Christopher Hitchens - Mistaken Divinity

 

 

Believe me, I hope you've all got drinks and cigarettes [audience chuckles] and lots of food. It takes a lot more than a fucking saxophone to stop me when I've got there. [cheers and applause] Now various people mentioned. "Well, it should be an actual story. Something really happened to you." I say, "Okay, I'll tell you quickly.” No, I won't at that. I'll tell you elaborately how it once happened to me that I was both-- because this is my quarrel with Brodsky, among others, about religion. How it once came to me that I was deified and how it once happened to me that I killed somebody. And I'd ask you to settle down and take that look off your face [audience chuckles] and stop smirking why I do so, because this is all true.

 

You may, if you've ever looked at the map, have noticed there's an almost beautifully perfect teardrop shaped island off the south coast of India. Used to be called Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka. It has the shape beautifully of a tear. Most countries don't look good in profile, as you know. The United States looks like a buffalo hide with which somebody has wiped their ass. The United Kingdom looks like a penis that's had suffered the most appalling diseases and depredations. France looks like-- I don't know what the hell it looks like actually. Ceylon is a beautiful teardrop shaped island, and on this island, there's been a terrible civil strife for several years.

 

And I went with a group of Tamil people all the way across the island on a famine relief mission where I noticed that before we even set out, they stopped at a temple and smashed some coconuts and made various propitiations and offerings at a temple, an elephant temple, a Ganesh temple, just to bless our journey, short one. But the fear was that it wouldn't be a safe one. And we were crossing, I now realize they were perhaps too kind to tell me or too prudent or too cynical, I never know now which was, territory that was very hostile to them. Anyway, that may be why they drove the car at great speed. I sat in the front. The Tamil driver sat behind the wheel.

 

I'll never forget, as long as I live, the moment when barreling through a village in the middle of Sri Lanka very near the great Buddha temple at Polonnaruwa where the most titanic and beautiful ruins still are in the dawn. Barreling through this village, an old fool ran out right in front of us, in front of the road and the car began to screech, but I already knew far too late, the bonnet, the hood hit him, up into the air he went, fell with a terrible thud right on the hood, right up on the windscreen. I could see his face looking at mine through the glasses as if watching someone drowning in an aquarium up onto the roof with another terrible thud.

 

And then as the car stopped skidding down onto the tarmac and dust in front of us and then the wheels went over him again and I thought, "I think we've killed him." And everybody stopped. Dead, if you'll pardon, you should pardon the expression. We had no choice. And from everywhere came villagers who I instantly realized did not welcome the presence of the Tamil minority in their village under any circumstances, let alone this one. Also there came Ceylonese, Sri Lankan police and militiamen fingering their weapons. I had to think quite quickly as I looked at my-- because if you go to Northern Ireland, if you live there long enough, you can tell who's Catholic, who's Protestant. You can just tell. The Catholics are a bit shorter, a little swarthier. [audience laughter] Call me old fashioned, if you will. The same roughly, roughly.

 

You don't have to stay in Sri Lanka very long to realize that they don't just not look the same to outsiders, they don't look the same to each other. The faces were suffused with the most terrified panic. If I was not there, the fat Englishman with his stupid-- I was wearing a white suit, kind of ridiculous Graham Greene ice cream concession cut. [audience laughter] They were going to be lynched. So, I put on-- I crammed on my straw hat and stood up towering over the locals and said, "Well, can I help you, officer?" And they backed off a little bit and by showing a press card that said Scotland Yard on it, I worked in London in those days, I persuaded them I was a policeman and that they couldn't lynch these people right then and right there.

 

So, when we got through the moment which was, I still think the nearest I've got to being humiliatingly killed myself, to seeing others humiliatingly killed and certainly is the nearest I've got to having someone killed by a car that I was in. We drove on slowly and carefully and they made camp towards the evening and lit a fire. We were nearly at the other side of the island where they were again in Tamil territory. And they said, "Do you know what we were doing when we broke those coconuts at the beginning of the journey? And we offered their sacrifices." And I said, "No, it didn't occur to me to ask." They said, "Well, we all believe in Sai Baba. Anyone here ever been a Sai Baba fan? Remember Sai Baba?" He was the man who could produce magic ash on video and claimed to raise people from the dead in South India. He was a big deal in the cult world. In the cult religious world, in the inane Western imitation of pseudo eastern religion that still goes on, was a big thing then.

 

He said, "But we now realize that you are Sai Baba." [audience laughter] This was a bit of a facer. I mean, they hadn't even cooked my dinner yet or brought me my things. But they said, "No, from now on we're going to carry you everywhere [audience chuckles] and we're going to bring your things. Was it Johnnie Walker Black?" "Yes," I said. "I mean, so that--" I said, "Okay, all right." "Was it Rothman's Blue?" "Certainly, it was Rothman's Blue, but you don't have to carry me everywhere. I mean, we chaps feel we've got over all that." "No, no, we insist. You are divine. It was only your-- It was--." "Well, I've been told that before, but though you might not think it'll look at me?" "It was only your intercession, your personal intercession that saved us from being lynched. You are to us the God, and you have saved our lives."

 

Now, I'm not one to repudiate a compliment, and certainly not when rammed home, if you'll pardon the expression, with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a sleeve of Rothman's Blue. But what I said was, "What about-- shouldn't we check on the road back when we get back to that village?" Because the last we saw, that guy was being dragged out of the road and put on a stretcher by the police. And the one reason we were let go was he wasn't dead yet. "Shouldn't we check to see if God saved his life? I wonder what happened, in the words of the old Noël Coward song, I wonder what happened to him." And there isn't another road. So, we had to take the other road back. And we did go back through that stricken village where we were probably the only excitement that had been in that part of mid Sri Lanka for some time. And we did make a courtesy stop.

 

And since they were under my protection and since I was divine, [audience chuckles] it was okay to call at the police station and at the hospital and we found that the man that we'd run over and hit and who I'd seen, I'll never forget his face even now, writhing, squirming, panicked, through the windscreen of that car, then down under the wheels, having bonked on the roof of the car, who did turn out to have been the town drunk, for which I even now willing to raise a glass, that he was as dead as Dickens says about Marley, dead as nail indoor. And I thought, "Well, why doesn't a man who can produce magic ash from his palm and proclaim that he can raise people from the dead and intercede in human affairs as a divine one? Why didn't Mr. Sai Baba save him and not us?"

 

So, these were both my mentors and protectors and my tormentors in very good company, I must say. They all were. But they taught me what I already knew, which is that all stories about eternal life, all stories about divinity, all stories about divine intervention are entirely false. And that was a lesson absolutely worth learning. [audience chuckle] And with or without the Johnnie Walker or the Rothman Blues, I feel I can still drive it home. Thank you.