Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/christopher-hitchens-dead-20111216-1oyc4.html

Quote :

Christopher Hitchens has died of cancer at the age of 62, Vanity Fair reports.

The magazine said he died today after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer last year while on a book tour for his memoir Hitch-22.

Vanity Fair's website reported that he died at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, surrounded by friends, whom he described this year as "my chief consolation in this year of living dyingly". He wrote last year that "cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic".

Hitchens was known for his heroic intake of alcohol and cigarettes. He wrote in 2003 that his daily intake of alcohol was enough to "stun the average mule".

He said he had given up smoking in 2008, but journalist and author Peter FitzSimons, who interviewed him for his appearance at the 2010 Sydney Writers' Festival, said Hitchens had still been smoking as of last year.

Hitchens was a columnist for Vanity Fair and online magazine Slate and the author of The New York Times bestselling book God is Not Great.

His most recent book was Arguably, a collection of his essays.

He was a famous iconoclast and wrote critically of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Winston Churchill.

Hitchens took a third-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Mr Clinton.

He later wrote about his gay experiences at Oxford in Hitch-22, including a dalliance with two unnamed future members of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet.

He left university and joined the Times Higher Education Supplement but was fired within six months, and went on to write for New Statesman magazine, working alongside novelists Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

In a departure from the Left, he famously argued in favour of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, having initially being opposed to the 1990 invasion. He wrote in a 2004 opinion piece for The Nation magazine that he was "slightly" for the re-election of President George W. Bush.

This year, Mick Brown wrote in The Telegraph in London: "Until the publication three years ago of his book God Is Not Great, Hitchens had been, in the words of his late friend the author Susan Sontag, 'a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas' - but largely unknown outside it.

"He reviewed books for Atlantic magazine, wrote regular columns for Vanity Fair and Slate, and regularly appeared on cable news programs in the US. To those who follow not only politics but also the fortunes of those who commentate on politics, he was well-known for his perceived move from left to right over the war in Iraq."

His brother Peter is a conservative columnist for the the Daily Mail in London.

Always thought he was quite entertaining and witty, even when our views differed. R.I.P.

I am deeply saddened.

A tremendous force of a man, a real iconoclast. While I rarely agreed with his damming view of the Abrahamic faiths or religion in entire, his passion, conviction and humour always engaged me. His legacy and intellect towers over his surviving brother, Peter Hitchens.

Whatever awaits him on Judgement Day (assuming there is one), he'll go out fighting.

RIP.

RIP.

Incredibly saddened by the news. Hitchens was an intellectual giant if ever there was one. His absence makes the world a more boring place in general.

Here's a surprisingly excellent obit from the Associated Press


HOUSTON – Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes left and right and wrote the provocative best-seller "God is Not Great," died Thursday night after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.

Hitchens death was announced in a statement from Conde Nast, publisher of Vanity Fair magazine. The statement says he died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer

A most engaged, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink (enough to "to kill or stun the average mule") and cigarettes, he announced in June 2010 that he was being treated for cancer of the esophagus and cancelled a tour for his memoir "Hitch-22."

Hitchens, a frequent television commentator and a contributor to Vanity Fair, Slate and other publications, had become a popular author in 2007 thanks to "God is Not Great," a manifesto for athiests that defied a recent trend of religious works. Cancer humbled, but did not mellow him. Even after his diagnosis, his columns appeared weekly, savaging the royal family or reveling in the death of Usama bin Laden.

"I love the imagery of struggle," he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. "I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, he was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction -- half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush. But his passions remained constant and enemies of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, remained hated.

He was a militant humanist who believed in pluralism and racial justice and freedom of speech, big cities and fine art and the willingness to stand the consequences. He was smacked in the rear by then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and beaten up in Beirut. He once submitted to waterboarding to prove that it was indeed torture.

Hitchens was an old-fashioned sensualist who abstained from clean living as if it were just another kind of church. In 2005, he would recall a trip to Aspen, Colo., and a brief encounter after stepping off a ski lift.

"I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition," he wrote. "What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. `Sir, that would be inappropriate.' In what respect? `At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level.' In that case, I said, make it a double."

An emphatic ally and inspired foe, he stood by friends in trouble ("Satanic Verses" novelist Salman Rushdie) and against enemies in power (Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). His heroes included George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Gore Vidal (pre-Sept. 11). Among those on the Hitchens list of shame: Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong il, Sarah Palin, Gore Vidal (post Sept. 11) and Prince Charles.

"We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant," Hitchens wrote in 2010 after the heir to the British throne gave a speech criticizing Galileo for the scientist's focus on "the material aspect of reality."

"He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense."

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949. His father, Eric, was a "purse-lipped" Navy veteran known as "The Commander"; his mother, Yvonne, a romantic who later kill herself during an extra-marital rendezvous in Greece. Young Christopher would have rather read a book. He was a "a mere weed and weakling and kick-bag" who discovered that "words could function as weapons" and so stockpiled them.

In college, Oxford, he met such longtime friends as authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan and claimed to be nearby when visiting Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton did or did not inhale marijuana. Radicalized by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies, was kicked out of Britain's Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War and became a correspondent for the radical magazine International Socialiam. His reputation broadened in the 1970s through his writings for the New Statesman.

Wavy-haired and brooding and aflame with wit and righteous anger, he was a star of the left on paper and on camera, a popular television guest and a columnist for one of the world's oldest liberal publications, The Nation. In friendlier times, Vidal was quoted as citing Hitchens as a worthy heir to his satirical throne.

But Hitchens never could simply nod his head. He feuded with fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, broke with Vidal and angered freedom of choice supporters by stating that the child's life begins at conception. An essay for Vanity Fair was titled "Why Women Aren't Funny," and Hitchens wasn't kidding.

