Upstream | December 16, 2011 | 112 comments

Christopher Hitchens Has Died | Obits, Musings, Photos, Videos

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/christopher-hitchens-a-vanity-fair-writer-was...

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EthicalVegan
Washington Post...

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Christopher Hitchens dies; Vanity Fair writer was a religious skeptic, master of the contrarian essay

PHOTO:
(MARVIN JOSEPH/WASHINGTON POST)
- Christopher Hitchens in May 2010.



By Matt Schudel, Updated: Thursday, December 15, 9:15 PM


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Christopher Hitchens, a sharp-witted provocateur who used his formidable learning, biting wit and muscular prose style to skewer what he considered high-placed hypocrites, craven lackeys of the right and left, “Islamic fascists” and religious faith of any kind, died. He was 62. He had cancer of the esophagus.

Vanity Fair, the magazine for which Mr. Hitchens worked, confirmed his death.


Mr. Hitchens, an English-born writer who had lived in Washington since 1982, was a tireless master of the persuasive essay, which he wrote with an indefatigable energy and venomous glee. He often wrote about the masters of English literature, but he was better known for his lifelong engagement with politics, with subtly nuanced views that did not fit comfortably with the conventional right or left.

In his tartly worded essays, books and television appearances, Mr. Hitchens was a self-styled contrarian who often challenged political and moral orthodoxy. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, savaged Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, ridiculed both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, then became an outspoken opponent of terrorism against the West from the Muslim world.

In 2007, Mr. Hitchens aimed his vitriol even higher, writing a best-selling book that disputed the existence of God, then enthusiastically took on anyone — including his own brother — who wanted to argue the matter.

His supporters praised Mr. Hitchens as a truth-telling literary master who, in the words of the Village Voice, was “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” Writer Christopher Buckley has called him “the greatest living essayist in the English language.”

Enemies vilified Mr. Hitchens as a godless malcontent. His onetime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, called him “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic [and] cynical.”

Mr. Hitchens was a raffish character who constantly smoked and drank, yet managed to meet every obligation of a frenetic professional and social schedule. A writer for the Observer newspaper in Britain described him as “at once resolute and dissolute.”

Friends and enemies alike marveled at how the hedonistic Mr. Hitchens, after a full evening of drinking and talking, could then sit down and casually produce sparkling essays for Vanity Fair, the Nation, the Atlantic, Slate.com and many other publications without missing a deadline.

“Writing is recreational for me,” he said in 2002. “I’m unhappy when I’m not doing it.”

He seldom produced an uninteresting sentence while writing with authority on a dizzying array of subjects, including books on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and the Elgin Marbles. Besides his political essays — usually about international affairs, seldom about domestic U.S. policy — Mr. Hitchens also wrote about strictly literary subjects, including authors Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.

The writer he was most identified with, though, was George Orwell, the British essayist and author of “1984.” His bracing moral courage and brisk prose were among Mr. Hitchens’s ideal models.


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112 comments // Christopher Hitchens Has Died | Obits, Musings, Photos, Videos

  • WNYmathGuy
    • +1
      WNYmathGuy  

    • Went too young for sure. I didn't know of him till after he died. It's sad we lost him and sadder that he was so obscure. Society can sure hide a lot of great people.

    • 5 months ago
  • JangoFetish
  • figure8
    • +1
      figure8  

    • He was good buddy of mine for the last 6 months or so.... Just discovered him... He didn't know me but I sure did know him... Thank You Christopher

    • 5 months ago
  • BRAVATRAVELS
    • +3
      BRAVATRAVELS  

    • I just remember the reason why I admired him soo much...

      It was right after I read this:

      "Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish.

      Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.

      Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

      — Christopher Hitchens

    • 5 months ago
  • JanforGore
  • BRAVATRAVELS
  • EthicalVegan
  • EthicalVegan
    • 0
      EthicalVegan  
    • Image

    • http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/17/remembering-the-real-genius-of-...

      The Daily Beast...

      PHOTO: Brooks Kraft | Corbis

      .

      Remembering the Real Genius of Christopher Hitchens, Not the Caricature

      Dec 17, 2011 7:24 PM EST

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      The world lost a true genius in Christopher Hitchens. But the coverage of him as the lovable curmudgeon does a disservice to the memory of the man, writes Lee Siegel.

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      The price paid for celebrity is caricature, and by the end of his rich, accomplished life, Christopher Hitchens had become everyone’s lovable curmudgeon. In the pages of publications that once would have nothing to do with him—The New York Times (they didn’t like his anti-Zionism), The New Yorker (they didn’t like his strong opinions)—he was suddenly extolled for exciting copy as “The Contrarian,” “The Drinker,” The Partygoer.” The relentless comparisons to George Orwell made you wince, not because Hitchens didn’t deserve the extravagant praise—in many ways, he did—but because comparisons tend to diminish. He was not someone like Orwell (a comparison he himself nurtured and invited). He was Christopher Hitchens, unique and unduplicable. He was the most distinctive personality in Western literary journalism. If he was like anything, he resembled some larger-than-life 19th-century figura. He was journalism’s Lord Byron. And unlike certain other Washington-based literati, he didn’t spend his professional life hurling thunderbolts from behind the shelter of a title and a desk. He made his own way. Always.

      It was dismaying to anyone who had been dazzled by Hitchens’s remarkable intellectual gifts, his superhuman productivity, his extraordinary verbal nimbleness—not to mention his charm and warmth as a man—to see him celebrated at the very moment when he was intensifying the fanatical streak in his writing. They love you to pieces when your real teeth and real claws give way to toothless and clawless gestures of ferocity. Hitchens’s strident support of the slaughterhouse in Iraq was vulgar and insensate. His meanness toward religious people was unbearably callous and smug. In the age of the Internet, where stridency, meanness, and smugness rule, Hitchens hit the culture’s sweet spot. That he performed it all with a wink as he slipped back into the glittering high society that seemed—along with alcohol—to fleetingly appease his unappeasable need for love and attention only added to the disillusionment among people who knew what a true genius he was.

      Unlike the Hollywood version of genius, which is preternaturally cerebral, Hitchens was preternaturally visceral. He was not, it seemed to me, so much disciplined as driven by obsession—discipline alone cannot supply you with the vitality to write over a thousand words a day for your entire life. There is a book by Edmund Wilson called The Wound and the Bow in which Wilson invokes the old myth of the great archer Philoctetes and his wound that wouldn’t heal. That wound, wrote Wilson, was bound up with Philoctetes’ gift. There was something mythic about Hitchens’s unfathomable vitality and avidity. It was so bound up with whatever compelled him to kill himself with drink that it made both his work and his personality spellbinding.

