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.

Contrarian News For Old Codgers (OATS1)

The News Is Not Good

   

   I hate to be the bearer of bad news, since there is enough of it, but being contrarian I must counter all the good news about old age that is now being published. "Fake News" must be combatted even when we would like to believe it. That positive propaganda about the elderly would be produced in great quantities was predicted by the prescient Russell Baker over 30 years ago in an article in the New York Times which began like this:

“We will soon be inundated with nonsense about how wonderful it is to be old. The baby-boom generation now becoming long in the tooth, thick in the middle and sparse on the top will demand it.”

  He refers to the land we inhabit as "Old Crockdom".  The article prompted this letter:

Russell Baker suggests that ''we will soon be inundated with nonsense'' as more and more of my fellow boomers get gray and ''long in the tooth'' and endure other calamities of aging too painful for me to repeat. Yet this graying, long-haired, reading-glassed boomer ''kid'' wonders if some benevolent astigmatism isn't keeping Mr. Baker from seeing the bit of dismal nonsense that is already in his hands: our age demanded -- and got -- large-print $20 bills. With laser surgery available to restore eyesight and erase expression lines, does Mr. Baker really expect ''this vast army of demanders'' to go kindly without as it slouches toward Old Crockdom?

   The trend continues into this century and was commented upon in a review of Michael Kinsley's book, Old Age: A Beginner's Guide. The reviewer notes that “Kinsley is intent on being wryly realistic about coping with illness and the terminal prospects ahead.” [He suffers from Parkinson's]. He continues:

“Longevity breeds literature. As people (including writers) live longer thanks to medical advances, we can expect many more books contemplating the vicissitudes of aging, illness and dying. These topics, previously thought uncommercial, not to mention unsexy, have been eloquently explored recently by Diana Athill (“Somewhere Towards the End”), Roger Angell (“This Old Man”) and Christopher Hitchens (“Mortality”), among others. Now that the baby boom generation, defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, “enter life’s last chapter,” Michael Kinsley writes, “there is going to be a tsunami of books about health issues by every boomer journalist who has any, which ultimately will be all of them.” Hoping to scoop the others, he has written “Old Age,” a short, witty “beginner’s guide,” with an appropriate blend of sincerity and opportunism...."

He is equally sardonic on the prospect of losing one’s marbles. “Of the 79 million boomers, 28 million are expected to develop Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. . . . That adds up to about 35 percent, or one out of three.” Lest the vain ones think they can better their odds by living right, he adds: “They are jogging every day but will get Alzheimer’s anyway.” 

   Perhaps that is enough bad news for now. 

Sources: 

   The review of the Kinsley book is from "Michael Kinsley’s ‘Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide’, Phillip Lopate NYT, April 18, 2016.

   I did not write down the complete information for the Russell Baker article, but you will find it in the New York Times on Nov. 20, 1988.

   Back when Mr. Baker turned 91, I wrote about it and within that piece you will find an eloquent description of his visit to see his mother in a nursing home. See Russell Baker's Birthday.   He died last year. See: "Russell Baker (Aug.14, 1925 - Jan. 21, 2019).

About OATS1

OATS is my acronym for "Old Age Themes" and I intend for this to be a series about the realities of the aging process. If you really wish to believe that old age is fantastic you might want to avoid any posts containing OATS.

Bonus Information:

   You happy codgers who read this far by mistake, need not read further. If you are going to live well into the three digits you will need all the money you have. If you have a more realistic view and are wondering what to do with all the money you have and the additional bit you just received from the Canadian government, and probably don't deserve, then follow Michael Kinsley's suggestion and give it back. The reviewer obviously does not think that is such a good idea:

   

“He [Kinsley] almost ruins it all with a conclusion recommending that the boomers redeem themselves with a final sacrifice — wiping out the nation’s debt. By having the money they leave behind sufficiently taxed when they die, he argues, they could leave a legacy that parallels the Greatest Generation’s achievement in World War II. “Boomers, those lazy, self-indulgent bums, those drugged-out draft dodgers, those mincing flower-power hippies who morphed into Wall Street greedheads with nothing left of their culture of peace and love except a paisley tie: We may not have the opportunity to save the world like our predecessors did, but we can save the American economy from the mess our predecessors are leaving.” Backtracking a bit from this cockamamie scheme, he nevertheless takes it seriously enough to devote the whole last chapter to it. The real mistake, economic realities aside, is to have abandoned the more charmingly intimate, skeptical persona he had so meticulously built up beforehand, trading it in for a pundit’s robes.”