He had long been unhappy with the left's reluctance to confront enemies or friends. He would note his strong disappointment that Arthur Miller and other leading liberals shied from making public appearances on behalf of Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. He advocated intervention in Bosnia and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

No Democrat angered him more than Clinton, whose presidency led to the bitter end of Hitchens' friendship with White House aide Sidney Blumenthal and other Clinton backers. As Hitchens wrote in his memoir, he found Clinton "hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics."

He wrote the anti-Clinton book, "No One Left to Lie To," at a time when most liberals were supporting the president as he faced impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens also loathed Hillary Rodham Clinton and switched his affiliation from independent to Democrat in 2008 just so he could vote against her in the presidential primary.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, completed his exit. He fought with Vidal, Noam Chomsky and others who either suggested that U.S. foreign policy had helped caused the tragedy or that the Bush administration had advanced knowledge. He supported the Iraq war, quit The Nation, backed Bush for re-election in 2004 and repeatedly chastised those whom he believed worried unduly about the feelings of Muslims.

"It's not enough that faith claims to be the solution to all problems," he wrote in 2009 after a Danish newspaper apologized for publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that led Muslim organizations to threaten legal action. "It is now demanded that such a preposterous claim be made immune from any inquiry, any critique, and any ridicule."

His essays were compiled in such books as "For the Sake of Argument" and "Prepared for the Worst." He also wrote short biographies/appreciations of Paine and Thomas Jefferson, a tribute to Orwell and "Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring)," in which he advised that "Only an open conflict of ideas and principles can produce any clarity." A collection of essays, "Arguably," came out in September 2011 and he was planning a "book-length meditation on malady and mortality." He appeared in a 2010 documentary about the topical singer Phil Ochs.

Survived by his second wife, author Carol Blue, and by his three children (Alexander, Sophia and Antonia), Hitchens had well crafted ideas about posterity, clarified years ago when he saw himself referred to as "the late" Christopher Hitchens in print. For the May 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, before his illness, Hitchens submitted answers for the Proust Questionnaire, a probing and personal survey for which the famous have revealed everything from their favorite color to their greatest fear.

His vision of earthly bliss: "To be vindicated in my own lifetime."

His ideal way to die: "Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around)."



Requiescat in pacem, Christopher.

Read Hitch-22 not too long ago and found it an incredible, refreshing read. Man will be sorely missed.

I must admit that I haven't read any Hitchens, but I'm not sure I get what was so special about him. You'd think he was the only person ever to have questioned organised religion or to have denied the existence of God. And he seemed to have little sympathy for those who find comfort in faith, which I don't think is an admirable trait.

I was reading a selection of his writings in yesterday's Torygraph, and it all seemed to be the kind of stuff spouted in any saloon bar, for instance: of course they should ban the burka, just imagine if you tried to walk into a bank with your face covered.... The Harry Potter series is overrated.... You often get very poor service in restaurants.... Men need to make women laugh but men don't seem to require that women be funny, funnily enough.... I presume that this sort of thing wasn't the best that he had to offer.

Still, props to him for the waterboarding episode.

Yes, Hitch could be very mean-spirited, particularly toward believers. And I consider the complete rejection of religion to be not only unsupportable but asinine. Whether or not God exists is certainly a fair subject for debate, but guys like Hitch claim that belief is so risible as to make it unworthy of debate. Strangely enough, however, they make their reputation debating God's existence.

I have the book God is Not Great and it is far more interesting than the average talk one hears in a bar or anywhere. Do not always agree with the points he's making, but he does them so well.

Way too early to go with so many crazies still talking out of their behinds and actually believing that they are truthfull instead of egotictical buggers.

RIP

And if there is a deity he's up for some serious discussion now.

The world is a much poorer place without him.

May the old windbag rest in peace, and I do mean that in the kindest way.

But we do still have his brother, Peter - a brilliant writer, and very much at odds with his late brother's ramblings.

From Peter's Daily Mail tribute to his brother:

"The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it. "

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html#ixzz1khMR1ZDw

bondfan06 wrote:

Hitchens was an intellectual giant if ever there was one. His absence makes the world a more boring place in general.

There was a young whore from Crewe,
Who filled up her c*** with glue,
She said with a grin,
"Since they pay to get in,
They can pay to get out of it too".

Erica Ambler wrote:

bondfan06 wrote:

Hitchens was an intellectual giant if ever there was one. His absence makes the world a more boring place in general.

There was a young whore from Crewe,
Who filled up her c*** with glue,
She said with a grin,
"Since they pay to get in,
They can pay to get out of it too".

Not bad. But more felicitous this way:

There was a young whore from Crewe,
Who filled up her c*** with glue,
"Since they pay to get in,"
She said with a grin,
"They can pay to get out of it too".

It was one of Mr Hitchens' lesser works I agree.

The tits of a barmaid of Crale
Were tattooed with the price of brown ale
And on her behind for the sake of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.

There once was a girl named Lewinsky,
Who played on the flute like Stravinsky.
'Twas "Hail to the Chief"
On this flute made of beef
That stole the front page from Kaczynski.

Said Clinton to young Ms. Lewinsky,
"We don't want to leave clues like Kaczynski.
Since you made such a mess,
Use the hem of your dress;
And wipe off that stuff from your chinsky."

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known:
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
Given the choice of how to be blown.

Bravo.

From that Washington Post contest, right?

Terrific.

If only someone had explained to 9 year old me that the US President and the fat girl were on TV every night because of cock-sucking, I'd be all like:

Sharky wrote:

Bravo.

From that Washington Post contest, right?

Oui. I only made a few minor improvements.