The popular British expat journalist Christopher Hitchens
died last Thursday at 62 of pneumonia brought on by esophageal
cancer. One might say “passed away” but Hitchens’s writerly ghost
won’t stand for it. In life, Hitchens was not sentimental about
death, anyone else’s or his own impending anticipated oblivion.
When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Hitchens called the former
president a “phony and a loon” and judged him “as dumb as a stump”
in an obituary for Slate.
The Hitchens of 1994 would have stopped there but his more
mature self needed to go further. “However,” he wrote, “there came
a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington” and the world
changed forever. Hitchens had huddled at the Marriott Hotel “from
dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be
real.”
Many of those friends were very smart Democrats who had
“all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be… the
president instead of Reagan.” Their cars would soon sport
Dukakis-Bentsen bumper stickers. “No doubt,” he wrote, “they wish
that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in
the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on
watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.”
Hitchens continued, “I have been wondering ever since not
just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need
of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by
showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or
the latest Republican at any rate.”
“Ever since” was not quite right. As a columnist for the
left-liberal Nation magazine, Hitchens had raged against
George H.W. Bush and the first Gulf War in 1991. He first embraced
American intervention with the Kosovo war in 1999. After the
attacks of September 11, 2001, he had his name stricken from the
Nation’s masthead over the left’s putative pacifism. His
final column there cheered on war in Iraq.
Many conservatives admired what Hitchens had to say in the
pages of the Nation, Slate, Vanity Fair
and so many other places, yet, like his hero George Orwell, he
stubbornly considered himself a man of the left. He was correct in
one respect. National Review founder William F. Buckley
Jr. held that you didn’t have to believe in God to be a
conservative, but you could not be an outright mocker of religion.
Hitchens hated the Almighty, even as he professed not to believe in
Him, and he hated the overtly religious “God botherers.”
Though he denounced many aspects of the Soviet Union,
Hitchens always praised its creation of a “secular Russia” — a
development made possible by persecuting the Russian Orthodox
Church. When Rev. Jerry Falwell died, Hitchens lamented it was a
“shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to.” He thought
militant Islam worse than conservative Christianity by degree only,
which created some logical problems with his support for the George
W. Bush administration.
His anti-God thoughts found their fullest expression in
the 2007 runaway bestselling book [G]od Is Not Great: How
Religion Poisons Everything. It was not a good book. Its
arguments were flawed and it was riddled with errors. The reviewer
for the Washington Post concluded, “I have never
encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted
with its subject.”
The book brought Hitchens increased fame, fortune, infamy
and a few surprises. After he announced that he had late stage 4
esophageal cancer — a condition encouraged by his nearly lifelong
habit of heavy smoking — Christians organized “Everybody Pray for
Christopher Hitchens Day.” His brief response in the Washington
Post ran under the immortal headline, “Pray for me?
Christopher Hitchens?”
Ironists in the British press noted that Dr. Francis
Collins, former head of the human genome project who was overseeing
Hitchens’s treatment, was a deeply committed evangelical Christian.
Dr. Collins seems to have had some success slowing the disease’s
progress. The fact that Hitchens lasted more than 18 months from
the diagnosis of a rapidly spreading cancer attests to that. But
alas, some miracles remain stubbornly beyond the reach of modern
medicine.
