Christopher Hitchens - R.I.P.

Famously polemic essayist Christopher Hitchens died earlier this week from complications from cancer. He was 62-years-old.

To be honest, I'm not as familiar with his work as I wish I was (in a move that to me always feels like carving up the dead and serving the flesh on toast points -- that rush to consume so soon in death everything a writer has published --  I added a couple of his books to my library queue).  His Vanity Fair article "Why Women Aren't Funny " was one of the first things I read as I was trying to wedge myself into the blogging community, and while I abhor gender essentialism, I wasn't particularly insulted. (Being thought of as funny is actually fairly low on my list of priorities.) Even when I disagreed with him, I couldn't deny that he was great writer.

There's been a lot written recently about liking "problematic" things, especially for those of us who pride ourselves on being aware of every single injustice. Hitchen's writing was the epitome of that: problematic. Deeply flawed and often coming from a place of utmost privilege. It's okay to acknowledge that in death as much as in life. His politics weren't perfect, and he wasn't always consistent NPR's Scott Simon says:

He called himself a Trotskyite-Marxist in the 1970s, though he seemed much funnier to me than whatever I ever imagined a Trotskyite-Marxist to be. A number of years ago, after his falling out with The Nation magazine, people stopped referring to him as liberal. A little after that, as he became outspoken about his atheism, they stopped referring to him as a conservative. By the time he died, no label applied to Christopher Hitchens. I think he worked hard to achieve that.

We often seem to treat consistency of thought as a sign of character. Politicians and pundits are applauded for repeating themselves. Observers and activists say, "Aha!" if they discover a distance between what some public figure believed five years or five months ago, and what they say today. Compromise is difficult when changing your beliefs is taken to be a moral cave-in instead of the sign of a curious, lively mind.

I spent the better part of the week reading a lot of the tributes to Hitchens, and it's as unfair (not to mention ludicrous considering he was probably the media's most visible atheist) to canonize him as it is to demonize him. His support of the war, his could-be-interpreted-as-hypocritical views of abortion, his support of women's rights when his own writing was at times misogynistic, adds to the difficulty of giving him a proper -- and appropriate -- tribute. Goodbye Hitch.