      You could feel the wound when you spoke with him. He could be an attractive listener, his eyes twinkling as the wheels turned through infinite possibilities of riposte. But for the most part, he simply had to have the first and last word, and if a crowd drew round him as he ran away with the conversation, all the better. The mythic need for attention—I’m not knocking it; without it, there would be no monuments of art or intellect—could make him an astringent truthteller. People go on now about how Hitchens alienated his friends on the left with his screeching jingoism about the Iraq War, but he had been alienating his friends on the left the whole time he was on the left. I still remember the column he wrote for The Nation, decades ago, in which he came out, as it were, as pro-life. The brouhaha that caused made the furor over his support of the Iraq War look like a bar mitzvah.

      Hitchens’s best work was fueled, as he said, by a hatred of bullies. That is another way of saying that his best work was a brilliant struggle with himself, for he could be the worst of bullies. Along with his wound-driven vitality, his titanic certitude also accounted for his spellbinding quality (not to mention that beautiful voice that made him sound uncannily like Richard Burton). His late work seemed to me to be a relaxation of that struggle. He accepted the universal caricature of himself as the hard-drinking “contrarian” and reveled in his capacity to bully all comers. It was at that point, when Christopher Hitchens became “Christopher Hitchens” that celebrity wrapped its rubber arms around him.


      But incandescent individuals like Hitchens work from behind a mask, and through the toll and ardor of work, they inevitably become, to one degree or another, the mask. I will not miss at least half of what Hitchens wrote in the last few years. I will miss the presence, somewhere on earth, of a man of tantalizing depth and mysterious energy, who lacked just enough self-knowledge to turn, a little, the consciousness of his time.

      .

      He was Christopher Hitchens, unique and unduplicable. He was the most distinctive personality in Western literary journalism.

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    • 5 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • 0
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      Reuters...

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      Christopher Hitchens: A Salute to Intellectual Honesty

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      By Sharon Waxman at TheWrap

      Sat Dec 17, 2011 8:53pm EST

      .

      Nothing sharpened Christopher Hitchens’ mind like cancer.

      He wrote the best, most piercing, most clarifying prose of his career as he faced down the specter of his own demise.

      As he dealt with fatigue and nausea, with the anger, disgust and frustration that must accompany what he knew was a death sentence, Hitch poured it all into words that were as painfully honest as they were hilarious.

      “I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies,” he wrote in September 2010 in Vanity Fair, to those who hoped for a last-minute conversion to faith.

      His illness was a terrible irony. Hitchens was at the peak of his career. For decades he had toiled in the margins of the intellectual elite, plunging into distant political conflicts that only a few Americans noticed, and hanging with the denizens of British literary journalism and high-brow fiction.

      None of this paid very well, and despite Hitch’s fancy accent, he did not come from money. But suddenly he got rich and pretty famous.

      He contracted cancer just a few years after writing the bestseller “God Is Not Great” in 2007. It turned out that attacking George Bush, Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa got him nowhere the notoriety that he won for taking on God. (Or, "god," as he always wrote it.)

      Hitch became a constant presence on the debate circuit on the topic of atheism, a familiar face on Jon Stewart and Bill Maher (another vocal atheist) and a sought-after blogger, letter-writer and columnist. (“It seems there is no utterance of mine that isn’t worthy of publishing,” he told me, when I asked him to think about blogging for TheWrap.)

      And so: Cancer was very ill-timed.

      “Rage would be beside the point,” he wrote, on learning of his illness, one in a series of columns in VF that won him a national magazine award. “Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read -- if not indeed write -- the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the bestseller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to … To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

      And of course, his religious detractors found much irony here, much about which to gloat.

      But it was here where Hitchens rose to the challenge so few of us could imagine, using humor and a core intellectual honesty to face down the existential challenge that was suddenly of immediate relevance.

      He absorbed many horrible insults, including those who called his cancer some kind of divine retribution, something he somehow ‘deserved.’

      He responded thusly in September 2010:

      “The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former ‘lifestyle’ would suggest that I got. Why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: it’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed … And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)”

      I never could decide whether to laugh or cry at this prose. In the end, I could only marvel at Hitch’s ability to pierce the heart of his own mortality with such detachment and wit.

      He always jumped into the middle of great moral debates. And he never took the side that was easiest to defend. In fact, it was easy to suspect that he liked to take the opposite argument – just because.

      This aspect of Hitchens – the gadfly who loved the spotlight – used to annoy me. I first remember seeing him a couple of decades ago on a talk show like “Meet the Press,” and he showed up a vision of scruffiness – unshaven, and wearing Birkenstocks. I thought it stunk of anti-establishment grandstanding.

      But I watched him over the years, and changed my mind when I got to know him during the release of my last book, “Loot,” about stolen antiquities. The fate of the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon sculptures taken to England a century and a half ago – was another of his thankless causes, rooted in that core of intellectual honesty. (The sculptures were taken by stealth. They belong in Greece. Not a lot of Brits spent their time saying so. Hitch did.)

      He came to debate the topic with me at a New York Times lecture in 2008, and after beating up the British cultural establishment for about an hour, we headed out to a lunch at an empty Italian restaurant. It lasted for four hours, and he drank his way through many whiskeys and regaled the table with tale after ribald tale of his adventures.

      It was one of the most memorables afternoons I’ve spent, ever.

      Farewell, Hitch. We salute your brilliant mind, and a moral heartbeat that pulsed so strongly throughout.

      And that pen. Oh how we will miss that pen.

      .

    • 5 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • 0
      EthicalVegan  
    • Image

    • http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/christopher-hitchens-final-memoir-morta...

      New York Daily News...

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      Christopher Hitchens' final memoir "Mortality" comes out in January
      Book will be a collection of his final columns

      BY Braden Goyette
      NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

      Saturday, December 17 2011, 12:27 PM

      PHOTO:
      Christopher Hitchens speaking at the New York Public Library in June 2010.
      Peter Foley/EPA

      Christopher Hitchens’ former student remembers his mentor

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      Even with the outpouring of rememberances from fellow journalists after Christopher Hitchens' death Thursday, Hitch is going to have the last word about his death.

      A new book from the late iconoclastic writer is due out early next year, Hitchens' publisher, Atlantic Books, announced Friday.

