This is going to be a threeway book review. Parts one and two tonight, going over Martin Amis's Koba The Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million and Christopher Hitchens's letters to a young contrarian. Both will be written as I listen to Nirvana's Nevermind, which I'm playing because this week's Newsweek cover story engaged the bejeezus out of me. The third book will have to follow later this week, when I finish reading it.

Koba is about 20m people Stalin killed, and why Amis's father Kingsley and his friend Hitchens spent decades defending the system of government that enabled him. It's also an arbitrary listing of the horrors of pogrom after terror after pogrom that Amis came across while reading a roomful of books about Stalin.

Koba was a nickname of Stalin. Amis uses the nickanme to take hold of language and reintroduce this famous fuck-up. Koba is basically an extended journal of ruminations on murder. There is no new scholarship, and most of the best spots are quoted selection from other books on Stalin. The only original offering comes from Amis's personal life (the book gets started on page 3, and by page 5 Amis has told us that his sister died recently) and Amis's journal-writing style of stating his own impressions, biases, as fact ("When Nabakov wrote X, he was thinking that blah blah blah").

He's exploring out loud why you can make a joke about the communism, but you can't joke about Naziism. In the spirit of the book, I'll cite one of the examples of murder which Amis didn't seem to think was funny, but I did:

The biggest ship in the fleet [taking vicims to the gulags on the fringe of the USSR] was called the Nikolai Yezhov, after the Cheka chief who presided over the Great Terror; when Yezhov was himself purged, in 1939, the Nikolai Yezhov became the Feliks Dzerinsky, honoring the Cheka's ferocious founder.

This I find giggle-worthy.

Amis thinks that whatever it is that makes the commie murder possibly-joke friendly and Naziism not is the same thing that allowed his dad and his friend Hitchens to lend their names, reputations, arguments to the USSR. Amis was always anti-commie, and he wants to know why men he respects could act like such fuckwit slaves to intelligentsia orthodoxy, and why he can still muster a chuckle about this particular genocide. He's trying to link his own pain about losing his sister and his own disillusionment with his dad and his friend to the solemn memory he feels like Soviet pogrom victims are denied.

Now, book two: Hitchens apparently wrote a bunch of letters to an unnamed student of his at the New School, all of them about why it's worth debating and disagreeing and fighting. Koba came out after letters, which came out the month after 9-11. Shortly after the attacks, Hitchens pretty much renounced the Left as a whole, saying they were a bunch of knee-jerk, um, contrarians. Today he's probably anti-Ashcroft, but if you see him on a talk show he'll most likely be savaging the Left. (I don't have any problem with that as an argument, other than that the Left seems like a straw man at this point. Ashcroft is a possible ruiner of lives, but Daschle and Nader seem to be in a race toward irrelevancy).

Hitchens lists inspiring dissidents throughout history, most of whom died without knowing they'd succeeded in helping society. For him, Marx was a good guy who came up with a good idea that changed the world, but whose ideas were then perverted by bastards. Amis says Hitchens was always full of crap: that he was never a really honest writer until 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell down and there was no point in towing the party line anymore.

Both books are over-written. Both guys write things like "and the second, which is a corollary of the first," and they break the cardinal rule of johnny writing: never use an esoteric horseshit Frenchism when you can say what you mean in English. Which is too bad, because their realspeak can get your blood pumping "More basically, Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. He was a nun-killer--they all were," -Amis, and... [a Hitchens quote about fucking i can't find]. But they also have sad, sobering sentences like "Given total power over another, the human being will find that his thoughts turn to torture," -Amis, and "Irony is 'the glory of slaves': the sharp aside and the witty nuance are the consolation of the losers and are the one thing that pomp and power can do nothing about," -Hitchens.

It's no overstatement that these two British guys are a good estimate of where cutting edge thought is going today. But this cutting edge ain't daddy's: it's very-pro America, very adoring of George Orwell--who made a similar break with most of the Left after WWII started. And though neither of these books really adresses the issue, it's clear by every logical inference laid out by the authors that they would be gung-ho about the war on terror. The contrarians are united behind the bumble-voiced commander in chief. They aren't hippies, they're forward leaners. They don't want Bush to change course, they want to keep him true to his word: that would mean rebuilding Afghanistan, breaking down Iraq to rebuild it, and taking the Saudis out behind the woodshed and slapping them around a bit.

I don't argue that this is wise, only that this is a big friggin change. And that is 1 minute until 3. So I'm posting and going to bed.