RIP Christopher Hitchens

its full of stars

I'm not DP but we have the same initials

hitch taught us how politics could be rocknroll

who will teach us how politics can be rickroll

Obama

"Never Gonna Lock You Up"

i remember one july afternoon at a convention center in san antonio the louche figure of hitch was draped over a sedan wth two vassar girls, smoking rollups and downing a magnum of pol roger

a hieratic silence prevailed

'never let the islamo-nazis win', he intoned to the assembled press corps

everyone cheered

hitch was inspirational like that

http://www.thedialecticalplaya.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Hitchens1.jpg

sweet christ

mine eyes

paging dom

You guys never read his VF piece on his makeover?

Died the day the Iraq War ended, his work complete I guess...

otm http://coreyrobin.com/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-the-most-provincial-spirit-of-all

― Cooper Chucklebutt, Friday, December 16, 2011 11:00 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

"Only a writer of Hitchens’s talents could do justice to the culture that now so shamefully mourns him."

what sanctimonious garbage

eh supporting the Iraq War is pretty unforgiveable imho

dont be so sanctimonious abt this war that killed hundreds of thousands of people guy jeez

He contained multitudes. Righteous truthsayer, imperial asshole.

no i meant dont be so sanctimonious about ppl expressing (possibly conflicted!) regret about the passing of an interesting and forceful personality

let me do the next part for you:

"did u kno hitler was an interesting and forceful personality mmmmmm ~think about it~"

"a bunch of people got bombed by people that weren't this sad drunk blowhard oh well its sad, he was a alcoholic"

christopher hitchens was a total asshole!

dont use apologetic words like 'forceful' i mean be serious

He contained multitudes. Righteous truthsayer, imperial asshole.

― Dr Morbius, Friday, December 16, 2011 5:31 PM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Permalink

... an unforgettable journey along Dr Morbius's chode

being an asshole is fun sometimes (i'm sure you've noticed I enjoy it occasionally) but defending The New American Century is another story.

i meant 'sanctimonious' in a p literal way, dudes

being an entertaining asshole = forgiveable, even admirable under certain circumstances

joyously advocating and celebrating warfare = gtfo you monster

lol he was a movement atheist too

that is: yes the dude was an asshole and on the wrong side of history on at least several issues, but that blogue post you posted was redlining the sanctimonitron imo

man deal w/it guy deserves sanctimony all over his gravesite

I read the Trial of Henry Kissinger not long out of college, while I was staying at friend's house. I couldn't sleep, so I pulled it off the bookshelf and sat at his kitchen table and started reading. My friend walked in to get breakfast the next morning, and I was still there, just finishing the book. He said "Holy shit you've been reading that the whole time?" and I was all "YES AND SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT FUCKING KISSINGER." I'll never forget that.

Hitch was almost 100% of why I subscribed to Vanity Fair. I had a hard time with the pro-Bush stuff, hell, I had hard time with half the stuff he wrote in the last 10 years. But at the same time, he was what convinced me to read and love Joyce. He sent me back to re-read Byron. Got me to read Wodehouse, for god's sake. And in general, he helped me appreciate the craft of actual rhetoric, and language...and even when he depressed the hell out of me, his turns of phrase were still often sheer gloriousness.

I'm going to miss that drunk fucker. So much.

ice - hitchens was an early and important figure in the history of trolls so by trolling his rip thread you are really just paying tribute to the man's legacy

Let's not forget that even in the last 10 years he's been otm on politics some of the time, like his (demonstrative!) stance against waterboarding.

ha, i saw some old clip today of him on hannity pissing all over falwell after his death and i totally thought about how he was an A+ troll
xp

ice - hitchens was an early and important figure in the history of trolls so by trolling his rip thread you are really just paying tribute to the man's legacy

― iatee, Friday, December 16, 2011 11:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Permalink

duh i mean just duh

Greenwald compares the whitewashing of Hitch's corpse to Reagan's, and quotes Orwell to spank CH's bloodthirsty war cries.

Orwell:

The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

Greenwald:

There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud. But what these paeans to Hitchens reflect even more so is the warped values of our political and media culture: once someone is sufficiently embedded within that circle, they are intrinsically worthy of admiration and respect, no matter what it is that they actually do

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

The comparison is facile at best, and most of the obituaries I read yesterday were perfectly capable of explaining two contradictory impulses: that Hitchens was an excellent and often great writer who proselytized for the most worst geopolitical disaster of the last thirty years.

I'm surprised Greenwald, for maximum effectiveness, didn't cite Hitchens' Reagan obit:

I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

btwn this and the Kael thread(s), I've realized I don't give much of a damn about "great writing" in nonfiction.

lol journalism is graded on a curve for sure

Morbs, are you telling us you don't want us to read your reviews?

I'm under no illusions that what I do is great, but criticism is way easier than standup comedy.

anyway the Weekend Edition guy on NPR this morning did a eulogy today praising Hitchens as a 'free thinker' umoored from his old dogmas etc. I doubt we'd be hearing any of that if he had moved from imperial bloodluster TO Trotskyite.

wonder how many of the ppl waxing self-righteous about hitch and iraq were fervent supporters of obama's unconstitutional attack on libya (at least one poster here, by my count). anyway, pretty much all the obits i've seen (aside from the 'the first time i ever met hitch...' ones) make a point of hitch's wrongness on that one issue.

he was also a misogynist a bully and a really lame reddit style contrarian and movement atheist lets not forget!

btw lol @ 'fervent supporter' and false equivalencies

criticizing hitchens as a pretty shitty orwell substitute is prob the critique that would hit closest to home. his iraq war support was something of an orwellian gambit "I will look silly right now but I will be validated" and that really does not appear to be something that's ever gonna happen. 10 years later, 'islamofascism' seems like more of a joke than ever.

but he could be funny and seemed to live a good life, I'll defend those things. I'd find his political views more objectionable if I felt like he were the type of person actually influencing people and world events, instead of basically just an entertainer.

Hitch was almost 100% of why I subscribed to Vanity Fair. I had a hard time with the pro-Bush stuff, hell, I had hard time with half the stuff he wrote in the last 10 years. But at the same time, he was what convinced me to read and love Joyce. He sent me back to re-read Byron. Got me to read Wodehouse, for god's sake. And in general, he helped me appreciate the craft of actual rhetoric, and language...and even when he depressed the hell out of me, his turns of phrase were still often sheer gloriousness.

I'm going to miss that drunk fucker. So much.

Well said. This is a hard one for me. I really appreciated his spirit, even though i found his political turns over the last decade to be maddening.

There aren't enough like him imo.

agree with iatee-- it would be one thing if it had seemed like ppl were actually taking cues from him and he had managed to influence the tide of public support for the iraq misadventures in some way. but as far as i can tell the influence that he had as a writer didn't function in that sense or at least to that aim.

reading lots of hitch obits doesn't make me think about the iraq war or militant atheism or becoming a better writer, it mostly just makes me think "am I currently drinking enough alcohol on a day-to-day basis?"

The real test is to drink a lot at a party and step away to write coherent paragraphs and come bac,