Thank God for Hitchens

Hitchens has always held an antipathy for totalitarianism, especially in religious form. Now fighting cancer, he has thankfully not lost his voice.

Like the vast majority of people who’ve ever lived, I’ve never had the pleasure – or displeasure, if you’ve earned his ire – of meeting Christopher Hitchens. Despite our mutual friend (writer from Canada named David – runs a blog site – you might have heard of him) and residential proximity (a mere seventeen blocks or so), the Anglo-American literary and political giant has never yet had reason to run into this particular anonymous undergraduate. However, like millions of others, I have had the pleasure of getting to know Mr. Hitchens through his astounding written and spoken body of work, including eleven books and innumerable pamphlets, articles, and essays over the course of a four-decade career. He estimated recently that he writes at least a thousand words a day of printable copy.

But now, Hitchens is in the news not for the prodigious growth of his literary corpus but rather for that of the squamous cells in his esophagus. By this point anyone who takes even the slightest interest in Hitchens or his work is well aware of his ongoing battle (the word suggests itself naturally, though the man himself finds it misleading and inaccurate) with a very deadly, very advanced cancer. Fortunately, neither the “alien” (as he calls his cancer) nor the poisons stemming its further advance has dulled Hitchens’ pen. And though treatment has robbed him of his hair and his sense of virility, one can be thankful he still retains his voice, oft described as “cut-glass” but more accustomed to cutting down opponents in debate.

Hitchens has written several columns since his diagnosis, including one long-form essay about his cancer in Vanity Fair. He has also conducted three interviews, all in his Dupont Circle home, with Anderson Cooper of CNN, The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg, and Charlie Rose (who left his customary oak-tabled studio to accommodate Hitchens). In each case, Hitchens has been asked the same questions – about his father “the Commander”, his mother’s suicide pact in Athens and her failed attempt to reach him, the possibility of a deathbed conversion, the suitability of praying for him, etc., etc. It’s not that such questions are inappropriately personal – the biographical ones are in his recent memoir, after all – it’s that they’re tedious, Cooper’s especially. How many times does Hitchens have to make clear that while his mind is whole he will not be asking for salvation from an entity he doesn’t think to exist? How often need he be asked about how his mother was a ray of color in a gloomy postwar childhood?

Hitchens is a man of ideas, the greatest of which is an unshakable antipathy for totalitarianism in all its forms, especially those stemming from the followers of the heavenly Dear Leader of Abrahamic faith. In some ways, it’s a shame that Hitchens was not born a generation or two earlier in order to have the opportunity, like his hero George Orwell, to fight the twentieth century’s greatest monsters at the peak of their power. Of course, I’m still plenty glad that the world has him now. So when all anyone can bother to ask the star correspondent to the land of malady about is whether the old canard about atheists and foxholes is true, I start to feel as the though the world is wasting whatever supply may be left of the thoughts of an irreplaceable mind.

I’m very happy to have Hitch-22. Along with Letters to a Young Contrarian, it’s the most illuminative glimpse into Hitchens’ life and thoughts. “Topic of Cancer” was, in a word, brilliant. But if I were Christopher Hitchens, I would find it very tiresome to be asked whether I wish I had abstained from alcohol and tobacco instead of my feelings on the Cordoba House or North Korea’s latest provocations. So, Hitch, if you’ll permit one exhortation from an admirer and friend-once-removed – keep up your strength, continue your invaluable “Fighting Words” column for Slate, and don’t let TV interviewers treat you like a relic, a curiosity, or a dead man walking. We need your perspective now as we ever have and will enjoy it, with luck, for years still to come.