Christopher Hitchens again

I've read two more things about Christopher Hitchens on the occasion of his death.

Katha Pollitt wrote:

...I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth. For a man who started out as an International Socialist and ended up banging the drum for the war in Iraq and accusing Michelle Obama of fealty to African dictators on the basis of a stray remark in her undergraduate thesis, he seems to have spent little time wondering how he got from one place to another, much less if he’d lost anything on the way....

and...

His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking....

That was the bad side of Christopher—the moral bully and black-and-white thinker posing as daring truth-teller....Some eulogists have praised him for moral consistency, but I don’t see that: he wrote tens of thousands of words attacking Clinton for executing Ricky Ray Rector, but seemed untroubled about George W Bush’s execution of 152 people—at the time a historical record—as governor of Texas. He was so fuelled by his own certainty he claimed that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq only proved they were there.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/katha-pollitt

Norman Finkelstein wrote a piece on counterpunch.com subtitled "Atheist Found Dead in Fox Hole" which you can read here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/22/hitchens-passing/

Finkelstein mentions that he's an atheist himself. You should read the whole thing.

But here's the end:

I get no satisfaction from Hitchens’s passing.

Although he was the last to know it, every death is a tragedy, if only for the bereft child—or, as in the case of Cindy Sheehan, bereft parent—left behind.

But, still, life is full of surprises.

No one should be too smug in his certitudes.

And if you’ve made a career of pissing on other people’s mostly innocuous beliefs, should it surprise that outside the tiny tent called Vanity Fair, your memory stinks of urine?

Finkelstein mentions Cindy Sheehan, the gold star mother who Hitchens had attacked for opposing the war.

That seems to be a theme in a lot of the obituaries---bringing up all the people Hitchens attacked after their deaths.

I did read one guy. I don't remember who it was. He finally came out against this "new atheism" thing that Hitchens was a part of after he read one of the New Atheists call for torture to be used against Muslims, because their religion was such that you just had to.

You have Muslims in the U.S., Europe and Israel who are a persecuted minority, then you have Muslims in some Muslim countries who themselves persecuting religious minorities. Pretty much like everyone else. The Catholics in Northern Ireland tried to organize a non-violent civil rights movement modeled after that in the U.S., and they were thrown into concentration camps and murdered in the streets. The Catholics in the Republic of Ireland, on the other hand, banned contraceptives and blocked a 12-year-old girl from leaving the country to get an abortion after she had been raped.

By the way, Pollitt went into Hitchens' anti-abortion views. I remember the column Hitchens wrote in The Nation. He called for, let me see, the state to provide women with contraceptives and financial support for women and their babies, and in exchange, he would ban abortion. A letter-writer pointed out that countries like Sweden had all this, and women there still sought abortions. I don't think the Irish girl whose parents were blocked from taking her England was thinking about the financial strain.