Christopher Hitchens

  Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15, 2011. This year marks the ninth anniversary of his death and since there will be many remembrances next year, I thought I would present mine now. Had he lived, he would be almost 72 and I am sure would have remained as pugnacious as he appears in the picture above.

Some of the reasons why I admire him are better expressed by Larry McMurtry who wrote this about him in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:

“The descendants of the great readers I have mentioned are too often merely fluent know-it-alls, of whom Christopher Hitchens might be considered the exemplar. There he is, every week or month, in the Nation, Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, writing about history, politics, books, public figures, virtually anything that comes down the freeways of our global culture. I personally have seen Christopher Hitchens in public debate while so weary or drunk or both that he can hardly have known whether he was even facing his audience, or whether there was an audience --and yet not a detail of his argument was dropped and not any of his long and well-turned sentences were slurred. His speech, like his writing, is precise, often brilliant, sometimes spellbinding, rarely inelegant; and yet one feels--as with many of his high-journalistic peers--that all this knowledge (or at least all this information) is not really reading-derived, but has been acquired more or less by osmosis, by rubbing elbows with his journalistic peers in Washington, London, New York, Paris, Delhi, Tehran, or wherever. I might note that this fluency is something few Americans seem to possess; perhaps it stems from admirable European secondary education. I might note too that it is mainly those high journalists who seem to command the steadily released energies of their Victorian counterparts, Bagehot, Macaulay, Saintsbury.” (p.123)

To be able to argue well while drunk may not be a skill you admire, but as one who does not do such a good job, even when sober, it is one that appeals to me. I am, by the way, rather good at drinking and much prefer it over arguing.

The abilities he displayed while arguing typically where employed in support of notions I also support. He was not a fan of religion as you will gather from the hint provided in this title: God Is Not Great. If you need a bigger hint, it is found in the not so subtle sub-title: How Religion Poisons Everything.

After receiving the cancerous death notice, he was asked near the end if it was likely that he would seek solace in religion. Here is his answer: "Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God."“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Atlantic in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

  He was also a critic of what is termed "Islamofascism" and would have undoubtedly written (as I did) about the recent beheading of a French teacher and the murder of three churchgoers by Islamist terrorists. He defended Salman Rushdie who, you may remember, had to go into hiding and whose Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher shot. This is what Hitchens wrote when asked about that fatwa:

When The Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship -- though I like to think my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. (p.268.)

Post Script:

In the "About This Blog" section of this blog I state the one of its purposes is to serve as a memory aid for me. By reading up on subjects and then writing down thoughts, I assumed, for example, that a year-or-two from now I might have a vague recollection of who Christopher Hitchens was. It is not working.

A few paragraphs into this post I had the thought that I might have written about Hitchens before. I have. Not only that, I quoted the same bit from Larry McMurtry! Well, it is a good bit and if I have any readers, they may have forgotten it as well. The post was about Mother Teresa, about whom Hitchens wrote a book: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

The Bonus:

Since I provided the McMurtry quote twice, here is a new one. It is from Michael Kinsley and it is found in a review of God Is Not Great, in the New York Times, May 13, 2007:

His enemies would like to believe he [Hitchens] is a fraud. But he isn’t, as the very existence of his many enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be sure, but no more so than many others in Washington — or even in New York or London — who are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking — although he enjoys that too. And through it all he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: 23 books, pamphlets, collections and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates and other public spectacles whenever offered.

The quotation about Hitchens unlikely deathbed conversion is also from the New York Times:

"Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62," by William Grimes, Dec. 16, 2011.

You can see and hear Hitch in action in many YouTube videos; e.g. interviews with Jon Stewart and Sean Hannity and an almost seven hour compilation.