      The Guardian reported that the memoir, entitled "Mortality," will be based on Hitchens' columns for Vanity Fair about his year and a half-long struggle with cancer. A spokesperson for Atlantic Books said the memoir had been planned for some time.

      The polarizing pundit remained active until his last, filing his final Vanity Fair column from the Texas hospital where he passed away early Thursday morning at age 62.

      "I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers," Hitchens wrote. "The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write... I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true."

      The head of Atlantic Books, Toby Mundy, told The Guardian it was “an honor” to work with the late writer. "There is no-one like Christopher Hitchens. He was the most brilliant and versatile non-fiction writer of modern times, whose prodigious output was of stunningly high quality, a showcase for his vast range, deep knowledge and fierce wit,” Mundy said. “When he was diagnosed with cancer, he faced it with characteristic honesty, courage and rigour. He is, quite simply, irreplaceable."

      .

      Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/christopher-hitchens-final-memoir-morta...

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    • 5 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • 0
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUGiWoCaR_0

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      YouTube...

      .

      Uploaded by slatester on Dec 16, 2011

      Christopher Hitchens, iconoclastic journalist and author, has passed away of complications from esophageal cancer.

      Hitchens, who authored nearly 20 books including God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Hitch 22: A Memoir, was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Atlantic, and a columnist at Slate.

      In an interview with Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg following his cancer diagnosis, Hitchens remained a steadfast atheist, allowing that any deathbed conversion to religion would be disingenuous: "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said, "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

      Hitchens was 62.

      .

    • 5 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • 0
      EthicalVegan  
    • Image

    • .

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/henry-porter-my-friend-chris...

      The Guardian...

      Henry Porter
      The Observer, Saturday 17 December 2011

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      christopher-hitchens-hay-on-wye
      Christopher Hitchens: 'Even those outraged by him will miss him'. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

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      Christopher Hitchens: My friend, a man who never lost his taste for intimacy and good conversation

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      You cannot read his writings about the pain he endured from radiation without shedding a tear and gulping hard

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      Journalists are notoriously sentimental about the loss of one of their own: gusts of hyperbole appear about the recently departed only to be forgotten by the next cricket season. But Christopher Hitchens was not a run-of-the-mill hack, although that is how he sometimes risibly described himself: he operated on a much greater canvas, plied his wares with unfeasible talent, energy and confidence, wrote more, spoke more, drank more and knew more people than any other member of his trade thought possible.

      So while one blogger reacted to his death with "Good riddance to bad rubbish!" I take the view that Christopher, whom I knew pretty well for the last two decades, deserves a celebration as well as the rites of differentiation. Quite apart from anything else, life is going to be a hell of a lot less interesting without him around. Even those who were outraged by his positions on God or Iraq or Mother Teresa will miss the thrill of their own shock and indignation – of being able to agree on Christopher's utter baseness.

      The human brain is said to be the most complicated object in the known universe. Christopher's seemed to be living proof of that. One night in Manhattan in the days when Christopher was just hitting the big time in America, we wound up in the only bar open in Midtown. We had been out to dinner with our editor at Vanity Fair and Christopher's great champion, Graydon Carter, and surfed into the bar on a modest wave of booze at about two in the morning. When Christopher was recognised by a drunk who came up and belligerently doubted he was as smart as he made out, he reacted with his usual courtly manner and calmed the man down. At length it was agreed that he would test Christopher's knowledge of poetry: if Christopher remembered the lines of any poem he chose to name, he would buy us a round of drinks.

      Well, of course, the man didn't stand a chance.

      His first challenge was the short poem by W B Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. Christopher slowly plucked the first few lines from the air: "I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above/Those that I fight I do not hate/Those that I guard I do not love;" the rest tumbled out. He followed this with Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling and, for good measure, a fair portion of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, by which time he held the attention of the nighthawks of Midtown. Next day, with a blinding hangover, Christopher ordered devilled kidneys.

      I have found myself smiling more than is seemly in the 48 hours since his death, but then he always made me smile, because he was simply so clever and his mind so well-stocked and his truculence and courage so unfailing. He was a hero to many of my generation – despite his support for the Iraq war – and in middle age he grew to become an American legend, as well as a really invaluable part of the national discourse. His fame was extraordinary, but he never lost his taste for intimacy and proper conversation, which is why he kept acquiring friends, rather than simply admirers.

      And here I need to remark on a couple of things that seem to have been overlooked in the mass of reminiscence. He was emotionally quite sharp and interested in that side of life – the loves, motives and characters of his friends, which most public figures and showmen forget to think about on the big stage. He once said to me that the thing we always wanted most was the thing we desired in childhood. Quite right. He was either fascinated by human nature because he had read so much fiction, or the other way round. At any rate I suspect that, like Orwell, he believed that someone's politics were at base an expression of their personality, which is interesting when you think of his own migration from the left to a kind of neo-conservatism. No one can doubt that he consistently fought totalitarianism, and almost always stood up to the powerful, whether it was a university administration, the British establishment, God or Islamism.

      In a moving piece written after Christopher's death, his brother, the columnist Peter Hitchens, recalled the early appearance of this trait. " I have [a] memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school." I see that child in the man without much difficulty. The second thing not to be forgotten is that Christopher was amazingly good with young people. He encouraged new writers and journalists and got a terrific charge from speaking to young people in lecture theatres and debating halls, or individually. He was never ever patronising on grounds of age, which is why he found genuine fans among my daughters' generation. Perhaps he wasn't so far from his own youth, which is not to say that he was some kind of eternal boy, but rather that he remembered the nerves, bravado and frustrations of being in his early twenties, or even in that 1950s playground.

      In my experience, he also extended the same courtesies to subordinates in offices, to doormen, waitresses and the like; and that says a lot about someone. But let's not forget that Christopher was devastatingly rude if obstructed by a petty regulation or some hackneyed opinion which drew his scorn. But in the end he always managed to disarm and, to a vast number of people, including me, he remained self-evidently lovable. In the 18 months since his diagnosis with oesophageal cancer, Christopher lost his beautiful voice, his raffish air, his optimism and swagger. His existence became concentrated – on his love for his wife, Carol Blue, his children, his close friends, the inner core of his beliefs and the English language. He wrote wonderfully about the King James Bible, the writer's voice and Dickens (not yet published) for his staunch friend and editor at Vanity Fair, Aimee Bell, as well as some harrowing accounts of his disease and treatment. You cannot read his latest piece for the magazine about the pain he endured from radiation – "this thing that seemed to scorn painkillers and to attack me in my core" – without shedding a tear and gulping hard. In the face of this onslaught, he never wavered on his antitheist convictions or failed in his obligation to report from the battlefront with honesty and insight. He was very brave indeed.

