Christopher Hitchens

I loved and revered Christopher Hitchens. And don't start in with that stuff about Iraq either: I loved him in large part because of his various idiocies, not in spite of them.

Beyond the politics there is also, perhaps, this reason for not loving him: he was aggressively middle-brow. He was wrapped up in the daily news cycle, but was careful to pepper his copy with just enough discussion of timeless literature, to appear on television with just the right sort of timeless Britishness, to drop in just the right number of foreignisms to appear classically learned (mot juste, nil nisi bonum, etc.), to come across as something more than a journalist.

But who am I kidding? That's exactly my level! Or at least it is a good deal of the time. I've often thought of Christopher Hitchens and Perry Anderson as representing the only two models of engaging with the world that are at all attractive to me: the one hot and pugnacious and in the thick of it, the other icy and above-it-all and somehow omniscient; the one more full of shit than the other but for that reason also more human; each occupying his own clearly marked-out spot on the social brow.  I'm sure Anderson thinks Hitchens was a boob, and will say nothing good, or nothing at all, about him now. Both are staunch enemies of the nil nisi bonum rule for speaking of the dead.

For several years the rhythm of my week was structured by Hitchens's Monday column in Slate. I was patient with the more aggressively neo-con pieces (though even here I think I've understood, if not approved, the internal logic of the path from Trotsky to Wolfowitz). His stuff on religion never interested me that much, other than for the insult comedy it afforded him. He seemed to me, here, simply blind to the value of the imaginative, anthropological perspective on belief, but this is by no means his shortcoming alone. I treasured the excoriations of Hillary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and other professional fools, and often found myself reading them two or three times in the hope of reliving the pleasure of the first.

Things changed when he got sick. As if afraid of contagion, I stopped reading him. I wrote him off as already dead. I realize now this was a way of managing, however immaturely, the anticipated emotional blow of his death, the loss of that week-structuring dose of whatever it was he had to say. Occasionally I would stumble inadvertently on the articles chronicling his protracted demise, which he was now writing for Vanity Fair. I read these in pained awe. If he was only a journalist, he nonetheless managed to make journalism do what Socrates and Montaigne claimed philosophy, at its most excellent, does: he made it a preparation for death.

This morning I received a group e-mail from my friend Abbas Raza, whose website, 3 Quarks Daily, allows me regularly to dump many of my extra words. 3QD has often seemed to me a sort of electronic shrine to Christopher Hitchens, or to the ideal he represents. The site comes strongly endorsed by Richard Dawkins and the like, yet it has long been clear, I think, that a blurb from Hitchens would have been the real holy grail.

The subject of the e-mail was: 'Hitch, 3qd'. I imagined for a second that Abbas had succeeded in roping the dying man into some project or other: judging some contest, being at the center of some multi-author forum, or something. I am a fan of almost no one but for that second I felt something a bit like I imagine baseball fans do when they catch the home-run balls hit by their idols, or whatever: I thought I was going to come into some sort of contact with the only person to whom, in my adult life, I have written adulatory messages, 'fan letters', some might call them (two, no reply).

Abbas was of course asking for 3QD contributors to memorialize Hitchens, not to interact with him. I don't know, though. What is there to say? Would 'death not be not proud' serve as a mot juste here, as it did for him in his own tribute to Susan Sontag? I could also go on and on rehashing favorite bits from the oeuvre, but one in particular stands out right now. It was about some Virginia Tech administrator whom Hitchens had deemed dim, and who had declared some days after the 2007 massacre on that campus something like: It's OK to be happy again; it's a beautiful day and the birds are singing. The birds were singing during the shooting, too, Hitchens responded. So, anyway, the birds are singing.

Comments

[Ophelia]

I wish I were as middlebrow as you, Dr Smith.

Hitch paid great tribute to Perry Anderson in this piece: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/03/what-8217-s-left/4611/

Gore Vidal's high-minded libertine leftist aestheticism might represent, if you'll forgive the expression, a third way of engaging with the world.

[Picador]

"Would 'death not be not proud' serve as a mot juste here"

Heh. Edit that.

I know you said not to bring it up, but here's the image I've had in mind all day:

http://ideasandinfo.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/iraqi-girl-crying.jpg

"A newly liberated Iraqi citizen responds to the tragic death of Christopher Hitchens"

[Passer-by]

Exploiting a child whose name and circumstances you don't know and don't really care about, except as a pretext for a cheap shot at a man who's dead and can't respond to you? Now that's really impressive. Giving up on trying to make coherent arguments in words, because that's hard, and just grabbing pictures off the internet instead, because that's easy, only goes to prove Hitchens's point about the truly dire state of the western left.

[Picador]

Thanks Passer-by, I learned from the best. Hitchens was a master of the post-mortem grave-dance, in case you haven't been paying attention.

And you're right, I don't know anything about that girl. She's probably a really big fan of the war that Hitchens spent the last ten years cheerleading. Who wouldn't be?

Ah, fascist boot-lickers. The Internet seems to have a limitless supply. But at least, as of today, there's one fewer.

[passer-by]

" fascist boot-lickers"? I couldn't possibly compete with that depth of insight, that devotion to truth, that grasp of complexity. Still, it's good to see that the wankers and monomaniacs Christopher Hitchens fought against are still riled by his work and resentful of his achievements.
Now kindly fuck off and piss on someone else's corpse.

[kev fors]

passer-by, I tip my hat to you. Well said.

[Picador]

"Now kindly fuck off and piss on someone else's corpse."

No thanks, I'd rather continue pissing on Hitchens'.

Look, lots of people have said it better than I ever will. Greenwald's obit is a pretty good one, here:

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/