Nobody Remembers Christopher Hitchens

 Nobody Remembers—

The first time I read Christopher Hitchens it was in Vanity Fair. I thought he was so magnificent, so blunt, so witty, so…slap you in the face brilliant, that I got a subscription to the magazine.   Not since I’d read Dostoyevsky’s ” Crime and Punishment” had I found an author that I could really get excited about.  And it’s no wonder—-I found out tonight that Christopher himself decided to become a writer after reading that very same book.

Christopher was raised in the belly of the liberal Marxist/communist beast of Oxford during the sixties and he was THE radical protester. Vietnam, the Catholic church— he had an opinion on just about everything. He even protested the Queen. Being the son of a Scot-maybe it came a bit too easy. In fact, he wanted to do away with the monarchy.

During and after college, Christopher hung out with communists. He loved Trotsky,  Stalin, and Che. While the rest of us moved along, which is easy to do when you get out of college and go into the REAL world, Chris stayed in that “liberal” cushion of fantasy, because it’s the card you have to play with if you want to play with the Gods of the “elite “university, and Chris wanted in that world and his mother saw to it that he got in.

It’s no wonder that Christopher grew up a liberal atheist—most colleges promote the dark Russian tormented soul, as if it some kind of sacrosanct  mantle of superiority. College kids found it so cool back in the sixties to sit around and discuss Nietzsche: question God, Jesus ,and the Catholic Church, Hey, I did it. When you’re parents are working and you have nothing to do all day but go to class, you are eager to explore worlds your parents never talked about. I gave it a whirl..but got out of it pretty fast.

Not Christopher Hitchens. He took to liberalism like a beam of light to a worm hole.

He had no patience for Henry Kissinger, Michael Moore, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Sarah Palin (?) and Prince Charles.

“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.”

Nobody Thinks the same.

He was so inspired by Jefferson that he wrote a book about him and became an American citizen on the steps of the Jefferson memorial.

Still…it bugged conservatives that Chris did not think God was real, and he stuck with that until he died. Add your mother committing suicide onto your liberal Oxford education, mixed that with a depression covered over by daily consumptions of alcohol, I’d say that convincing yourself otherwise would seem a waste of time, not to mention too great a task.

Better to drink away any doubts you might have…and that’s what he did. By all accounts Christopher was an alcoholic, and it caught up to him. He was only 62 when he died today. If he had stopped drinking and smoking he might have lived longer. To explain his drinking he said :

“‘because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. Many great writers did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind.”

He’s right about that.

He must have been drunk when he wrote one of my favorite pieces of his called: “Why Women Aren’t Funny.”   

But– this Nobody Wonders if he got his wish. His wish was to know that GOD doesn’t exist, because if he didn’t then– Chris was right. And Chris would have liked that.

Being right. He made a habit out of it, when he finally got the hang of it.

Nobody Thinks that if God has an ego, it’s a lot bigger than Chris’s who by all accounts, was a rare breed of talent. I don’t think he will ever be bored again, if his soul survived.  I also don’t think God is going to stand in line to kiss Chris’s ass, when he tells him he was wrong about God not existing.    

I just thank God for putting him here in the first place…I have the rest of my life to catch up to his genius.

Nobody Flashes: One of the subjects Chris was passionately knowledgeable about was the Muslim world.  Listen to him talk in the video from 2009, about the dangers of Iran, and then think again Ron Paul’s foreign policy: In fact, Nobody Wonders why NONE of our leaders speck with such knowledge.

Life is too short, and the untimely death of Christopher Hitchens is just another reminder. I could have gone another decade reading his rants.

He was …one of a kind.  

December 17, 2011 Posted by Joyanna Adams | Memorial, Uncategorized | Christopher Hitchens, Clintons, life, Memorial, middle east, Muslims, Wars | 5 Comments