Christopher Hitchens Dead at Only 62

     While we all have to go it caught me unaware to hear today that he died so unpardonably young.

     "Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist who waged verbal and occasional physical battle on behalf of causes left and right and wrote the provocative best-seller “God is Not Great,” died Thursday night after a long battle with cancer. He was 62."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70540.html#ixzz1gj9lzAI3

    "Hitchens' death was announced in a statement from Vanity Fair magazine. The statement says he died Thursday night at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of his esophageal cancer."

    He was a guy of a fierce, biting rhetorical style. What I agreed with him most about can be summed up by the title of a recent book of his "God is Not Great." He and Al Sharpton had a debate over it that was interesting.

   I agreed with him on philosophical matters or at least in a remorseless materialism-at a minimum he was consistently anti-theological which was appreciated with all the Bible thumping of the Religious Right.

   Politically he and I were never quite on the same page. Until 9/11 he was well known as a leftist on the lines of Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal. Alexander Cockburn. He was also inspired by Marxism Following 9/11 it seemed like he suffered a lobotomy, he was like Paul at Damascus. In his early days he was to my left, in later life he was to my right.

   To be sure he was beginning to go off the rails in teh 90s. While in recent times we have seen Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS) in all its splendor, during the 90s there was more than a little Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS). This group was mostly made up of Right wing nuts however he was a conspicuous lefty who joined the ranks.

   Who really knows to this day why he was so irrational about Clinton? He was consumed with his sex life claiming:

   "he found Clinton “hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics.”
   Who knows. Credit him with being a study in contrasts and capable of making a lot of sense on many things and making none on others. Perhaps on some level he too had the need to play the moral scold.

   Then after 9/11 he voted for Bush in 2004 and registered as Democrat in 2008 again just so he could vote against Hillary in the primaries.

   Still it's books like The Missionary Position and God is Not Great where he really shows what he can do. His recent going after Prince Charles is vintage Hitchens:

   “We have known for a long time that Prince Charles’ empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant,” Hitchens wrote in 2010 after the heir to the British throne gave a speech criticizing Galileo for the scientist’s focus on “the material aspect of reality.”

    “He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense