I’m very sorry to see Christopher Hitchens go. I agreed with him on more things than I disagreed. I think the 9/11 attacks messed up his mind, but he was always interesting. He was a truly gifted writer. I enjoyed his writing more for its style and construction than its substance. Even though I think he was aggressively wrong about a lot of things, particularly later in life, I feel like we’re all poorer without him. I know he wasn’t religious and didn’t believe in the afterlife, but maybe he’s found an open bar in the sky. Yeah, probably not.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Bill Clinton, as I recall, kind of messed up his mind also. Nevertheless, RIP.
Why did Clinton mess up his mind?
From what I recall he hated him with a passion. He was for the Lewinsky impeachment stuff and everything related to it. There was a book titled “The Clinton Wars” by Sidney Blumenthal that covered this period. I don’t know if these events were linked to his slow turn towards the neo-cons after 9/11.
I don’t get the fawning over Hitch one bit. He whole-heartedly supported the Iraq war, for one. The only worthwhile thing Hitch ever did was volunteer to get warterboarded for that story he did about it. I’ll give him props for that. The rest? meh!!
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No One Left To Lie To
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Having not heard anything about him in a few months, I was sorta entertaining hopes that he might be improving. Very sorry to read this today.
The very sort of person whom the nil nisi bonum rule was created to protect, yet the very sort of person who didn’t feel bound by it in his own case.
An English Mencken. Slightly different basket of unhinged prejudices, but more alike than different.
I’ve not read enough of Hitchen’s work, but I did this year read his book on Orwell, Why Orwell Matters. Very good read.
Not sure most realize Hitchens started out on the Left, he was against the Vietnam war.. maybe even was egads!! a Socialist.
Then he came to America…
The right constantly carps about the more or less non-existent left. The left is mostly gone now, because many intellectuals like Hitchens turned to the “dark side”. Seems to happen as people age.
he was my favorite drunken athiest. you never knew just how drunk he was when he appeared on tv. I didn’t agree with him, but usually, he made me laugh.
As an atheist myself, I was always pleased to see his spirited assaults on religion.
He was a wonderful writer and speaker, as everyone knows. At the same time, having read a good bit of his work (most recently his memoirs), he never really persuaded me of much. I never supported the Iraq War, I’m not an atheist, I still think Bill Clinton is ok.
Yet he will be remembered many years from now. What I admired most about him was his unabashed intellectualism in the public sphere. Rarely in America do we have a high-profile journalist or writer who is constantly in the media sphere and completely unafraid of displaying his wit, intelligence, and education. He was also obviously a man of deep integrity, which seems equally rare these days.
As a non-atheist, I trust that he’s getting his mind/spirit blown (in a good way) right about now.
I have to admit I haven’t read much or seen much of him, but by whatever chance, in the 4 articles and appearances I remember, he was eloquent but just simply and obviously wrong on his most basic assumptions. It was hard for me to get around to buying one of his books.
But my condolences to anyone who feels the loss.
I hated his ideological turn to the neocons post 911 — he used to be a great leftist intellectual. I still have no love for his warmongering in the 21st century. However, Christopher Hitchens was an inspiration for me to come to terms with my own atheism, and allowed me to be open in public about it. For this, I thank him. I’m not sure it would have happened without his influence.
No one can deny his skills as a debater.
The militancy of Hitch after 9/11 is a warning to us all, that a moment of national crisis can be a great danger to civil liberties. I think that he was a person who made up his own mind on many issues, but the 9/11 thing was very threatening to many.
Irony:
“The duty of the true republican is to resist the banana republic, and perhaps some bananas Republicans, and bananas Democrats, so that the Bill of Rights survives this war as it has survived previous ones.”
– Christopher Hitchens
He was very close to the last of his kind: an unabashed public intellectual of integrity and wit, and who could use the language the way it was meant to be used. I can’t think of anyone else like him today.
His stand on Iraq was maddening, but grew from his strongest obsessions, namely the evil of theocracy. I think he was amazingly wrong-headed about Iraq, since, for all Saddam’s vileness, it was an exception to the Iranian-style theocracy dominating the region.
I think his many peculiar conclusions will be forgotten and his work live on, because as WH Auden said of another writer, time “worships language and forgives / everyone by whom it lives.”
My own take, for what it’s worth.
http://bit.ly/uJEryR