Christopher Hitchens Is Dead.

Christopher Hitchens, writing for Vanity Fair, subjected himself to a yearlong makeover testing the limits of the “micro-economy based on the pursuit of betterment” starting in 2007. A teeth clean, facial mask, hair and nails, exercise and even a Brazilian wax were all part of the regimen. He concluded, in the final piece published a year after the first, that “some of this you could try at home and some of it you certainly should.”

The month before the final piece of his self-improvement exercise came, Hitchens attempted another sort of exercise: he subjected himself to waterboarding. This was 2008, and there was an intense debate over the legitimacy of waterboarding as an interrogation method. Some saw it as torture, others as a sort of benign tactic in the search for intel to make our five year war in Iraq justifiable. The title of the waterboarding piece is “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” leaving no wiggle-room in his stance.

As you can imagine, Hitchens wasn’t able to endure much water boarding, understandably (after all, it is torture), but I’m surprised that he went the entire year trying to “better” himself physically. He already had the reputation of being the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking iconoclast. From videos of debates and lectures, you could tell he wasn’t a slight man.

He had already given up smoking by means of hypnosis, which is no easy task, and had for a while given up drink, leaving a void in his life. But here was a man who woke up one day and subjected himself to torture, and also a man that couldn’t reason his way to exercise:

I have often thought that when I do die it will be of sheer boredom, and the awful thing about growing older is that you begin to notice how every day consists of more and more subtracted from less and less. All right then, that rules out joining an exercise club.

Now that he was left with nothing to think with, his ennui was resultant more from “virtue than vice.”

This is Bullshit

It was around this time that I first discovered Hitchens. I had a copy of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, and my roommate had a copy of “god is not Great.” We traded after we finished reading our respective copies, and though I had enjoyed Dawkins ideas, something about Hitchens stuck.It could have been his acidic wit or his verbal punning or that when he took the moral high-ground he did so with much more force than I was used to seeing. He had an idea of what was right, and stood up for those ideas as if the intellectual communities depended on it. He had what some might call “Integrity.”

And so I was hooked on Hitch, as he is known affectionately. I read as much as I could, bought most of his books (I shockingly still don’t own my own copy of “god is Not Great”) and some books just because he wrote the foreword. I watched his debates and lectures on youtube, and saw the humiliated faces of smart men who could not match his rhetoric. It was exhilarating to watch him perform, and he at times admitted that these speaking tours were part entertainment.

He would be labeled as merely an atheist, or as a neo-con, or whatever label fit the circumstances. Certainly because of Hitchens (and Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett), the label “atheist” became less icky to the general population. And though we won’t be electing an Atheist President anytime soon, great strides had been made for this once persecuted, still hated group.

It was because of Hithcens that I finally had the gaul to acknowledge the streak in myself; someone who had been kicked out of Catechism, who at the tender age of ten had taken to writing “this is bullshit” in the desks, and who at the even more tender age of eight knew that all of those animals were not going to fit on that boat. It was a personal revelation reading “god is Not Great”, and I saw fit to become a disciple.

In 2010, I had narrowly missed Hitchens in my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut at an event promoting his auto-biography “Hitch-22.” I figured that I’d have plenty of chances to go see him speak. After all I had been saying I better go see Dylan live before he dies since 2004, and now I’ve seen him four times, and Hitchens seemed to be performing on his own never-ending tour.

But, it was the very next day that he was rushed to the emergency room and diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the prognosis looking grim. He told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that he might not make it five more years.

He died a year and a half later, on December 15, 2011.

It’s a Pity There’s No Hell For Him To Go To.

For him, death was quite romantic. It was a major selling point of his Atheism. You can find any number of videos, essays, and comment debates over his description of heaven as a “celestial North Korea.” He said it so many times because he was continually asked about his next life, the one after he dies. Or sometimes because other Atheists said they wished that they could believe again, believe in the afterlife. And Hitch always seemed shocked by the non-believer for this wish. He’d launch into his famous tirade, which I quote from the “Hitchens vs. Hitchens” debate:

It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority, who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep; who can subject you — who must indeed subject you — to total surveillance, around the clock, every waking and sleeping minute of your life — I say of your life: before you’re born, and even worse (and where the real fun begins), after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. [emphasis his]

Only someone like Hitchens could make heaven seem unsavory.