      Christopher is the second friend I have lost in a week, a reminder perhaps to me, at least, to value the circle of living friends as much as he did.

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    • 5 months ago
  • MSII
    • +4
      MSII  

    • I definitely didn't agree with him on everything, but anyone with any intelligence (and sanity) couldn't help but be just awe-struck by the caliber of the man's intellect! He was always worth watching and listening too just for the level of his thought, his wit. A truly amazing, epic intellect!

    • 5 months ago
  • hombre76
    • -4
      hombre76  

    • good riddance to rude trash. Insulting and belittling people for beleiving some thing you don't, sounds like a fundementalist to me.

    • 6 months ago
  • ampersand
    • 0
      ampersand  
    • hombre76:

      Although I had the same distaste for exactly the same very public mistakes he made, so well pointed out by JanforGore, I can see how a semi-literate could feel especially threatened by Mr. Hitchens.
      I'd suggest you take a moment to pause, (or at least work on your grammar and spelling for future contributions), and try and get some perspective on this, if not any ounce of compassion, or understanding.

    • 5 months ago
  • hombre76
  • ampersand
  • hombre76
  • ampersand
  • JangoFetish
  • JangoFetish
  • ampersand
    • 0
      ampersand  
    • JangoFetish:

      No doubt you know this, but people who miss the point of a comment, or purposefully divert it ("The Game of Uproar" as Eric Berne would label it), are tiresome to tussle with but that's the point of their diversion.

    • 5 months ago
  • H3ADLINE
    • +3
      H3ADLINE  

    • Your wit, insight and excellent writing will be missed. Those who knew him better will miss a charming and energetic man who always sought the truth above convenience or party. I wish his family the best. Goodbye, Hitch.

    • 6 months ago
  • deane
    • +5
      deane  

    • The human race was fortunate to have Christopher Hitchens. Taking on the lack of reason in religion is no easy way to live your life.

    • 6 months ago
  • JanforGore
    • +7
      JanforGore  

    • I wish his family peace, but I will never agree with his endorsement of Bush for president in 2004 and his support of the unconstitutional war in Iraq that took so many innocent lives.

    • 6 months ago
  • AJILIVIZION
    • +3
      AJILIVIZION  
    • JanforGore:

      Hitchens supported Bush and Invasion of Iraq? That doesn't fit my understanding of the man, not that I know much about him at all. Regardless if it is true, Christopher Hitchens shared a whole lot of wisdom and challenged many widely held beliefs, and for that he will be missed.

    • 5 months ago
  • unimatrix0
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • ThirdSection
  • AJILIVIZION
  • cherry5000
  • qwertyuioplkjhgfdsazxcvbnmqwertyuiop
  • UrbanErudite
    • +2
      UrbanErudite  

    • We lost one of greatest triumphant voices of reason with his passing. But do not despair, for in his death, new life is born, his words still linger, his lessons still stand the test of time, and we will carry that same flame, so that future generations may not live in fear, but bask in the light of enlightenment. We will work together to make a better world than the one You lived in Christopher, I promise you. You never left us, you might not be among us, but we are still with you, and we fight for a better tomorrow for all mankind.

    • 6 months ago
  • nowherefast
    • -5
      nowherefast  
    • UrbanErudite:

      Yet another current member who apparently never read this man's works and is unfamiliar with his beliefs or commented here just to make a mockery of him.

      "You never left us, you might not be among us, but we are still with you, and we fight for a better tomorrow for all mankind."

      Consistent with this man's beliefs, this man does not remain, just a dead carcass. Yet he never left us? How is he still here, and we are still with him... in spirit? Let's think about that a little while you continue to make a mockery with more eulogizing comments and ritualized commemoration of a dead atheist.

    • 6 months ago
  • VFORVENDETTA
    • +4
      VFORVENDETTA  

    • I believe that one could say with a good deal of certainty, that you made an excellent choice for your name and avatar, as they describe you both accurately and concisely.

    • 6 months ago
  • nowherefast
    • -7
      nowherefast  

    • He better hope God really is not great. He certainly was a miserable and tortured looking individual.

      Considering the man was so against forms and even the existence of spirituality, it's ironic to see the amount of ritual commemoration coming from member's comments on this post.

    • 6 months ago
  • ArtBaron
    • +7
      ArtBaron [removed]  
    • Image

    • Dear Lovely Death
      by Langston Hughes

      Dear lovely Death
      That taketh all things under wing
      Never to kill
      Only to change
      Into some other thing
      This suffering flesh,
      To make it either more or less,
      But not again the same
      Dear lovely Death,
      Change is thy other name.

      I raise a glass to thee Chris .
      Take care , wherever you are..

    • 6 months ago
  • nowherefast
  • ArtBaron
  • nowherefast
  • ArtBaron
  • TanzaniteDiamonds
  • nowherefast
    • -5
      nowherefast  
    • ArtBaron:

      "The irony is that all sorts of people are trying to inflect their own beliefs ( as you just did crassly ) upon the man's passing."

      And inflect your own belief's on the meaning of this man's passing is exactly what YOU did.

      With a "commemorative atheist's poem". Think about not just irony of that but the blatant hypocrisy.

    • 6 months ago
  • nowherefast
    • -5
      nowherefast  
    • TanzaniteDiamonds:

      "Don't confuse "respect" with a *ritual* remembrance."

      I would say exactly the same thing to you and the other members here. Out of respect for this man and his belief's, don't ceremonially come on these message boards and revere and mourn his passing.

    • 6 months ago
  • ArtBaron
    • +8
      ArtBaron [removed]  
    • nowherefast:

      He was an atheist and i tried to respect that in choosing a poem for him.
      There is no hypocrisy in that.

      Would you have that he be not spoken of again ?

      Would you like that for yourself when you go ?
      ( for no one to say a word ? )

    • 6 months ago
  • nowherefast
    • -7
      nowherefast  
    • ArtBaron:

      A "commemorative atheist remembrance" is paradoxical, and is inherently defeating of principle.

      Your first response insinuating that what remains is a rotting carcass that is now plant food, is actually consistent with his beliefs. Commemorative poems and eulogizing comments are not.

    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
  • EthicalVegan
  • ArtBaron
  • Incredulous
  • JangoFetish
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • DEM46
    • +7
      DEM46  
    • JangoFetish:

      You're funny!

      Otherwise, why didn't god save him and all the children who've died from cancer? Oh, that's right, imaginary beings can't save real humans or impact our lives.

    • 6 months ago
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • asocial
    • +7
      asocial  
    • JangoFetish:

      You're talking about a man, who if confronted by a god (not his god I might add) would tell that god to fuck off and die! Hitchens was a humanist and as such would be thoroughly disgusted by such a despicable god given the endless pain and suffering endured by humanity.

    • 6 months ago
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • EthicalVegan
  • BRAVATRAVELS
  • JangoFetish
  • JangoFetish
  • JangoFetish
    • -1
      JangoFetish  
    • DEM46:

      What is it with so called "athiests" Why are they so sure of themselves when they cannot prove God does not exist. Ever think of the repucussions of being wrong? Also, is it that necessary to be that hateful and blasphemous? Do you really need to insult belivers just because you havent found the joy of the Lord? The reason the world is so bad is not God's fault. It is man's. Specificly men like yourself who have nothing but hate in thier hearts. I truly pity you.

    • 5 months ago
  • JangoFetish
  • JangoFetish
  • VFORVENDETTA
    • +6
      VFORVENDETTA  

    • To say that Mr. Hitchens had a profound effect on my life would be an understatement, I have a great deal of admiration for him, the human family has lost a great representative of it, he will certainly be missed.

      Thanks much for the post E V, It is appreciated.

    • 6 months ago
  • DEM46
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • DEM46
    • +4
      DEM46  
    • VFORVENDETTA:

      I deal with varying degrees of religious zealots on a daily basis. I use their belief as a form of mental sparing which has made me a better atheist. As I age, I try not to offend more than is in my nature. I'm outspoken and don't hide my atheism anymore. My ultimate phrase usually is: To believe in imaginary beings I would have to suspend my intellect." I believe this is a variation on something one of our unbelieving hero's said to a zealot himself. :)

    • 6 months ago
  • artemis6
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • JangoFetish
  • JangoFetish
    • +1
      JangoFetish  
    • DEM46:

      If he were that intellectual he would know that it is impossible for God to not exist. Only the person with a truly sound mind and intellect can acknowledge the probability of a Creator.

    • 5 months ago
  • EmperorThan
  • remanns
  • keithponder
    • +5
      keithponder  
    • Image

    • http://current.com/community/93581866_christopher-hitchens-dead-from-cancer-hed-...
      I posted this minutes after I found it online, well before anyone else posted anything about his death on this site. Apparently staff felt that it was too brutal and refuses to post it on the front page.

      In the spirit of Christopher Hitchens, I have to ask otherwise. How can be ? Hitchens challenged the status quo beliefs as do I. Though it offended others, it did not stop him in his rentlentless pursuit of destroying mental slavery. He challenged everything that we were taught.

      Why shouldn't some of us hope that he was right. Respect for the dead should be no greater than respect for the living.

    • 6 months ago
  • VFORVENDETTA
  • remanns
  • Scott_Pert
  • JangoFetish
  • nikonwilly
  • Leen61
  • Leen61
    • +4
      Leen61  

    • I will post this paragraph from an article I just read about his death. He was one of our last true intellectuals. A sad day indeed. I wish he would've been on Bill Maher's show one last time. His last book "Hitch-22" is a must read. R.I.P. Mr. Hitchens.

      "There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar," said Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

      Hitchens is survived by his wife, the writer Carol Blue, and three children.

    • 6 months ago
  • savroD
    • +5
      savroD  

    • Indeed, the world has lost a great contrarian, author, and atheist. I will miss viewing a debater that, whether you agreed with him or not, could rip you a new one with the most effortless and beautifull use of the English language.

    • 6 months ago
  • CreditFigaro
    • +4
      CreditFigaro  

    • He was definitely hard nosed.

      He was certainly dedicated to his craft.

      He was a great artist of literature and philosophy.

      He will be missed.

      The cause lives on.

    • 6 months ago
  • rerushg
  • trut
  • CollegiateMind
  • hombre76
  • noxidereus
  • WakeUpPeople
  • EthicalVegan
    • +4
      EthicalVegan  
    • Image

    • http://www.npr.org/2011/12/16/143595854/writer-christopher-hitchens-dies

      NPR...

      .

      Writer Christopher Hitchens Dies At 62

      by David Folkenflik
      Writer and commentator Christopher Hitchens died Thursday. He was 62.
      Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

      .

      December 16, 2011

      .

      The influential writer and cultural critic Christopher Hitchens died on Thursday at the age of 62 from complications of cancer of the esophagus. Hitchens confronted his disease in part by writing, bringing the same unsparing insight to his mortality that he had directed at so many other subjects.

      Over the years, Hitchens' caustic attention was directed at a broad range of subjects, including Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, Bob Hope, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa.

      "If you're at Vanity Fair and you're talking about some of the things that Christopher has taken on, at the top of the list is going to be Mother Teresa," said Graydon Carter, editor at Vanity Fair and a longtime friend.

      In 1994, Hitchens co-wrote and narrated a documentary on her called Hell's Angel.

      "This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have since had the poor taste to question," he said in it.

      Hitchens wrote about her for the magazine, too. Carter says it didn't go over so well.

      "That's a tough topic to go after," he said. "It was quite negative, and we had hundreds of subscription cancellations, including some from our own staff."

      Christopher Eric Hitchens was born in 1949 — the son of a British naval commander and a navy nurse — and by his own account was trained to join the British elite. He studied at a prestigious private school and then at Oxford, picking up along the way a love of smoking, drinking, politics, philosophy and argument. In 2010, Hitchens reviewed his life's path on NPR's Talk of the Nation as he talked about his latest memoir.

      "I mean I thought of, at one point, entitling the book Both Sides Now, to describe the various ambivalences and contradictions that I've been faced with, or that I contained: English and American, Anglo-Celtic and Jewish, Marxist and — what shall we say — I've been accused of being this, accused of being a neoconservative and not always thought of it as an insult; internationalist but in a way patriotic," he said.

      In his student days, he was a leftist, opposed to the Vietnam War; he later wrote for the New Statesman before coming to the U.S. in the early 1980s to write for The Nation magazine. His anti-American writings, informed by his socialism, yielded over time to a muscular defense of Western and particularly American values. During another of his frequent NPR appearances, Hitchens said he sought to counteract people he considered apologists for Islamo-fascism.

      "Because I think it's the principal threat and because I think that it tests our readiness to say that we think our civilization is worth fighting for and is better than those who attack it," he said. "And I look — not just with politicians but full time with commentators, intellectuals, friends, for any note of apology, any sort of weakness or indecision on that point which I've come to consider to be morally and ideologically central."
      Hitchens was diagnosed with metastasized esophageal cancer in June 2010. He told NPR that while doctors say he has a chance of remission, his chances of living longer than five years are slim.
      Enlarge Brendan Banaszak/NPR

      Hitchens was diagnosed with metastasized esophageal cancer in June 2010. He told NPR that while doctors say he has a chance of remission, his chances of living longer than five years are slim.

      There was a certain performative element to the certainty he projected in his work for Vanity Fair, Slate and the Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Sometimes it came across as a stunt, as in his claim in Vanity Fair that women could not truly be funny.

      "For most men, if they can't make women laugh, they are out of the evolutionary contest," he said. "With women there's no need to be rendering yourself attractive to men in that way. We already find you attractive, thanks."

      The New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley called Hitchens "polymorphously polemic" for that one, but his stunts sometimes spanned to more serious issues as well, such as, in 2008, subjecting himself to waterboarding. He lasted for all of 16 seconds.

      "It's annoying to me now to read every time it's discussed in the press — or in Congress — that it simulates the feeling of drowning," he said at the time. "It doesn't simulate the feeling of drowning. You are being drowned, slowly."

      Hitchens had all too vivid a glimpse into his own mortality — cutting short a lecture tour by explaining that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. He borrowed a line from a character in a novel written by his friend Martin Amis: "I lit another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you to the contrary, I am always lighting another cigarette."

      His friend Graydon Carter said in fall 2010 that, if anything, Hitchens' ordeal — which he has chronicled vividly — made the always entertaining dining companion a better listener.

      "It slowed it down so he's not as pyrotechnic as it was before," he said. "You get all the great stuff but without all this blinding sort of wizardry with his intelligence in the language."

      For years, Hitchens had toured the country debating religious figures about his utter disbelief in the existence of a God. He didn't waver in the face of his inability to treat his disease. To the very end, whatever the argument joined, Hitchens' voice was an original. He is survived by his wife, the writer Carol Blue, and three children.

      .

    • 6 months ago
  • artemis6
  • Nabe8
  • ArtBaron
    • +8
      ArtBaron [removed]  
    • Image

    • Chris goes off to the great plot in the soil to be one with nature and nutrients for the living creatures that lie beneath.

      His energy and magic is left behind in his thoughts and words for us all.

      He was a great man and will be missed.

    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • +2
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      CONTINUED…

      PART FOUR…

      .

      In my English family, the role of national poet was taken not by Philip Larkin but by John Betjeman, bard of suburbia and the middle class and a much more mordant presence than the rather teddy-bearish figure he sometimes presented to the world. His poem “Five O’Clock Shadow” shows him at his least furry:

      This is the time of day when we in the Men’s Ward
      Think “One more surge of the pain and I give up the fight,”
      When he who struggles for breath can struggle less strongly:
      This is the time of day that is worse than night.

      .

      I have come to know that feeling all right: the sensation and conviction that the pain will never go away and that the wait for the next fix is unjustly long. Then a sudden fit of breathlessness, followed by some pointless coughing and then—if it’s a lousy day—by more expectoration than I can handle. Pints of old saliva, occasional mucus, and what the hell do I need heartburn for at this exact moment? It’s not as if I have eaten anything: a tube delivers all my nourishment. All of this, and the childish resentment that goes with it, constitutes a weakening. So does the amazing weight loss that the tube seems unable to combat. I have now lost almost a third of my body mass since the cancer was diagnosed: it may not kill me, but the atrophy of muscle makes it harder to take even the simple exercises without which I’ll become more enfeebled still.

      I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

      These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes.

      I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

      .

      .

      .

      .

    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • +3
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      CONTINUED…

      PART THREE…

      .

      If being restored to life doesn’t count as something that doesn’t kill you, then what does? And yet there seems no meaningful sense in which it made Sidney Hook “stronger.” Indeed, if anything, it seems to have concentrated his attention on the way in which each debilitation builds on its predecessor and becomes one cumulative misery with only one possible outcome. After all, if it were otherwise, then each attack, each stroke, each vile hiccup, each slime assault, would collectively build one up and strengthen resistance. And this is plainly absurd. So we are left with something quite unusual in the annals of unsentimental approaches to extinction: not the wish to die with dignity but the desire to have died.

      Professor Hook eventually left us in 1989, and I am a generation younger than him. I haven’t sailed as close to the bitter end as he had to do. Nor have I yet had to think of having such an arduous conversation with a physician. But I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

      It’s probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory. It’s also impossible to warn against. If my proton doctors had tried to tell me up front, they might perhaps have spoken of “grave discomfort” or perhaps of a burning sensation. I only know that nothing at all could have readied or steadied me for this thing that seemed to scorn painkillers and to attack me in my core. I now seem to have run out of radiation options in those spots (35 straight days being considered as much as anyone can take), and while this isn’t in any way good news, it spares me from having to wonder if I would willingly endure the same course of treatment again.

      But mercifully, too, I now can’t summon the memory of how I felt during those lacerating days and nights. And I’ve since had some intervals of relative robustness. So as a rational actor, taking the radiation together with the reaction and the recovery, I have to agree that if I had declined the first stage, thus avoiding the second and the third, I would already be dead. And this has no appeal.

      However, there is no escaping the fact that I am otherwise enormously weaker than I was then. How long ago it seems that I presented the proton team with champagne and then hopped almost nimbly into a taxi. During my next hospital stay, in Washington D.C., the institution gifted me with a vicious staph pneumonia (and sent me home twice with it) that almost snuffed me out. The annihilating fatigue that came over me in consequence also contained the deadly threat of surrender to the inescapable: I would often find fatalism and resignation washing drearily over me as I failed to battle my general inanition. Only two things rescued me from betraying myself and letting go: a wife who would not hear of me talking in this boring and useless way, and various friends who also spoke freely. Oh, and the regular painkiller. How happily I measured off my day as I saw the injection being readied. It counted as a real event. With some analgesics, if you are lucky, you can actually “feel” the hit as it goes in: a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it. To have come to this—like the sad goons who raid pharmacies for OxyContin. But it was an alleviation of boredom, and a guilty pleasure (not many of those in Tumortown), and not least a relief from pain.

