RIP Christopher Hitchens

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
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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,

*back

I'm not sure how many members of the public took their cues from him but i always had the impression that his stance, along with the likes of Nick Cohen and David Aaronovich, helped create an atmosphere in which some fairly important and influential people within the British liberal / left could justify the war and the rhetoric about 'islamo-fascism' to themselves.

A. Cockburn:

I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.

...between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

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

http://exiledonline.com/who-can-forget-christopher-hitchens-fake-waterboarding-stunt

Eh, fuck Mother Teresa.

ew

http://www.rochdalewriters.org.uk/shell/bung_klaus/diana/images_diana/mother_theresa_02_dead_orig.jpg

Hic-chens certainly did his part to make atheism the New Obnoxious Religion.

i can understand complaining abt having other peoples trip shoved down yr throat, particularly at the institutional level, but getting all excited over not believing in something is just kinda silly

its like you have as much attachment to this shit as the believers

also would be a good look for secular humanism to admit that mostly their core ideals first appeared in the historical record via religion, and that the situation is a lil more complex than lol spagetti monster

cooper chucklebutt is a brave new voice for the nu-sandbox era

u r

no i mean u r (otm itt)

he was also a misogynist

not sure I've seen the evidence to back this one up? (unless it's the "why women aren't funny" thing which, despite the headline, I don't think qualifies.)

it totally qualifies!

but theres lots of thinking like this http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/05/12/but-if-youre-wearing-a-veil-how-will-i-know-that-youre-smiling-baby

i mean its not like his primary offense against humanity, more of a symptom of his generally incredibly entitled attitude, but still worth noting

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/05/12/where-is-rights-outrage-over-hitchens-black-dyke-wanda-sykes/

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief).

xxp There's the 'calling the Dixie Chicks "fat fucking slags" and "sluts" thing' too.

Christopher Hitchens pointed out in this article in Vanity Fair, the only funny women around are “hefty, dykey, or Jewish”

yeah, "why women aren't funny" qualifies, come the fuck on

maybe he'll spend the afterlife w/ Sophie Tucker & Gertrude Stein

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i think jho's right that his sexist and racist stuff stems mostly from how hilariously "provocative" he thought it was to throw his entitlement in his reader's faces, but it's not my job to psychoanalyze him. the stuff he said was still sexist and racist.

think it's fair to assume he had some shitty ideas about gender

tho, psychoanaytically one might read his provocation as overdetermination

haha, no doubt

The quote that's stood out for me most in the last few days of feasting: "The only known cure for poverty... is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

Is there any precedent for this?