Christopher Hitchens died Thursday at the age of 62 after battling esophageal cancer, and though his prolific and enlightening work belongs to the world, he did make an Orange County connection late in life.
Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010) includes a chapter based on Hitchens having contacted an Irvine family whose son had volunteered to fight in Iraq and was killed near Mosul.
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Hitchens reached out to the family after a friend sent him Army Second Lt. Mark J. Daily's obituary, which included the passage: “Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on
the moral case for war deeply influenced him.”
The British-born author underwent, as his longtime readers know, a profound transformation, spending time early in his writing career as a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party's International Socialism magazine and, after 9/11, arguing with Noam Chomsky and
others who blamed U.S. foreign policy for the attacks, supporting the Iraq War and backing George W. Bush's 2004 re-election.
Not that Hitchens–whose titles include The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Is Christianity Good for the World?–A Debate–would be invited to any Religious Right barbecues down in Crawford. (And yet, the self-described “conservative Marxist” died in a Texas hospital. Hmmm . . .)
“Humanity has lost a powerful stalwart for atheism,” says Roy
Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, in a statement sent over this morning.
“Christopher Hitchens changed the discussion about religion and
non-belief by championing public criticism of theology.” Hitchens was, according to the association, “one of a group that became known as The Four Horsemen” (the others being Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris).
Hitchens was the keynote
speaker at the 2008 World Humanist Congress in Washington, D.C. Due to his declining health, he had to pull out of a scheduled appearance at April's American Atheist Convention, instead
sending a letter that stated, “Nothing would have kept me from joining you
except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn
is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of
death.” He ended in typical Hitch fashion: “And don't keep the faith
What we will mostly miss, of course, are those stunning verbal and written assaults on his philosophical and ideological foes, who have included Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Dalai Lama, Michael Moore and Jerry
Falwell–and if you can establish a through-line from those names, good fucking luck. Two days after Ronald Reagan died, Hitchens described him as a “cruel and stupid lizard. Hitch referred to Bill Clinton as “a cynical, self-seeking ambitious thug.”
Amid the collateral damage, many fired back. A former friend
called Hitchens “a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian.” One critic
described him as “a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay.” Bombastic? You betcha. But, God, a lot of us will miss the godless bastard.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.