      .

      CONTINUED…

      .

    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • +2
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      CONTINUED…

      PART TWO…

      .

      In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger. In the course of his mental decline, he became convinced that the most important possible cultural feat would be to prove that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. This is an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration.

      (I take a slight interest in this, because not long ago I was invited onto a Christian radio station in deepest Dixie to debate religion. My interviewer maintained a careful southern courtesy throughout, always allowing me enough time to make my points, and then surprised me by inquiring if I regarded myself as in any sense a Nietzschean. I replied in the negative, saying that I had agreed with some arguments put forward by the great man but didn’t owe any large insight to him and found his contempt for democracy to be somewhat off-putting. H. L. Mencken and others, I tried to add, had also used him to argue some crude social-Darwinist points about the pointlessness of aiding the “unfit.” And his frightful sister, Elisabeth, had exploited his decline to misuse his work as if it had been written in support of the German anti-Semitic nationalist movement. This had perhaps given Nietzsche an undeserved posthumous reputation as a fanatic. The questioner pressed on, asking if I knew that much of Nietzsche’s work had been produced while he was decaying from terminal syphilis. I again responded that I had heard this and knew of no reason to doubt it, though knew of no confirmation either. Just as it became too late, and I heard the strains of music and the words that this would be all we would have time for, my host stole a march and said he wondered how much of my own writing on god had perhaps been influenced by a similar malady! I should have seen this “gotcha” coming, but was left wordless.)

      Eventually, and in miserable circumstances in the Italian city of Turin, Nietzsche was overwhelmed at the sight of a horse being cruelly beaten in the street. Rushing to throw his arms around the animal’s neck, he suffered some terrible seizure and seems for the rest of his pain-racked and haunted life to have been under the care of his mother and sister. The date of the Turin trauma is potentially interesting. It occurred in 1889, and we know that in 1887 Nietzsche had been powerfully influenced by his discovery of the works of Dostoyevsky. There appears to be an almost eerie correspondence between the episode in the street and the awful graphic dream experienced by Raskolnikov on the night before he commits the decisive murders in Crime and Punishment. The nightmare, which is quite impossible to forget once you have read it, involves the terribly prolonged beating to death of a horse. Its owner scourges it across the eyes, smashes its spine with a pole, calls on bystanders to help with the flogging … we are spared nothing. If the gruesome coincidence was enough to bring about Nietzsche’s final unhingement, then he must have been tremendously weakened, or made appallingly vulnerable, by his other, unrelated sufferings. These, then, by no means served to make him stronger. The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox. This may have given him the euphoric impression that he was triumphing, and making use of the Will to Power. Twilight of the Idols was actually published almost simultaneously with the horror in Turin, so the coincidence was pushed as far as it could reasonably go.

      Or take an example from an altogether different and more temperate philosopher, nearer to our own time. The late Professor Sidney Hook was a famous materialist and pragmatist, who wrote sophisticated treatises that synthesized the work of John Dewey and Karl Marx. He too was an unrelenting atheist. Toward the end of his long life he became seriously ill and began to reflect on the paradox that—based as he was in the medical mecca of Stanford, California—he was able to avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford. Reasoning on this after one especially horrible experience from which he had eventually recovered, he decided that he would after all rather have died:

      I lay at the point of death. A congestive heart failure was treated for diagnostic purposes by an angiogram that triggered a stroke. Violent and painful hiccups, uninterrupted for several days and nights, prevented the ingestion of food. My left side and one of my vocal cords became paralyzed. Some form of pleurisy set in, and I felt I was drowning in a sea of slime In one of my lucid intervals during those days of agony, I asked my physician to discontinue all life-supporting services or show me how to do it.

      The physician denied this plea, rather loftily assuring Hook that “someday I would appreciate the unwisdom of my request.” But the stoic philosopher, from the vantage point of continued life, still insisted that he wished he had been permitted to expire. He gave three reasons. Another agonizing stroke could hit him, forcing him to suffer it all over again. His family was being put through a hellish experience. Medical resources were being pointlessly expended. In the course of his essay, he used a potent phrase to describe the position of others who suffer like this, referring to them as lying on “mattress graves.”

      .

      CONTINUED…

      .

    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • +2
      EthicalVegan  
    • Image

    • .

      .

      .

      http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201

      .

      Christopher Hitchens' Last Essay for Vanity Fair...

      [Thanks to Hari Chengalath]
      .

      .

      .

      The Magazine
      January 2012

      .

      PART ONE…

      .

      Trial of the Will

      Reviewing familiar principles and maxims in the face of mortal illness, Christopher Hitchens has found one of them increasingly ridiculous: “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Oh, really? Take the case of the philosopher to whom that line is usually attributed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lost his mind to what was probably syphilis. Or America’s homegrown philosopher Sidney Hook, who survived a stroke and wished he hadn’t. Or, indeed, the author, viciously weakened by the very medicine that is keeping him alive.

      By Christopher Hitchens

      .

      Death has this much to be said for it:
      You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
      Wherever you happen to be
      They bring it to you—free.
      —Kingsley Amis

      Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
      Suicide remarks are torn
      From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
      Plays wasted words, proves to warn
      That he not busy being born is busy dying.
      —Bob Dylan, “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
      .

      When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fall, he did take to his bed and eventually turned his face to the wall. It wasn’t all reclining and waiting for hospital room service after that—“Kill me, you fucking fool!” he once alarmingly exclaimed to his son Philip—but essentially he waited passively for the end. It duly came, without much fuss and with no charge.

      Mr. Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, has had at least one very close encounter with death, more than one update and revision of his relationship with the Almighty and the Four Last Things, and looks set to go on demonstrating that there are many different ways of proving that one is alive. After all, considering the alternatives …

      Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

      In fact, I now sometimes wonder why I ever thought it profound. It is usually attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker. In German it reads and sounds more like poetry, which is why it seems probable to me that Nietzsche borrowed it from Goethe, who was writing a century earlier. But does the rhyme suggest a reason? Perhaps it does, or can, in matters of the emotions. I can remember thinking, of testing moments involving love and hate, that I had, so to speak, come out of them ahead, with some strength accrued from the experience that I couldn’t have acquired any other way. And then once or twice, walking away from a car wreck or a close encounter with mayhem while doing foreign reporting, I experienced a rather fatuous feeling of having been toughened by the encounter. But really, that’s to say no more than “There but for the grace of god go I,” which in turn is to say no more than “The grace of god has happily embraced me and skipped that unfortunate other man.”

