements, her finances, projects and associates, and to judge “Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”
Does anyone have a problem with that?
What’s under the veil turns out to be pretty unsightly: Mother Teresa’s missions—backed by a yachtful of grifters from Haitian first lady Michèle Duvalier to 1980s S&L fleecer Charles Keating—are revealed to be less concerned with eliminating the poverty of the poor (and even their attendantphysical pain) than with extending those things as their means toward salvation in the afterlife: “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.” Hitchens’s most devastating source is “Mother” herself: She “has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign,” through which the poorest of the poor, the least of these, must grin and bear it until they’re transmuted from being the last to the first.
Hitch being Hitch, he cannot, here and there, resist pouring it on for the reader’s edified delight. Commenting upon the decision of advice columnist Ann Landers to share one of Mother’s prescriptions for improving the world (“smile more”), he writes: “It is … doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen even by Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimatur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous.”
But The Missionary Position remains less a polemic than an investigation rooted in personal passion. In the manner of such intrepid, also-departed colleagues as Oriana Fallaci and Ryszard Kapuściński, Hitchens traveled the world toward eruptions of what fundamentally agitated him, and that was tyranny. “This is,” he writes in the book’s originalforeword, “a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and
During the middle of the last decade, in his great period of political apostasy, Christopher Hitchens often entertained, along with his older left-leaning pals, a sprinkling of younger conservative journalists and operatives, all of them not only thrilled to be in his company—who ever wasn’t?—but also grateful and deeply reassured to have such a blue-chip intellectual on their side of the Iraq War, that historical moment’s great divide.
I would smile quietly while these young men cheered him on and hear-hear ’d. Just wait, I’d think, knowing the moment would arrive when the ideological fiddler would have to be paid, when the host would change the topic and the earnest and happy young men would be reduced to looking at their shoes and muttering Oh, well, yes, I suppose . I like to think of this as the Mother Teresa Moment, named for Hitch’s most incendiary cultural dissent but applicable to any subject that might startle the Christian soldiers of the Bush administration into remembering that, apartfrom Saddam Hussein, Hitch remained entirely his unreconstructed secular and socialist self.
Hitchens’s disdain for the “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf”—i.e., Mother Teresa—became so famous that new readers of The Missionary Position may be surprised to discover that the phrase appears nowhere in this slender volume. If the book’s main title produces a guffaw, its subhead (“Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice”) more closely tracks its spirit. Far from being some cackle of defilement, or even just a bit of bad-boy blasphemy, The Missionary Position is, in fact, a modest, rational inquiry, a calm lifting of the veil that drapes its sacred subject. “Once the decision is taken to do without awe and reverence, if only for a moment,” writes Hitchens, “the Mother Teresa phenomenon assumes the proportions of the ordinary and even the political.” The author wishes to examine his subject’s public pronouncements, her finances, projects and associates, and to judge “Mother Teresa’s reputation by her actions and words rather than her actions and words by her reputation.”
Does anyone have a problem with that?
What’s under the veil turns out to be pretty unsightly: Mother Teresa’s missions—backed by a yachtful of grifters from Haitian first lady Michèle Duvalier to 1980s S&L fleecer Charles Keating—are revealed to be less concerned with eliminating the poverty of the poor (and even their attendantphysical pain) than with extending those things as their means toward salvation in the afterlife: “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.” Hitchens’s most devastating source is “Mother” herself: She “has never pretended that her work is anything but a fundamentalist religious campaign,” through which the poorest of the poor, the least of these, must grin and bear it until they’re transmuted from being the last to the first.
Hitch being Hitch, he cannot, here and there, resist pouring it on for the reader’s edified delight. Commenting upon the decision of advice columnist Ann Landers to share one of Mother’s prescriptions for improving the world (“smile more”), he writes: “It is … doubtful whether a fortune-cookie maxim of such cretinous condescension would have been chosen even by Ann Landers unless it bore the imprimatur of Mother Teresa, one of the few untouchables in the mental universe of the mediocre and the credulous.”
But The Missionary Position remains less a polemic than an investigation rooted in personal passion. In the manner of such intrepid, also-departed colleagues as Oriana Fallaci and Ryszard Kapuściński, Hitchens traveled the world toward eruptions of what fundamentally agitated him, and that was tyranny. “This is,” he writes in the book’s originalforeword, “a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and
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