I've always hated Hitchens as the ultimate, pompous self-regarding narcissist. Never once did he cover an issue without inserting himself and his mighty outrage at the center of it, so that every political issue was about him. The fact that his politics swung all over the place and was ungrounded by anything other than his peevishness damns his legacy. He literally achieved nothing except being the blowhard in the middle of the cocktail party. He held forth and had a very high opinion of his opinion. That is the sum of him. He amounts to nothing; he stands for nothing except himself.
And now he's gone. And nobody's going to go back and read him to understand his time the way they still read Orwell writing about his era. People will look back and wonder why anybody paid attention to him at all.
Pretty! And the hat is nice, too.
David, ha! You just basically summed up why I hate Vanity Fair. (The magazine, not the book, of course!)
I don't even know who Christopher Hitchens is.
He literally achieved nothing except being the blowhard in the middle of the cocktail party.
But he did it on a wider stage and made more money at it than the average blowhard. He also faced a miserable death with panache.
I felt mostly the way David does about Christopher Hitchens, but instead of Hec's analysis of his writing, I just thought he was kind of a
twat.
But I did come to feel some respect for him with his writing about his cancer.
Oh, and this is why I came here originally...Good Stuff fodder for sure.
Anonymous donors pay strangers' layaway accounts
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But he did it on a wider stage and made more money at it than the average blowhard. He also faced a miserable death with panache.
If you want to argue that a massive narcissist made a grand exit, I'll buy that.
