It was pretty much literally impossible to agree with everything Christopher Hitchens said.
For example, I was 100% in agreement with his position that Henry Kissinger should be prosecuted, tried, and imprisoned for his myriad crimes against humanity. As he said in The Atlantic:
Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in politics, from Greece to Chile to Argentina to Indonesia, are now in jail or awaiting trial. His own lonely impunity is rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs-strong enough to detain only the weak and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand.
On the other hand, if you agreed with him on Kissinger and Vietnam it was almost certain that you would disagree with him on Bush's invasion of Iraq, which he not only supported, but called “a war to be proud of”.
You could agree with his positions on atheism and religions but wish he would be a little more polite and tolerant of the sensitivities of religious people, or at least that he would refrain from criticizing that beloved icon, Mother Theresa:
Or you could take pleasure in his obvious enjoyment of language and learning, but just wish that he would be a little less sure of himself.
Hitchens was one of the greatest public intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, A man whose English breeding and education were evident with every word he spoke, but who became an American and embraced that identity.
Hitch died yesterday of esophageal cancer at the age of sixty-two. It is a great loss for all of us.
“Cynical contrarian” says the BBC of a wonderful, unique voice and mind that was certainly not always right, but could never be ignored. “God Is Not Great” was a tour-de-force of all things wrong with religion and those who practice it, while his memoir, “Hitch-22”, was a celebration of a life of words and thought lived richly and to the fullest.
If only all our public debates took place at the level and with the richness of knowledge and language of a Hitchens diatribe; instead we must endure Rick Perry failing to remember how many judges sit on the Supreme Court and Tom Friedman’s vapid discourse on flat earths and olive trees.
“Yes, I could have used him to help write my defense summation, but that would have been a ‘collective’ effort.
Guess I’ll abide by Thumper’s Law.