In the new issue of Commentary, Andrew Ferguson does a great job of deconstructing the Princess Di-level of mourning that Christopher Hitchens received upon his demise from some quarters — many of whom should have known better:
Most unexpected of all, at least by me, was the overpraise for Hitchens’s habits of mind, and for his politics, which supposedly placed him courageously at odds with the establishment. “He offered a model of how to think,” wrote one grief-stricken acquaintance. The PBS historian Simon Schama mourned the “unfillable space where his prose rocked and rolled in face of the demure, the hypocritical, and the ignorantly self-important.” [Which is a nice description of your average NPR staffer -- Ed]
Such excess obscures the most obvious conclusion we can draw from Hitchens’s politics, which is that he was a crank. In the early 1980s he was convinced that the Reagan administration had colluded in the Soviet Union’s downing of the airliner KAL 007. A few years later he was a vigorous promoter of the “Secret Team” theory that fit the Iran-contra scandal into a world-girding conspiracy of international bankers and private militias. A handful of memorialists dismissed his hatred of Bill Clinton as a lapse in judgment, but maybe you had to be there to see how unhinged it was: He really did believe that Clinton had been an accessory to the murder of a pair of hillbillies back in Arkansas. And the Queen, that “whore,” was almost as evil as the Albanian dwarf.
AdvertisementThere were lots more opinions where these came from, and any combination of two or three of them, expressed with Hitchens’s ardor and bloody-minded indifference to fact, would have got any one else run out of polite society. In media circles—not to be confused with polite society, I know—even the whole package couldn’t disqualify Hitchens. Where his polemics failed as models of logic or casemaking, they excelled as attention-getters. Only his later embrace of Republican foreign policy threatened his hallowed place among media people, but the threat was temporary and finally inconsequential.
After his death, I puzzled over the universal praise and its intensity. I thought of his charm, his learning, the preternatural fluency of his writing. But surely mere talent and amiability weren’t enough to indemnify him so thoroughly among the journalistic class that memorialized him so excessively. No, that required fame, the ultimate inoculation.
And then I remembered the Dreyfuss story. Hitchens might not have been famous back then, but he wanted to be, and he worked hard at it, and in the end, as he knew, he could reap fame’s rewards from a class of people for whom mere fame is the ultimate intoxication—far more impressive than learning or talent or rigorous argument. The scurrilous opinions might bring him fame, but the fame would guarantee that the opinions wouldn’t matter.
It’s maybe not the best fate for a man who once might have hoped that his ideas would be taken seriously, but it’s the fate Hitchens chose. At least that’s my theory. And I knew the man for more than a quarter of a century. Did I mention that?
Exit quote: “Andrew Sullivan, a well-known blogger, reprinted a New York magazine story about his arrival at a Hitchens party: Sullivan, the magazine reported, greeted [the host] with a hug and a kiss. ‘I want tongue. Give me tongue,’ Hitchens implored, to no avail.”
Like Steve Jobs, whose death was followed by seemingly universal praise that he changed the world and set it on its course to the future.
Not really. He led in and won some competitions, but the changes in information and communications technology that are sweeping the world would be happening with or without Steve Jobs. Furthermore, he was a pioneer in the ever increasing control in the corp over “your” gear.
Let this guy say what he will about Hitchens: I say that at least Hitchens wasn’t some politically correct hack and that he said what he meant and wasn’t afraid to see it. That means he was wrong sometimes; so what? The PC that comprises the vast majority of the media brutally attacks soft targets like whites, men and Christians and lets everyone else’s bigotry have full and free rein. The media on the Left basically takes positions that amount to nothing more than being against making potato salad out of cute kitties or selling 8 yr. old children into slavery – anything more nuanced or challenging than that gets tossed aside.
Hitchens had credibility and so when he said Islam was a despicable religion people didn’t say he was an Islamophobe but listened; to do otherwise would be to risk being ripped apart by these pesky things called logic, proportion, context, reason and an insistence on a consistent philosophy rather than one that points in whatever direction that makes Muslim, gays, women and minorities look good regardless of the true meaning of and neutral application of a word called “justice.”
In the Left leaning world of the politically correct “justice” moves around like a slippery snake and according to race, religion, gender, gender preference and economic status. Doling out morality by these standards amounts to little more than idiocy.
Hitchens often spoke and wrote out of frustration and even anger and that is something I can trust whether I agree with the particular topic or not; to suggest that was an act is its own hit-obit the man decries.
I could have gone for years and years without knowing that exit quote and been quite happy.
What a weak hit-obit.
Hitchens could have written it done much better.
Sigh at my editing error.
PIMF
I never personally spoke to him face to face (although I did speak with him on a radio show once and I emailed back and forth with him a few times). I was a fan of his writing. It was honest, witty and he was damn productive. I miss having him about.
He could be a d-ck. But, I enjoyed Letters to a Young Contrarian.
Call it a “hit obit” if you like, but I think it’s a necessary bit of counter-messaging in the hagiographic aftermath of Hitchens death. Whatever else he was, Hitchens was a big-time hater and his passions tended to undermine his arguments with irrationality. And did anyone else notice that his meanest ad-homs were directed at women?
Mother Teresa comes to mind.
I respected Hitchens because he was that rare bird, an honest atheist. Unlike the typical sophomoric atheist who mocks ‘religion’ out of ignorance, Hitchens had an understanding and respect for Christianity and its believers.
I liked Hitchens precisely because he was a contrarian and I mostly read opinions with which I am in essential agreement. Highly literate contrarian opinion like his is/was(we shan’t see his likes again soon) always thought provoking. Frequently Hitchens served to harden my original opinion in diametric opposition to whatever he espoused about God, for instance, or Mother Teresa. This “hit obit” as some above are calling it is an ironic bit of contrariana that Hitchens might’ve penned about himself from the hereafter he denied existed – contrarian no more.