Where is christopher hitchens speaking

Trained in the persuasive arts, Hitchens may have single-handedly returned the debate to its requisite perch, among intellectuals, at least. Author as caduceus—talker entwined with scribbler.

And by his writing gift. Hitchens neither wrote nor spoke with his latter-day swagger from the get-go. If we back up to his early columns for The New Statesmen in England and The Nation in America, his forums in the s and early s, he was an aggressive polemicist but not yet a mesmerizing speaker. Hitchens may have sounded his scoundrel best to friends and editors who loved his vulpine conversation. Many of us loved I know I did to hear Hitch showering contempt on theocracies or ridiculing the bloviators of mass TV.

My dream debate: Hitch vs. Dennis Rodman. This last is essential to the social author. In the egregious cases of Ali and Hitchens, proximity to mic and assembly arouses the mind to open the mouth so the pearls or the parodies tumble out, prefigured from one chamber or newly uttered from another.

Hitchens pushed his words into the public arena, insisting they be part of the rabble he roused. Let me first suggest why Hitchens epitomizes the social author with a nod to the new authorship of the late 16th century.

On the heels of the printing press, four oral forms saw their works first copied out as manuscripts, later published in very limited editions as books: the sermon, poetry, drama, and the Bible. These forms, studied prior via memorization and recitation in groups, became classics.

In our time, Hitchens reverses the oral-to-print revolution. He followed up his acerbic text with a passionate sales talk, which had an effect a book could not. Unlike most writers of the 20th century, Hitchens pushed his words into the public arena, insisting they be part of the rabble he roused.

They usually had to do with Iraq. We both supported the war, but I supported it in an ambivalent, liberal way, while Christopher supported it in a heroic, revolutionary way. The more I saw of the war, the deeper my despair became. Christopher made it a point of honor never to call retreat. Read: Hitchens remembered.

I know of many friendships that ended in those years, including a few of mine. But something strange happened between Christopher and me. For every time he called me a split-the-difference bien-pensant, and for every time I called him a pseudo—Lord Byron, we seemed to become better friends.

Exchanging barbs was a way of bonding with Christopher. After he got sick, I received an email that told me we were friends:. But I find I must know exactly who said it and what the precise words were.

Looking at my huge Orwell shelf I suddenly felt too exhausted to comb through it which would once have been a pleasure so I am employing you as a short cut. Incidentally, because my library is loosely arranged by alphabet, I noticed last night that where the Orwell runs out there is a novel called The Half Man The ability to be brutal in print and decent in person was a quality I very much admired in Christopher.

It went to the heart of his values as a writer and a human being. It belonged to an old-fashioned code, and for all his radicalism, he was old-fashioned. That sounded right.

Christopher was born a couple of centuries too late. As we get further away from his much-too-early death, I find myself missing Christopher more and more. Not so much his company, but his presence as a writer. Some spirit went out of the world of letters with him. Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?

What are the enemies of writing today? George Packer: Doublethink is stronger than Orwell imagined. I know it sounds perverse to count belonging as an enemy of writing. To cross the aisle politically was one thing. There was precedence for that. Churchill had very famously done it.

But Christopher well knew that whatever criticisms and loss of friendships he had suffered then would pale in comparison to what would follow his religious conversion. Hatred of God was the central tenet of their faith, and there could be no redemption for those renouncing it.

And it is here that his courage failed him. In the end, however contrary our natures might be, there are always a few people whose approbation we desire and to whose standards we conform. From Hitchens himself, however, there is only silence in the place where the supporting quotation or anecdote should have been. What Taunton offers in lieu of evidence are two lines of argument whose merits are … well, you decide for yourself what they are.

After all, a real atheist must agree with Peter Singer that a human baby is of no greater moral significance than a piglet. Since Hitchens did not agree with Singer, Hitchens must be moving toward agreement with Taunton. As for the first argument, it mistakes curiosity for assent. The off-stage Christopher Hitchens often paid respectful attention to points of view he thought partly or wholly mistaken.

The anecdote runs as follows: Christopher Hitchens has just finished yet another round of debate with a religious opponent. Relaxing in a restaurant after the debate, that opponent had a complaint. Hitchens had unfairly used atrocity stories to win his argument. I could add many more stories of my own to the ones you have told.

But they are not the actions of genuine Christians. Now comes the punchline. I interviewed Taunton early on Memorial Day morning and put the question directly to him. And so I walk into things—that I saw Christopher saying, that I saw him doing, and from that I draw certain inferences. People do communicate important messages non-verbally.

That possibility requires us to consider other questions: How sensitive an observer is Larry Taunton? And how reliable a narrator?

It is from Taunton we learn about the supposedly close relationship between himself and Hitchens—and we learn it via the amazing efflorescence of compliments to himself that Taunton gathers in his pages. We walked to a local restaurant where Hitchens knows the barman and the barman knows what Hitchens drinks, and I asked whether his cancer diagnosis had altered his political outlook at all.