It was a topic of interest outside of the lectern as well. For those who have read “Hitch-22" will know that his mother, after running away from life in England, killed herself in Athens as part of a suicide pact with a lover. He ruefully reminisces that he has “sunk [himself], over the course of the past four decades or so, into dismal attempts to imagine or think or ‘feel’ [himself] into [his] mother’s state of mind” before she decided to die.

He then launches into an investigation of self-slaughter that spans the poetry of Plath, the drama of Shakespeare, the sociology of Durkheim, the philosophy of Camus, personal accounts from Styron, a suicide as protest in the Czech Republic, and Saul Bellow’s Augie March, making it relatively clear that he was not lying when he said he was the student of death for forty years.

The name of his third book is “Prepared for the Worst,” and maybe he was when he received the diagnosis. In his collection of essays on his own demise, he writes: “My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

Aside from the deaths of his parents and himself, he often extended a word about others in their passing. If you were getting a Christopher Hitchens obit, you couldn’t be sure it was going to be kind. He called Ronald Reagan “dumb as a stump” in his obituary. He said among many other things that Mother Teresa’s “sense of modesty was the least inflated thing about her.”

Anderson Cooper asked Hitchens’ upon the death of raving lunatic Jerry Falwell, and I paraphrase, if he believes there is a heaven and if Jerry Falwell is there. He paused only for a moment, perhaps an internal sigh for answering the same question over and over, before saying “No, and I think its a pity there’s no hell for him to go to.”

Un-easy Targets

Iconoclast is a word that comes to mind when speaking of Hitchens. Though as easy as it was for him to say of trilobite Falwell what he did (including perhaps the greatest euphemism for “full of shit” I’ve ever heard), it was not so easy for the likes of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana.

He considered their charity work to be full of misplaced ambition. In his mind “both had used poor and sick people as ‘accessories’ in their campaigns.” Their work was a mere photo-op to him. And although his case against Diana has grown weaker with time, his case against Mother Teresa has only grown stronger. Since the publication of “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” in 1995, her stature as benevolent savior has decreased.

What most upset him was the practices carried out in the name of charity. Yet again, he is misunderstood almost as a rule, but never does Hitchens fault charity, just in the manner which she Teresa’s charity is meted out, and by having “your actions judged by your reputation, instead of your reputation by your actions.”

Among specific grievances against her was her love of suffering. As an ascetic, she felt that suffering was necessary to be one with Christ, and so she passed on this belief to the already suffering: the sick and poor who she was supposed to be helping. For a woman who had millions of dollars pouring into bank accounts with her charities name on it, there should be no reason why a cancer patient could not have aspirin to ease the pain, or that a poor person should have more than a canvas blanket to rest on.

And as his iconoclasm for Mother Teresa was, so was it for others. Most of all for the big invisible guy in the sky and the various books he gave his various followers. His indignation was that religions not be treated with the same kind of skepticism as you would a huckster or a snake-oil salesman.

He suggests knowing he has been arrested for fraud is “all we should have heard of Joseph Smith,” the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints. That he lifted from both the Koran and the Old Testament is even more pathetic. And finally, that he claimed all Native American’s were lost tribes of Israel is sheer lunacy.

But even as he takes a joking swipe a Mark Twain (Twain had called the Book of Mormon “chloroform”, to which Hitchens responded was too easy because it contained, “it did contain the Book of Ether.”), he was hitting an easy target; Joseph Smith was a convicted swindler.

His idea of the Torah and its sequel, the New Testament and it’s sequel, the Koran are no better. He was fond of calling the writers of the first two “illiterate goat-herders,” and said of the latter, “when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” so that if its sources fall, “it partly falls also.”

