The Oppositionist

It was 18 years ago on a crosstown bus in Washington, D.C., that I spotted the familiar face of a gentleman sitting by himself. I ventured to tell him that I admired his work. “Very kind of you to say,” he intoned in the British baritone I had learned to expect. When he inquired what I did to make my way in the world I mumbled something barely coherent about being a “writer” and the brackish journalistic backwater where I rowed my small craft.

“Well,” said Christopher Hitchens, “there’s no finer way for a gentleman to earn a living.”

My first exposure to Hitchens was an essay he wrote in the late 1980s called “On Not Knowing the Half of It” about the late-life discovery of his Jewish ancestry, a blend of personal memoir, literary critique and political commentary. I’ve been following him ever since. The European diction of his prose and the breadth of his learning—in literature, in history, in politics—is unmatched by any of the other scribblers and scribes and pundits, including the nominally “intellectual” ones. He is fearless—not just intellectually, but actually, physically fearless. He was once quoted as saying that the reason he became a journalist was so he wouldn’t have to learn about what was going on in the world by reading about it in a newspaper, and there is not a hotspot, danger zone or armpit of the world that he has not personally visited himself when he wanted to write about it.

And he is fearless as a debater and in his choice of targets. His friend the novelist Martin Amis has spoken of “that terrible thing you do with your mouth” when he is about to deliver some pitiable adversary to the airplane propellers, there to be dispersed into fine particles all over the atmosphere. 

There are people who may wish they had never heard of Hitchens (Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, to name two; the latter was so thoroughly skewered, in “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,”  as a mass murderer and war criminal that the book must surely be accounted among the most defamatory pieces of writing in the history of muckraking journalism.)  And Hitchens has collected some other enemies along the way—some who thought he betrayed a friend, Sidney Blumenthal, in his zeal to prosecute Bill Clinton as a misogynist rapist; others who will never forgive him for his support of the war in Iraq; still others who think he defames religion and faith (Hitchens would respond that he certainly hopes he does so).  

There was a time when some of these enemies resorted to Hitchens' famed capacity for drink as an explanation for his behavior or his views they didn’t like.  Speaking personally (as one who has had to put the cork in the bottle long before drinking anywhere near as much as Hitchens has spilled)  this has always seemed to be not just a low blow, but a weak one. I would do a lot to be able to drink half as much as he is reported (by himself and others) to have put away, write one-tenth as well, and be one-one-thousandth as prolific.

But now Hitchens’ penchant for booze and cigarettes has caught up to him, and I think his enemies can only be feeling renewed esteem for him. In the teeth of stage-four esophageal cancer, he continues to be productive and literate, as in this on-the-money piece about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party (and written, by the way, several weeks prior to the shooting in Arizona). http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101

And he continues to be unrepentant in his repudiation of all things theological. Hitchens has a lot of passions¸ but it seems that his atheism—actually, what he calls his anti-theism (he doesn’t just not believe in God, he thinks the notion of God is a positively bad one)—is the one that animates all the others.

As it happens, I am one who clings to the belief that whatever it is within us that causes us to yearn for the divine is a reflection of the divine (as opposed to a remnant of humanity’s childhood, as Hitchens would have it, or an artifact of our neurochemistry). But I think that Hitchens’ voice has been a positively good one for faith by forcing it, so to speak, to clear its voice and say what it means, and what it doesn’t mean, and to confront its contradictions and stupidities.

Or at least by forcing people of faith to reveal themselves. For instance, (and leaving quite aside the lowlifes online and elsewhere who wish him a slow, painful death) I have noticed even in his most respectful and earnestly well-wishing interviews that there is an undertone of unseemly curiosity about the state of his soul. Surely now that are you are face-to-face with death, Mr. Hitchens, you are willing to acknowledge a God?  No? Not even just a little?

I wonder how many people who secretly wonder that, or would like to see the question put to him, are aware that they are in fact, proving Hitchens right: that their faith, or what they call their faith, is really about fear. Fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of dying.

Hitchens mocks the “celestial dictatorship” that he says people of faith are yearning for. To the extent that the religious are seeking just that—an overseer of absolutes, absolving us of uncertainty and ambiguity—Hitchens is right both that it is folly (there  is, demonstrably, no such overseer and no solving the ambiguity and uncertainty of human life) and that it is a dangerous folly now that religion has become politicized and weaponized. A faith in absolutes tends to be absolutely uncompromising.

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving,” James Baldwin wrote fifty years ago (in “The Fire Next Time”).  “If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” I think the question isn’t settled. But Hitchens is right that the indoctrinated believers in celestial dictatorship are everywhere, seeking to force their vision of The Truth on the rest of us. And if a fiery end should come, it will almost certainly not be abortion or gay marriage or the teaching of evolution or any of the other bug-a-boos of those who think "secular humanism" is a dirty phrase, but religion—keen and fervent and righteous—that will ring down the curtain on us all.