Christopher Hitchens: 1949-2011

In an age of pygmies, those who appreciate intellectual giants acutely feel the loss of an incendiary icon of ratiocination and righteous, forthright, blunt truthfulness.  Christopher Hitchens succumbed to esophagal cancer on Thursday at the age of sixty-two.
     A fixture of public discourse and punditry for decades (particularly the last one), Hitch, as his friends and admirers tended to call him, had no peer in this intellectual and journalistic wasteland some of us call the Endarkenment.  A masterful prose stylist and author of several books and countless articles in such publications as Slate and Vanity Fair, the outspoken atheist and idiosyncratic, non-partisan politico approached celebrity status with frequent television appearances and controversial bestsellers (no small feat in a rotten age where celebrities are primarily "reality" television stars; lip-synching automatons; "authors" of ghost-written memoirs of unremarkable, meaningless lives; and other vacuous, vapid dilettantes who would be scraping chewing gum from school childrens' desks for a living in a halfway reasonable culture).   He was an erudite essayist; learned literary critic, sparkling with abundant allusions that would put most professors next door to shame; strident, nonpareil polemicist fearlessly striking down the sanctimonious with the pugilistic verbal parries he christened "Hitchslaps;" and breezy, entertaining wit that could disarm both friend and foe, momentarily leavening the gravitas of the most serious debate.  A colorful personality and three-dimensional character (in the best sense of the term), he shattered the one-dimensional stereotype of the stodgy, monotonous, academic stuffed shirt ("You are always entertaining, Christopher!" gushed Bill Maher once) as well as he shattered the death carrier that is the one-dimensional Endarkenment political dichotomy of leftism versus conservatism (more on that below).
     Besides his idiosyncratic, multifaceted philosophic outlook (I stop short of calling it a philosophy), he is perhaps best remembered for intolerant identification of insidious nonsense (ethical, political, and religious) and calling it by its proper names.  In an age of Judeo-Christian forgiveness and egalitarian, non-judgmental "respect" for all viewpoints, he had none of it:
     --in The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, he properly castigated the putative saint for "being a friend of poverty, not the poor" and taking--and squandering--money from the crookedest, most tyrannical swine on Earth;
     --in  No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, he excoriated a spineless, cynical sitting President, chronicling his war crimes, political pandering, and complete absence of personal character, credibly accusing him of the rape or attempted rape of at least three women, and humorously describing the 1970's appearance of a ridiculous man who could only come to prominence in ridiculous times as that of a contestant in a Bee Gees lookalike contest;
     --shortly after Jerry Falwell's death, he told Falwell's friends Ralph Reed and Sean Hannity, "If you gave Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox.";
     --on European admiration for Michael Moore: "But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they‘ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities."
... and numerous others, far too numerous to exhaustively recount, from "that bad actor and worse director" Mel Gibson and his antisemitism to the Dalai Lama's prohibition of masturbation and qualified endorsement of prostitution.  (Cf. Wikipedia's entry "Christopher Hitchens's critiques of public figures.")  (Anything but a curmudgeon or misanthrope, he was respectful and kind to anyone he deemed basically honest and decent.  He debated his friend Marvin Olasky on the existence of God with a comity he extended to all who were sincere and ingenuous.)
     Furthermore, Hitchens's probative, active mind, continually refining, reconfirming, and, when necessary, recasting his views, was virtually unheard of in the milieu of hidebound, unregenerate, incorrigible pundits several decades into their adult lives.  Philosopher Leonard Peikoff has commented that he has never seen anyone over the age of thirty change a fundamental view, but Hitchens was in his fifties when he cast off his life-long Marxism and stunned his colleagues on the left by supporting George W. Bush and his ostensibly hawkish foreign policy.
     Hitch was not perfect (perhaps he was living proof when he regurgitated the platitude that nobody is).  He never completely repudiated his Marxism, continuing to self-identify as a "Trotskyite."  His thought was sprinkled with dubious, trendy fallacies and non sequiturs ("Ayn Rand was crazy," "The gold standard is a festish," etc.).  If it is possible to take one's rejecting of the left/conservative dichotomy too far, he did, joining Gene Simmons as one of the few "celebrities" to support both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Fellow freethinker Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History, not incredibly accused him of plagiarism when she reviewed his seminal work god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in Free Inquiry.
     As in all great men, however, his virtues obliterated his vices.  In a dark, dumbed down epoch of homogeneous, predictable, simplistic, diffident, interchangeable public "intellectuals", Christopher Hitchens was as unlikely as he was necessary.
     If we are to get through this Endarkenment, others must fill his void.