RIP Christopher Hitchens

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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).

nakhchivan, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:15 (twelve years ago) link

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

ShariVari, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:15 (twelve years ago) link

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

nakhchivan, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:16 (twelve years ago) link

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

horseshoe, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:18 (twelve years ago) link

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

xp

Dr Morbius, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:19 (twelve years ago) link

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.

horseshoe, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:23 (twelve years ago) link

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

nakhchivan, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:25 (twelve years ago) link

tho, psychoanaytically one might read his provocation as overdetermination

nakhchivan, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:25 (twelve years ago) link

haha, no doubt

horseshoe, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:26 (twelve years ago) link

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?

oPal, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:29 (twelve years ago) link

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

nakhchivan, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:34 (twelve years ago) link

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

Cooper Chucklebutt, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:38 (twelve years ago) link

no i mean u r (otm itt)

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

aw

Cooper Chucklebutt, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:39 (twelve years ago) link

I think that's a fair take

iatee, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:42 (twelve years ago) link

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

Dr Morbius, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:50 (twelve years ago) link

troo

Cooper Chucklebutt, Sunday, 18 December 2011 17:51 (twelve years ago) link

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.

Emperor Cos Dashit, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:12 (twelve years ago) link

hard drinking iconoclastic journalist

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

Emperor Cos Dashit, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:15 (twelve years ago) link

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.

Aimless, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:24 (twelve years ago) link

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

Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:26 (twelve years ago) link

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....

kingfish sandbox bonaparte, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:33 (twelve years ago) link

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.

Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:35 (twelve years ago) link

aimless otm

awesome to have a clever englishman zinging yr enemies (nakhchivan), Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:42 (twelve years ago) link

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

Todd

realness, just realness, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:51 (twelve years ago) link

Ah, yes, Todd.

Ned Raggett, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:58 (twelve years ago) link

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

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

Ned Raggett, Sunday, 18 December 2011 20:59 (twelve years ago) link

*hugs*

Todd

realness, just realness, Sunday, 18 December 2011 21:14 (twelve years ago) link

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.

t. silaviver, Sunday, 18 December 2011 22:15 (twelve years ago) link

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.

― Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, December 18, 2011 3:35 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

lol

HOOS aka driver of steen, Monday, 19 December 2011 02:35 (twelve years ago) link

ugh of course

horseshoe, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:40 (twelve years ago) link

pareene OTM

aesthetic partisan (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 19 December 2011 16:47 (twelve years ago) link

feel like it could b a fun project to define "roiphe." is it "gargling balls?" "licking boots, at payless shoes?" we could put the agreed upon definition on urban dictionary

nuhnuhnuh, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:52 (twelve years ago) link

why is it that every time I encounter something written by Katie Roiphe my main takeaway is "this is one of the worst people in the world"

OH NOES, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:53 (twelve years ago) link

i think it's because you are literate

slandblox goole, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:54 (twelve years ago) link

lol

horseshoe, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:55 (twelve years ago) link

you nice liberals are so literal-minded. she's just a provocateur! isn't it fun?

horseshoe, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:55 (twelve years ago) link

She claims Hitchens drank last July, but he said several times that he gave up drinking; he'd lost the taste for it.

Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:55 (twelve years ago) link

http://imnotatoy.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/w5bcn.gif?w=500

nuhnuhnuh, Monday, 19 December 2011 16:56 (twelve years ago) link

good katha pollitt remembrance bit.ly/tjCN5l

max max max max, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:23 (twelve years ago) link

TNC grapples with Hitchens' support for Iraq.

Nevertheless, I think Glenn's frame is wrong. Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it's potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery's expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.

At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either "justice" versus "self-preservation." To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Given Hitchens own ties to this magazine, of which I'm very fond, I'd like to say that--at least in this space--there's no demand for exclusion, or any sense that Hitchens worthy of unalloyed admiration. No one should ever receive, or wisely desire, such a thing. I can't really speak for other people, but I don't believe in an essential, irreducible moral nature. I don't see Hitchens, or anyone else, as a case of either/or.

Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:32 (twelve years ago) link

pollitt's piece is good. it's kind of a trip for me to imagine them interacting irl.

horseshoe, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:34 (twelve years ago) link

What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns).

post graduate level zing

Cooper Chucklebutt, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:40 (twelve years ago) link

really who dreamed up this idea of a cruise as fundraiser for a political magazine

slandblox goole, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:42 (twelve years ago) link

just imagining it is so strange and horrible

Cooper Chucklebutt, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:43 (twelve years ago) link

there should be a short story where it's really some kind of bait and switch and they've all joined the navy reserve or an oil shipping line or something

slandblox goole, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:47 (twelve years ago) link

shanghaied to write spam for the russian mob

Cooper Chucklebutt, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:48 (twelve years ago) link

I voted for him twice, and I wouldn't want to be at sea w/ Ralph Nader (esp if Jim Hightower was also around)

Dr Morbius, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:52 (twelve years ago) link

what u voted twice for ralph nader how has this fact never come out on ilx before???

jk :)

Mordy, Monday, 19 December 2011 17:53 (twelve years ago) link


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