He looked mystified at the question, but I explained that he used to say that he woke up angry, full of disgust at the world. Was it still possible to feel so strongly about external enemies when the internal one had taken such malevolent root in his body? The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality.

Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliche. It's a big subject, but it's essentially small talk, and Hitchens's style requires the elevated registers of the epic and the ironic. Anything less is like asking a high-wire artist to perform his act at ground level.

Yet his engagement remains unusually engaging, in large part because with him it's never just about politics. His frame of cultural interests is far too large to be squeezed into the straitjacket of dogma and doctrine. He chided me a couple of times for not asking him about his first love, literature. It's no coincidence that the political thinkers he most often references are also gifted writers: Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Thomas Paine, even Thomas Jefferson.

The first two, like Hitchens, committed anti-totalitarians, and the second pair voices from the only revolution — the American — whose praises he continues to sing. Hitchens's friend Ian Buruma wrote a damning review of Hitch , in which he noted that Hitchens displays "a tendency toward adulation and loathing [that] comes naturally with the weakness for great causes.

We repair back to the apartment for a nightcap or two, and I fear it is I, the ostensibly well one, who crashes first. The spare room had only recently been vacated by Patrick Cockburn, the distinguished foreign correspondent, old friend of Hitchens, and savage critic of the Iraqi occupation.

Clearly the breach with the "other side" is not quite so decisive up close and personal as it might sometimes appear from afar. The following morning Hitchens rises late, as is his routine nowadays, and after working for an hour or two, reconvenes our discussion over lunch.

We sit in the dining room with the window open on a distinctly chilly autumn afternoon. He's wearing just a thin shirt, while I shiver in a thick pullover. Not for the first time, I feel a twinge of pity for that tumour. Does it realise what it's up against? A few days before we met, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's former deputy, was sentenced to death in Iraq for suppressing Shia religious parties during the Ba'ath rule. This surely wasn't the bright future for Iraq that the trenchant secularist and opponent of capital punishment had in mind back in He agrees that it's depressing news.

Nor is he confident that things won't deteriorate after the coalition has departed. They can keep it if they want but the parties of God may veto that. Unless we're directly requested by a functioning government backed by a functioning parliamentary vote to stay on, we have to leave it to them now.

So if the parties of God gain control, Iran's influence increases and human rights further decline, will it still all have been worth the loss of life and limb?

There are all kinds of reasons that don't get discussed and are harder to quantify. He points out something he says opponents of the war always fail to mention: the success of an autonomous Kurdistan. But he also says that the discovery of oil around Baghdad has transformed the material basis for political control.

If the oil laws were enforced properly by province, it could be as rich as Kuwait. The Saudis and the Iranians don't want a revived Iraqi oil industry because it will undercut them. You could have a modern Middle Eastern country or a parties-of-God failed state. OK, I'm glad we're not having an inquest now, as we would be, into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces.

The problem with this picture, of course, is that many people believe that it exactly describes what has taken place since the invasion. Hitchens maintains that the situation is better than it would otherwise have been, and to the extent that it's worse, the responsibility lies with al-Qaida.

I won't have that. For one thing, it absolves those who have done it of their guilt. I try to argue that it overstates the case to suggest, as some of his more deranged critics claim, that he is somehow personally responsible for the tens of thousands of lost lives in Iraq. After all, had he not existed, would history have taken a different path? To his credit, he refuses to accept that get-out. As he does in his memoir, he restates his role, along with people such as Peter Galbraith and Kenan Makiya he insists Ahmed Chalabi's part has been "ridiculously exaggerated" in helping to persuade Washington of the need for regime change.

But he also says that, even if he had negligible or no effect, "you should act as if your opinion might have made the difference. You don't have to be a megalomaniac to do that. And to say that you feel to that extent responsible, without making a parade of your feelings.

What's beyond doubt is that Hitchens's sense of optimism and purpose in in Washington was never going to be matched by the post-invasion plan in Iraq in He has no quarrel with the fact that the occupation was badly handled. But I mean tragic. He leaves the room briefly to deal with a domestic issue and I take the opportunity to close the window. When he returns, he opens it with a knowing smile. We continue talking for another couple of hours on everything from the Russian revolution to the Bay of Pigs, from the Spanish civil war to Tony Blair.

In the end, it's only my need to catch a plane that brings the discussion to a close. With Hitchens, though, the argument will continue, first with himself and then, if need be, with the world. His intemperate style is not to everyone's tastes, but as he has often remarked, you can't produce light without heat. To those of us who admire his clarity of thought, if not always his conclusions, it is indeed a lovely light.

And I'm pleased to say that on a cold November day in Tumortown, it showed little sign of fading.