Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

The Multitudes of Christopher Hitchens

Recently I finished reading the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens, entitled Hitch-22. Anyone who has read much of his work would understand the title's appropriacy. A Trotskyite socialist neo-con atheist with a loathing of Kissinger, Mother Theresa, and the Clintons (among others), Hitchens has long defied classification. No public intellectual is less predictable than Hitchens, and none evade classification quite as well as he does.

In areas in which I agree with him, most notably in his opposition to religion, his words have the habit of articulating my thoughts better than I ever could. In areas in which I disagree, like his support for the Iraq War, I've found him at least compelling. His erudite writing style is so idiosyncratic that he remains one of the few writers whose byline atop the page seems an almost superfluous detail. Whether his topic is Jane Eyre or Ahmad Chalabi, Hitchens is Hitchens- occasionally maddening, never dull.

Like most memoirs Hitch-22 is presented in chronological order yet has a particularly strong emphasis on personalities. Entire chapters are devoted to the people who have affected his life most deeply, from his parents to fellow public intellectuals Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, and Edward Said. In another memoir their inclusion would seem gratuitous, but this cast of famous names has seemed to have had a great influence on Hitchens; for instance, the seedlings of his eventual rift with the Left were sown from Rushdie's condemnation by the Iranian theo-thugs following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989.

This rift reached its apotheosis, of course, with Hitchens' public and vocal support of the Iraq War. Though one shouldn't put too much stock in the opinion a mere public intellectual, I do believe that Hitchens' full-throated defense of Operation Iraqi Freedom dealt a blow to those in opposition. It was one thing for the middling minds of the Right to vouch for belligerence. But Hitchens? His support, and that of other prominent thinkers,  gave the pro-war Right an air of legitimacy it might have otherwise been denied.

Hitchens remains unrepentant about his position, revealing a stubbornness that may or may not be admirable. For a self-described socialist, he says little about the war's effects on the Iraqi population, many of whom have made terrible sacrifices on account of the war. Little is said about whether the war advanced the strategic interests of the West, a factor that one would think should override most others. He paints many of the war's opponents as misguided Leftists tolerant of tyranny or anti-American Chomskyites, strawmen more popular with by far less acute thinkers than Hitchens. In short, when it came to Iraq, Hitch became the anti-Hitch- ersatz and predictable.

In an extraordinary episode, Hitchens would meet with the real-life consequences of his rhetorical hawkishness. A few years ago he learned of a young man who, encouraged by Hitchens' writings, enlisted to fight in Iraq and paid the ultimate sacrifice. The boy's parents contacted the famous writer to whom their son's fate was inextricably entwined and Hitchens, to his credit, visited the family on multiple occasions and learned much about the young man. In this case, Hitchens' rose above the easy platitudes about the virtue of dying for one's country and wrote movingly of the reality of war's wreckage. Short of recognition of the war's folly, this section showed a moral soundness absent in many other armchair warriors.

Hitchens wrote about the fallen soldier 'so that we might know him better, and even miss him'. Given the terminal nature of his illness, one could say that Hitch-22 may ultimately provide the same function. I have never met Christopher Hitchens, yet reading his articles and books over the years has enriched my life to a great extent. As a fellow atheist, I don't believe in celestial immortality. I am confident, though, that his books and ideas will continue to delight and infuriate us well into the foreseeable future.