      In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker. Nietzsche was destined to find this out in the hardest possible way, which makes it additionally perplexing that he chose to include the maxim in his 1889 anthology Twilight of the Idols. (In German this is rendered as Götzen-Dämmerung, which contains a clear echo of Wagner’s epic. Possibly his great quarrel with the composer, in which he recoiled with horror from Wagner’s repudiation of the classics in favor of German blood myths and legends, was one of the things that did lend Nietzsche moral strength and fortitude. Certainly the book’s subtitle—“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”—has plenty of bravado.)

      .

      CONTINUED…

      .

    • 6 months ago
  • CarlosBobthe3rd
  • EthicalVegan
    • +3
      EthicalVegan  

    • .

      CONTINUED…

      PART THREE…

      .

      Mr. Hitchens’s reporting on Greece came through unusual circumstances. He was summoned to Athens in 1973 because his mother, after leaving his father, had committed suicide there with her new partner. After his father’s death in 1987, he learned that his mother was Jewish, a fact she had concealed from her husband and her children.

      After moving to the United States, where he eventually became a citizen, Mr. Hitchens became a fixture on television, in print and at the lectern. Many of his essays for The Nation and other magazines were collected in “Prepared for the Worst” (1988).

      He also threw himself into the defense of his friend Mr. Rushdie. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved,” he wrote in his memoir. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”

      To help rally public support, Mr. Hitchens arranged for Mr. Rushdie to be received at the White House by President Bill Clinton, one of Mr. Hitchens’s least favorite politicians and the subject of his book “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton” (1999).

      He regarded the response of left-wing intellectuals to Mr. Rushdie’s predicament as feeble, and he soon began to question many of his cherished political assumptions. He had already broken with the International Socialists when, in 1982, he astonished some of his brethren by supporting Britain’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.

      The drift was reflected in books devoted to heroes like George Orwell (“Why Orwell Matters,” 2002), Thomas Paine (“Thomas Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’: A Biography,” 2006) and Thomas Jefferson (“Thomas Jefferson: Author of America,” 2005).

      His polemical urges found other outlets. In 2001 he excoriated Mr. Kissinger, the secretary of state in the Nixon administration, as a war criminal in the book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” He helped write a 2002 documentary film by the same title based on the book.

      Mr. Hitchens became a campaigner against religious belief, most notably in his screed against Mother Teresa, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” (1995), and “God Is Not Great.” He regarded Mother Teresa as a proselytizer for a retrograde version of Roman Catholicism rather than as a saintly charity worker.

      “I don’t quite see Christopher as a ‘man of action,’ ” the writer Ian Buruma told The New Yorker in 2006, “but he’s always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy.”

      One stand distressed many of his friends. In 1999, Sidney Blumenthal, an aide to Mr. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Hitchens’s, testified before a grand jury that he was not the source of damaging comments made to reporters about Monica Lewinsky, whose supposed affair with the president was under investigation by the House of Representatives.

      Contacted by House investigators, Mr. Hitchens supplied information in an affidavit that, in effect, accused Mr. Blumenthal of perjury and put him in danger of being indicted.

      At a lunch in 1998, Mr. Hitchens wrote, Mr. Blumenthal had characterized Ms. Lewinsky as “a stalker” and said the president was the victim of a predatory and unstable woman. Overnight, Mr. Hitchens — now called “Hitch the Snitch” by Blumenthal partisans — became persona non grata in living rooms all over Washington. In a review of “Hitch-22” in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Buruma criticized Mr. Hitchens for making politics personal.

      To Mr. Hitchens, he wrote, “politics is essentially a matter of character.”

      “Politicians do bad things,” Mr. Buruma continued, “because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” Mr. Hitchens’s latest collection of writings, “Arguably: Essays,” published this year, has been a best-seller and ranked among the top 10 books of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review.

      Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God.

      “The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Times in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

      Readers of “Hitch-22” already knew his feelings about the end. “I personally want to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive,” he wrote, “and to be there to look it in the eye and be doing something when it comes for me.”

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    • 6 months ago
  • EthicalVegan
    • +4
      EthicalVegan  

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      CONTINUED…

      PART TWO…

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      He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.’ Do I see myself doing this? No, I do not!”

      Christopher Eric Hitchens was born on April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth, England. His father was a career officer in the Royal Navy and later earned a modest living as a bookkeeper.

      Though it strained the family budget, Christopher was sent to private schools in Tavistock and Cambridge, at the insistence of his mother. “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it,” he overheard his mother saying to his father, clinching a spirited argument.

      He was politically attuned even as a 7-year-old. “I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well,” he told the magazine The Progressive in 1997. “And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.”

      Even before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, Mr. Hitchens had been drawn into left-wing politics, primarily out of opposition to the Vietnam War. After heckling a Maoist speaker at a political meeting, he was invited to join the International Socialists, a Trotskyite party. Thus began a dual career as political agitator and upper-crust sybarite. He arranged a packed schedule of antiwar demonstrations by day and Champagne-flooded parties with Oxford’s elite at night. Spare time was devoted to the study of philosophy, politics and economics.

      After graduating from Oxford in 1970, he spent a year traveling across the United States. He then tried his luck as a journalist in London, where he contributed reviews, columns and editorials to The New Statesman, The Daily Express and The Evening Standard.

      “I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was ‘Christopher Hitchens,’ ” he wrote in “Hitch-22,” “and then sneak down to the East End, where I was variously features editor of Socialist Worker and book review editor of the theoretical monthly International Socialism.”

      He became a staff writer and editor for The New Statesman in the late 1970s and fell in with a literary clique that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Clive James and Ian McEwan. The group liked to play a game in which members came up with the sentence least likely to be uttered by one of their number. Mr. Hitchens’s was “I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”

      After collaborating on a 1976 biography of James Callaghan, the Labour leader, he published his first book, “Cyprus,” in 1984 to commemorate Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus a decade earlier. A longer version was published in 1989 as “Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.”

      His interest in the region led to another book, “Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles” (1987), in which he argued that Britain should return the Elgin marbles to Greece.

      In 1981 he married a Greek Cypriot, Eleni Meleagrou. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by their two children, Alexander and Sophia; his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia; and his brother, Peter.

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      CONTINUED…

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    • 6 months ago
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