RIP Christopher Hitchens

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

xp

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?

that's a pretty orthodox economic/utilitarian argument for contraception in the third world

been thinking abt this guy obvs and just to somewhat summarize my thoughts: clearly a v skilled writer tho imo not as great as most seem to think, the main flaw is in his tone which is just incredibly pompous, its good for zings but def limits his range of expression, hes generally just pugilistic, more interested in destroying his adversaries than an honest exchange of ideas, i think this stems from the fact that his thinking his really not v sophisticated, like its below ilx mean understanding of the world, so his agression is a defensive measure, if you bully people theyll find it harder to engage w/yr actual ideas, this imho rules him out as an irl public intellectual, our world is already full of that sort of behavior, its p unremarkable and doesnt really advance anything useful or otherwise particularly

feel like a lot of his fame is due to the fact that hes a top level hard drinking iconoclastic journalist, like readers dont really make you famous, editors do, they dole out the jobs, and it helps if those editors think youre omg the coolest guy in the world - from a readers standpoint its p awesome to have a clever englishman zinging yr enemies - hes fun to read when you agree w/him, and the cultural transplant thing worked in his favor for sure

should note that im not at all familiar w/his literary criticism which may be mind bendingly wonderful for all i know

no i mean u r (otm itt)

― nakhchivan, Sunday, December 18, 2011 12:10 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

aw

I think that's a fair take

and the MSM of course embraced him fully as a talking head only when he went neocon.

troo

Cooper OTM. I've been an atheist most of my life but the popularized new stuff is so smug and one-sided that it's hardly an intellectual alternative to the dogmatic evangelical strawmen it kicks around for book sales.

This is really the only capacity I knew him in, so my superficial opinion of him was a master level troll with +50 intelligence points.

hard drinking iconoclastic journalist

When did it become a given that alcoholic writers are somehow really cool?

The brilliant alcoholic journalist is part of the mythology made by journalists about themselves, wherein the capacity for absorbing alcohol serves to underscore the presumed manliness of the journalist.

Let's discuss his essays on literature, of which this is one of the best:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/may/28/powells-way/?pagination=false

Pareene's take, starting with the mention that the man himself probably wouldn't take too kindly to all the "treacle" suddenly poured his way:

http://politics.salon.com/2011/12/17/when_hitch_was_wrong/singleton/

...There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)

And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.

Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.

And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism....

The most hilarious photo in Hitch-22 is of our hero and a few Kurds lighting celebratory cigarettes after the US invasion, as if this was the point.

aimless otm

Whether or not you agreed with Hitchens, you can't deny he was controversial!

Todd

Ah, yes, Todd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBFu2xIejUg#t=04m40s

(Skip to 4:40 if the direct link doesn't work.)

*hugs*

Todd

hope i'm still alive when all the ribald tales of that rascally lush and inveterate bon vivant glenn greenwald show up in his obits.