Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths

Glenn Greenwald finally chimes in:

When someone dies who is a public figure by virtue of their political acts — like Ronald Reagan — discussions of them upon death will be inherently politicized. How they are remembered is not strictly a matter of the sensitivities of their loved ones, but has substantial impact on the culture which discusses their lives. To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. To exploit the sentiments of sympathy produced by death to enshrine a political figure as Great and Noble is to sanction, or at best minimize, their sins. Misapplying private death etiquette to public figures creates false history and glorifies the ignoble.

All of this was triggered for me by the death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions. Part of this is explained by the fact that Hitchens — like other long-time media figures, such as Tim Russert — had personal interactions with huge numbers of media figures who are shaping how he is remembered in death. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for any human being to ignore personal feelings, and it’s even more difficult in the face of the tragic death of a vibrant person at a much younger age than is normal.

But for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.

And

Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief). As Cook put it: “it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong”; indeed: “People make mistakes. What’s horrible about Hitchens’ ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made.”

More here.

Yeah, I have to admit that I wasn't too terribly saddened by Hitchens' death.

I used to kind of like him. I mean, I only ever read two or three of his essays: it was his appearances on television, usually championing socialism in some way, or attacking God-believers, that gave me my impression of what he was about. I remember thinking that he was an excellent debater, really good at thinking on his feet and on the fly, masterful at spontaneous turns of phrase. And that proper British accent had more than a little to do with my good feelings about him. I also thought he was something of an asshole. But, hey, he was our asshole. And conservatives almost never looked good when he was in the room.

All of that changed, of course, after 9/11.

My sense at first was that he went a bit insane, thoroughly traumatized by the devastating attacks, and transitioned overnight from being a liberal darling attack dog to a conservative firebrand. My insanity defense for him evolved over the years, though, and it occurred to me that his intense disdain for religion of all varieties might have been the linchpin for understanding his Saul-to-Paul conversion in the early 2000s. That is, coupling his preexisting anti-religious attitudes with the death and carnage wrought by Al Qaeda might explain it all--he just really, really, really hated religion, and the notion of Muslims with nuclear bombs might have been too much for him to bear. Crazy, to be sure, but with a method to his madness.

Lately, however, I've been wondering if I've been completely wrong about all that. Perhaps Hitchens didn't go around the bend at all. Perhaps he was in full command of his emotions and intellectual faculties the whole time. Hitchens' came from an old school socialist background, and old school socialists, unlike with my own particular variety of leftism, are just fine with violence as a means to accomplish political ends. And this is where it gets interesting: American neoconservatism, which was the driving intellectual force behind the US invasion of Iraq, has its roots in Trotskyite socialism, which is exactly the brand of socialism to which Hitchens subscribed as a youth. That is to say, Hitchens made the same ideological leap from left to right that many American socialists had made decades earlier. He became a neoconservative, himself, and found that he was very much at home on this new warmongering side of the street. For the original neocons back in the fifties and sixties, it was the evil of Stalinism that provided motivation; for Hitchens, it was the evil of Al Qaeda.

But, whatever the cause of the Vanity Fair writer's stunning change of heart, it is certain that he became a bloodthirsty bastard during the last decade of his life, and a champion intellectual apologist for that which cannot be defended. I'd say these years he spent promoting war and hatred pretty much erased anything and everything he ever did that was good. That's because, as Mark Antony said in Julius Caesar, "the evil that men do lives after them."

People continue to die violently in Iraq, and Christopher Hitchens bears some small responsibility for that.

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