One of my personal favorites is the question of why this particular god chose to show up in the Middle East, perhaps 98,000 years after the first man. “Heaven watches with complete indifference” for the better part of human history, and then all of a sudden, 2000 years ago, “that’s enough of that, time to intervene,” with a human sacrifice. “Don’t let’s show up to the Chinese, who can read,” he continues, “let’s go to the desert and have another revelation.”

Or on the Ten Commandments;

“It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality […] to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time.”

And not to forget that while they forbid murder, Moses ordered the murder of all those that made graven images just after he brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, which forbade murder.

Or on Jesus Christ;

“if you have a virgin for a mother, it doesn’t prove anything about your doctrines. You could be born of a virgin and be a satanic imp, easily.”

And he also reminds us that Jesus wasn’t the only Jesus who believed himself to be god 2000 years ago.

Or how if this is all part of a plan, that it somehow involves telling us not to masturbate.

What Hitchens does best, isn’t so much mercilessly routing Religion, but to merely point out what believers in fact believe. More often than not, he has said nothing damning about the religion, in expanding on the thought above, we probably shouldn’t trust a book that chose a specific set of people 2000 years ago. His most damned victims are in fact the humans that follow these religions blindly: he wasn’t so easy to forgive those that act cruelly in the name of religion because they know not what they do.

One of those moments comes at debate at the Connecticut Forum. Rabbi Harold Kushner has just exclaimed that his son cried more at his first haircut than his first bris. Hitchens, looks him square, and asks how he can think that is a topic fit for humor. He repeats the famous line that it takes religion for a moral person to do disgusting things. The Rabbi tries again to retort that his son and grandchildren made nothing of it. After a tense few minutes of debate, the moderator suggest that they move on. But right before they move to the next question, Hitchens interjects, “genital mutilation is no joke.”

Even more is his outrage at Abraham who feigns to kill his son at the utterance of a word. Hitchens implies that if god were to ask him to kill his son, his retort would be “fuck you.”

The Anti-Theist is an Anti-Despot in Disguise

This is his modus operandi, telling oppressive rulers to go fuck themselves (despite what the Pope would have to say about it). Because ultimately, Hitchens was anti-despotic, and that more people haven’t figured this one out is shameful.

And despite the fact that most people will pin him as an Atheist writer, a theologian of sorts, he wasn’t. He was a journalist first. When he wasn’t critiquing a novel or some new edition of an old novel, he most often wrote about wars, oppressive states and leaders, and sometimes the two worlds would meet and he would get a chance to talk about George Orwell.

It’s obvious, almost glaringly, that he saw the Judeo-Christian god as a despotic leader. Harken back to our “celestial North Korea” to see just what I mean. And this is an extension of his whole career; whether it be the Trotskyist youth or attempting to sue the NSA for overstepping their boundaries (this is before the leaks), he has always been against over-reaching authority.

Undoubtedly inspired by Orwell, but also by the likes of Thomases Paine and Jefferson, amongst others, he would fight tyranny in all realms, but some of his most ardent fights would be in the political realm. The most exemplary being his pro-Iraq War stance. This is what would get him labeled as neoconservative.

For those of you who don’t know, Hitchens was very much for the Iraq War, saying as early as March of 2003 that

“The decision to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein is the right one, and was also the only one. […] Those of us who support this intervention do so precisely because we are scrupulous about human life and reverent when it comes to its protection.”

A year earlier, he was calling for the removal of Hussein by military force:

“To the extent that the United States underwrote Saddam in the past, this redoubles our responsibility to cancel the moral debt by removing him.”

Or in 1991 when he excoriated Washington “contractors and salesmen” that played pet to Hussein:

“The very concept of ‘human rights violations’ is almost absurd in Saddams’s Iraq, which recognizes no right except that of the ruling party.”

And to that end, I believe we can safely say that Hitchens wasn’t so much warmongering as he was advocating the removal of certain political leaders that were committing genocide and betraying human rights. As he had done so for over two decades.

Follow him through his many reports on despots all over the world, and you will find that he almost always calls for their removal. He called out Pakistan for aiding terrorists, Qaddafi, Mugabe, and even Kony before that strange campaign. He called out politicians locally, writing book length critiques of Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton.

He so hated Henry Kissinger that he titled one piece “Henry Kissinger, Have You No Shame?” He once remarked that “it’s very hard to identify the most revolting moment in Henry Kissinger’s life.”

Hitchens left some disgust for Clinton saying that he is “immune to shame, dishonor, embarrassment, and disgrace.” And worse that Clinton was “a war criminal, a rapist, and a pathological liar.”

No one was spared his vitriol so long as they abused power. Other American politicians were criticized merely for being unable to lift this country back to its Jeffersonian heights. And if an abuse of power was going on somewhere in the world, you could count on Hitch to let you know about it.

Hitch is Dead, Long Live Hitch!

That is Christopher Hitchens. The guy who was willing to share unpopular opinions because he held humans to much higher standards than most do. You get the feeling that he somewhat suspected that he might one day see the world as he saw fit; free from despots, free from religion, wholly and totally free. And why was that such a bad goal?

The problem, much like hell, was always other people; “those who need or want to think for themselves will always be a minority,” he believed. You could hear it in his voice at debates and on TV: it was like he was screaming “what don’t you get?” through clenched teeth. Sometimes you could see the smirk on his face, knowing that he might have gotten through to someone. And a credit to him, with his prolific writings, he really did try to explain himself to us, and those of us that wanted to think for ourselves got it.

Hitchens certainly wasn’t perfect either. He once remarked that he were to search his “own life for instances of good or fine behavior” he would not be “overwhelmed by an excess of choice.” And he didn’t seem to think women were funny, for whatever reason, and on that one I’m pretty sure he was wrong.

But wrong he was often not. Whether he was trying to prove that waterboarding was really torture, or that it’s strange that the book forbidding you from murdering is full of murder, or that it’s wrong to abuse the rights of anyone, for any reason, he was most often on the side of humans.

He wrote in “Letters to a Young Contrarian:”

“Just as you discover that stupidity and cruelty are the same everywhere, you find that the essential elements of humanism are the same everywhere, too.”

And I find that a fitting title for Hitch: humanist. He called himself an anti-theist and a Trotskyist and this and that. Some called him a neo-con, or classless, a sinner, and plenty of other mean titles. None of them were ever quite right, they didn’t fit the stature of the man. His goal was always to stand up for us humans, whether we wanted him to or not, like a parent saying “take this medicine it’s for your own good.”

Some of us knew, I include myself and the thousands of people who bought his books. He certainly had a readership, I’ve gone through over six books, and through a print magazine and an online magazine, and endless youtube video; most of which come with the entertaining tag of “Hitch-slap,” for when he got an opponent pretty good.

He said that “people know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains; every time a Bastille falls one is always pleasantly surprised by how many sane and decent people were there all along.” How many personal Bastilles did Hitchens help fall? Certainly some of mine.

I joked earlier about becoming a disciple of Hitchens, for he hath shown me the way. I know this sounds a bit like gospel, but it’s not. I’m not asking that everyone become an Atheist. The default position of Atheist is not knowing the answers to life’s major questions, but don’t pretend that you have answers I know you don’t have. I’m not asking anyone to become an anti-theist. If you need religion to do good in the world, so be it, just do actual good instead of grandstanding for photo-ops while people suffer. And I’m not asking that you be pro-War, or Anti-Clinton, or even Anti-despot. Just remember that there are people out there committing ruthless atrocities in the name of government, sometimes, even, your own.

All I wanted was to set the record straight, that Christopher Hitchens was a humanist above all else. He stood up for humanity in his own unique way. We have to realize that because every generation needs it’s Hitch:

And now that he’s dead, who will be the one to tell us to take our medicine? Maybe get a little exercise?