Telling It Like It Is

I suppose that today is the day to officially admit that I never really “got into” the whole phenomenon that was Christopher Hitchens, even though I’m generally quite interested in the concept of the public intellectual. I’ve been reflecting a bit about this today and discussing it with friends. Whether or not I agreed with Hitchens wasn’t ever the issue, though that seems to be the thing that most people are talking about today.

For my own part, I can recognize that he was clearly brilliant, witty, and an excellent writer; he also clearly never pulled any punches. But I didn’t usually see a purpose in the pieces that involved him doing things that didn’t much interest me — like getting a makeover — and then explaining his experience. And I often found his best writing — the stuff that should have been most interesting to me — to be overly nasty toward others, sometimes unnecessarily so, and this made reading it less engaging for me. I always wanted more of a separation between the smashing to bits of someone’s argument and the smashing to bits of someone.

That said, I did once engage in a serious way with Hitchens’ work, this time on the death penalty and the role of religion in the public sphere, back in September. You can find that post here. I think it’s a good one and I think having Hitchens as my imagined interlocutor made me put as much thought into it as I could.

There were a few other times when Hitchens’ ideas appeared on my blog. Those are here (on Amnesty International’s strange bedfellows problem), here (on Noam Chomsky’s wrong-headed ideas about Osama bin Laden), and here (on whether Hitchens’ brand of angry atheism might be supplanted by a kinder, gentler version). And, of course, I recently made good use of the video of Hitchens being waterboarded in a post about how the GOP candidates have embraced torture again.

Maybe I’ll go back and read some of Hitchens’ work again to see what I missed or what I might understand differently now. Happily, there’s a great deal of it.