December 16, 2011
JUST WHEN HE WAS BECOMING INTERESTING...:
Christopher Hitchens, writer and Vanity Fair contributor, dies at 62 (Dylan Stableford, 12/16/11, Yahoo: The Cutline)His own memoir, "Hitch-22," was published shortly before his diagnosis, forcing him to cancel a book tour.
"I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus," Hitchens wrote then. "This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice."
Yet he continued to write about his fight with cancer--among other weighty topics--in the months that followed.
"Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic," he wrote in Vanity Fair last year.
Amusing as his shtick could be, Mr. Hitchens was all about his own self, though he did show signs, before his illness, of getting beyond that. It was, perhaps, too much to hope that he'd ever have the decency to apologize for his unstinting opposition to anti-communism and his defense of the Soviet Union and its satellite movements. But in later life he'd written sufficiently flattering pieces about major conservative figures--Edmund Burke, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and the like--that it seemed almost a back door way of making amends for the error of his ways.*
Sadly, his illness prevented him from completing the progression he'd embarked on. Just as he could not face up to the reality of the USSR he'd defended, it would have been too much to ask that he face the prospect of his own death honestly after 60 years spent raging at God. Hopefully in death he can find the peace that his self-destructive behavior suggests eluded him in life.
*His enthusiasm for the War on Terror after 9-11, which made fans of many on the neocon Right, ought to be seen as more a matter of distaste at what rampant Islamicism would mean for him personally than as a sudden conversion to the belief that the Anglo-American world has a moral obligation to help liberate oppressed peoples.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 16, 2011 4:05 PM
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