Very Worth Reading

Smoking and drinking are risk factors for the cancer which killed him. (Source: Mayo Clinic web site.) Joy joy joy.

If you read the article you will find that it’s not about his alcoholism but his misogyny. Strangely Hitchens ‘cared deeply’ (according to Hitchens) about the poor suffering women in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When he met actual women in the flesh in Washington….not so much.

“I don’t know how long Christopher will be read. […] But as a vivid presence Christopher will be long remembered.”

I don’t mean to get on Katha Pollit’s case … but this is an indictment of her whole world, in which Hitchens was the best they could do for a vivid presence. While the people who liked reading him were all going on about how he quoted high culture, people who hung out with him were all going on about how he drank, and smoked, and said nasty things to people. He simultaneously got to play British intellectual and British punk. It all seems rather pathetic and trivial.

But all right. If anyone except the people who knew him are going to remember him as a viviid presence, what exactly are they going to remember? “Either that wallpaper has to go, or I do” came up yesterday in conversation not about Oscar Wilde… so what is it?

Smoking and drinking are risk factors for the cancer which killed him. (Source: Mayo Clinic web site.) Joy joy joy.

To make matters worse, he had a family history of that specific type of cancer. In the column where he discussed being diagnosed, he mentioned that his father also died of esophageal cancer, albeit at 79 instead of 62.

He had his balls waxed? Why?

hitchens’ big contradiction was in his humanism. no one’s not a humanist on a cold night, but it was hitchens’ trick to co-opt the moral glamour of a democratic humanism while attaching his practical loyalty to an elitist one. what explains how you can sustain a righteous scorn of the religious impulse and at the same time be socialistically suffused with sympathy for the lot of the masses? (indeed, what would you expect of a simple ‘mammal’ but a tendency to totalitarianism?) i think a belief in the improvability of man explains it, but a belief specifically in the desirability of the improvement of man towards the goal it was for hitchens self-evidently just for him to aspire to, that of the condition of hitchens and his friends

Has anyone mentioned Neal Pollack’s contribution yet? Because it’s also worth reading.

That was a good piece by Pollit — which spurred me to look up the 1989 article on abortion she mentions, since I vaguely remembered Hitchens mocking pro-lifers in God is Not Great. Here’s a longer excerpt:

The leading element in the “right to life” movement is indeed composed of hypocrites, who are either indifferent to the suffering of others or in some cases positively enthusiastic about it; who are marketers of religious cretinism; and who have been thoroughly and revealingly unsettled by one of the century’s most positive developments, the sexual autonomy of women. As has been said before, the “lifers” pretend concern for humanity before it is born and after it is dead, and contribute mightily to the
preventable bits of misery in between. …

It is because I actually do mind about this that I am appalled by the exploitation of the subject by religious and political demagogues. Still, most of them have the excuse of ignorance or depravity. The left should not. If you care to spend a few minutes talking with the people who attend “right to life” events, the active majority of them working-class women, you will encounter all kinds of what I am still arrogant or confident enough to call illusions. But you will also encounter a genuine, impressive, unforced revulsion at
the idea of the disposable fetus. This revulsion would deserve respect even if it were “only” emotional. But anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour
with a textbooko n embryology knows that the emotions are not the deciding factor. In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture
some organs. As to whether this involves pain on the “Silent Scream” scale, I have no idea. The “right to life” leadership, again, has cheapened everything it touches.

12, 14: “In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match’s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge. ”

Is there a punch line later on? Because that’s stupid.

Poe’s Law is strong enough so that they had to plaster a big “Satire” at the top of the thing. Too bad, really.

Thanks, Belle. Certainly the best of the obits of my namesake that I’ve read during the past week or so. Courage in a narrow sphere, all too true of many men.

I love when foot soldiers worship at the feet of lieutenants who could never hold a water bottle for a four-star general. Be that as it may, as you were.

Hitchens was the prototypical Oxbridge Hooray Henry.

Somehow they missed the “Satire” tag on Eagleton’s piece. But it must have surely been there. No one could have written that seriously.

“Of a later president, George W. Bush, Hitchens observes that his eyes are set close enough together for him to use a monocle rather than a pair of glasses. […] All this is the kind of scabrous wit that readers of the Great Contrarian have come to relish.”

This answers many of the questions I’ve had about people who like Hitchens’ style, at any rate. The problem with Bush was that *his eyes were set close together* — in fact, it’s scabrous wit to bring that up. Wait till these people hear my fart jokes!