Hitch Is Up

Christopher Hitchens has died. It's hard to think of a well-known pundit who was at the center of more debates, or who was involved in them in a more intelligent manner.

Hitchens was a man of the left, but because he wasn't doctrinaire, in later years he was attacked more often by his own side than by the right.  I remember reading him in The Nation years ago, thinking he was their best columnist by far, as a writer and a thinker. (Not that he was always a rigorous thinker--he often had a take no prisoners approach which sometimes sacrificed subtlety for ferocity; then again, it's hard to name too many journalists who are rigorous in weekly columns.)

He attacked Reagan and Bush 41 with vigor.  But then he started attacking Clinton, a man he saw as a perjurer and serial abuser, which no doubt led to a lot of consternation at the magazine.  But that was Hitch, calling 'em as he saw 'em.

He wrote widely, appearing in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal and many other papers and periodicals.  He also put out a fair number of books.  Some were tributes to his heroes--Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell--others attacks on those he saw as villains--Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa.  There were also collections of essays, and, a few years ago, a book on atheism that was probably his best seller.  In 2010, he published Hitch 22: A Memoir, which may be a good place to start.  Soon after it came out, though, he was diagnosed with the esophageal cancer that led to his death.

He wasn't just a writer, he was a man of action, who went into the field and met the people involved--and often went out drinking with them.  And though he was known as a political thinker, he was more than a policy wonk.  He wrote in depth about literature, and it was clear that artists mattered as much, if not more to him, than politicians.

When a fatwa was placed on his friend Salman Rushdie, he saw it as attack on basic Western values.  Ever since 9/11, if not before, he was one of the top names on the left to attack the dangers of radical Islam.  He wrote eloquently about how it was a modern form of fascism, standing against everything the left allegedly supported: freedom of speech, equality of the sexes, the universal franchise, open scientific inquiry and so on.  Leftism didn't mean being mindlessly against powerful Western nations, it meant understanding where the true threat lay and fighting it if necessary.  Thus he vociferously supported the war in Iraq--a position that probably earned him more vitriol from former compatriots than anything he'd ever heard from erstwhile enemies.  It was certainly enough to get him kicked off The Nation.

He was undaunted, of course.  He lived for a good fight. And it's not as if he supported every aspect of America's War on Terror.  He opposed limitations on due process, for example, and also wrote against waterboarding--going so far as to be waterboarded himself.

Though he was a man of convictions, he was also willing to change his mind.  He started as a socialist but came around the seeing the useful, even revolutionary aspects of capitalism.  He also changed his mind on certain figures of our time--Gore Vidal was once a mentor, but Hitchens recognized that he'd cracked.  And Hitch was more than ready to call out (former?) friends, like Noam Chomsky (who wasn't even convinced Bin Laden was behind 9/11).

Born and raised in England, he made his home in America years ago and became a citizen in 2007.  I'm sorry I never met him.  In the back of my mind, I always thought I'd get around to it, but when he was diagnosed, I figured he probably had better things to do with his time.  He took the bad news about as graciously as could be expected, giving interviews about his condition, and working almost to the end.  His last public statement I'm aware of was that he was reconsidering Nietzsche's old line "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Some saw it as a significant statement, but it sounded more to me like a guy who knew the end was near still capable of making a joke.

We certainly disagreed on plenty (especially his views on Israel), but he struck me as the ideal sort of public intellectual.  The kind we often bemoan doesn't exist any more.  And maybe with his death, that's true.