Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

By Richard the Ele... on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 12:12am |

URL:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/In-Memoriam-Christopher-Hitchens-19492011

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Amen

by Michael Wolraich on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 12:18am

His writing will be missed.

by trkingmomoe on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 12:28am

Sigh. I've followed his work pretty fervently since I first saw him as a substitute host on a late late night talk show sometime in the 80's. (It might have a show that was only broadcast in NYC, but it was broadcast, as I didn't have cable.) He ripped his "guest," David Duke, to shreds. It seemed to me perhaps the most amazing, jaw-dropping verbal performance I had ever seen to that date on television. It was like: who is this man?!

Here is apparently his last article, for the January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair:

Trial of the Will

Via Josh Voorhess @ Slate, who writes:

....At a rare public appearance in his final months, Hitchens conceded that his time was running short, but said that he had no plans to give up his life's work in the face of his deteriorating health. "I'm not going to quit until I absolutely have to," he said then, drawing an ovation from the crowd.

Hitchens lived up to that promise, authoring articles for a number of publications during his final weeks on everything from American politics to his own mortality. Writing for Vanity Fair in a piece that was published only days before he died, Hitchens reaffirmed that he hoped to be fully conscious and awake as he passed away, "in order to 'do' death in the active and not the passive sense," much as he had previously explained to his readers was his wish even before he learned of his cancer and prognosis....

by artappraiser on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 12:49am

I was watching a snippet of Hitchens on youtube the other night. He was taking questions, one of which was barely audible:

"Yeah, I'm invited to be unpleasant at the expense of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Well, that's easy. Well, the novels, first, as I keep trying to say that, you know, in my view, there's more morality in a novel by George Elliot than there is in any of the four Gospels, or of the four of them put together.

I care very much about literature as the place where real dilemmas, ethical dilemmas, are met and dealt with. So to have novels as transcendently awful as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, sort of undermines my project.

And then, though I have some respect for the "Virtue of Selfishness," a collection of essays, and I've argued about them with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, as a matter of fact. (By the way, a state Federal Reserve Bank is not part of the Libertarian program [chuckles], though Mr. Greenspan seems a bit iffy about this self-evident proposition.)

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement." {Audience Laughter.}

My daughter gave me God Is Not Great to read last year, and I did enjoy his aggressive writing.

by Donal on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 8:16am

I already have spent three hours listening to Hitch on all the videos presented at DailyBeast.

I always liked the guy.

He was this pretty boy at Oxford who could drink all day, smoke up a storm and write three thousand words in the middle of the night.

People are already pointing to his life style as causing his death.

It was his life style that made him Hitchens.

Would it have been better for him to have survived another fifteen to twenty years and not have been Hitchens?

His backing of the w bush administration drove me crazy and I could not for the life of me understand why he had to spend so much time and energy attacking a woman for dedicating her life to the sick and the poor.

But consistency is the hobgobblin...

I cannot think of a writer who could make me laugh so hard with one sentence. ha

And when he was debating my side of things, it was the most wonderful thing to behold.

by Richard Day on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 9:16am

Very sad. I hope he rests in argument.

by Michael Maiello on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 9:33am

From one of the many tributes to Mr. Hitchens this morning-

"Hitchens was an old-fashioned sensualist who abstained from clean living as if it were just another kind of church. In 2005, he would recall a trip to Aspen, Colo., and a brief encounter after stepping off a ski lift.

"I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition," he wrote. "What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. `Sir, that would be inappropriate.' In what respect? `At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.' In that case, I said, make it a double.""

by Richard the Ele... on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 9:49am

I was never particularly aware of Hitchens before he started to, as Alexander Cockburn says in a more critical account than I have seen elsewhere, "wave the flag" for Bush. He seemed obviously smart and I did enjoy watching him debate religion and the existence of God a few times. Anyway, this is an interesting perspective on his career.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/

by A Guy Called LULU on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 7:16pm

He was a blowhard and a lout, but as an Englishman who could talk pretty, people over here fell over for him.

This guy hated Clinton, was pro-Iraq, hated Muslims, betrayed friends, backed other insane wars, ranted about religion, and generally never wanted to do anything more than hear himself talk.

Glad to see the back of him.

by Qnonymous (not verified) on Fri, 12/16/2011 - 10:51pm

Well, like I said above, I never knew much about him before he started pimping for the war boys. To the extent that I am capable I listened to his war mongering, Bush apologizing bs with an open mind. I thought he was a twisted piece of shite minus the 'e'. Because I did not know anything much of his previous positions as he had expressed them, and how he had expressed them in his previous existence in which he had gained a respectful following, I had never been in a position to give much thought to why he, as a particular person, had become a war-mongering fool with a good enough mind to sound intelligent as he poured out his hate filled diatribes. I was not aware of the extent to which he did so. I never had call to wonder what happened to him. What he was, in my opinion, was clear every time I heard him speak after 9/11 or every time I read something by him or about him.

After reading the Counter Punch article that I linked to above I felt I knew a bit more and because that article had the ring of truth, at least to me, and that truth seemed to go against the common perception here to the extent that it was expressed, so I brought it in.
Now there is a much more in-depth, hostile, critique of him as an idea shaper/opinion maker available which also has the ring of truth and which frames that truth in the context of the wrong and sometimes damaging way that fawning eulogies can distort history. I consider it worth reading and worth recommending so here it is.

http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 1:17pm

One thing I thought Greenwald would go into but did not was Hitchen's long crusade against Henry Kissinger. As a reader of The Nation before during and after nine eleven, it was quite startling to watch Hitchens transform from the persona of an anti-imperialist hell-bent upon bringing the Architect of War to justice into becoming a complete warmonger himself.

It was like reading The Picture of Dorian Gray with cluster bombs thrown in for added color.

by moat on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 2:53pm

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

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