I have mixed feelings about Christopher Hitchens. He’s always seemed to me to be sort of a drunk, English, belligerent version of Tom Wolfe. The writing is wonderful though the ideas are wrong and stupid, the rhetoric is convincing though the arguments lack evidence and logic. If that sounds harsh, read Hitch’s assertion that Ahmed Chalabi broke the Iranian codes or Wolfe’s explanation of why he voted for George W. Bush, each of which is as silly as anything I have ever read on RedState or the NRO. They’re both entertaining but it’s a real shame that either’s opinions are ever taken seriously.
I’ve got to count this in Hitch’s favor though:
Maybe now that Hitchens is 60-something and says he drinks “relatively carefully,” he’ll run this one through his (his Iraq war views) little gray cells one more time. By the way, “relatively carefully” to him is terribly spartan: just a Scotch and Perrier at lunchtime, followed by half a bottle of wine, and then the same again every evening.
A bottle of wine and two scotches a day, and that’s when he’s being careful.
Quiddity
Does he drive a car? He’d be almost always dangerously close to the DUI threshold, if not over it.
Chat Noir
Never cared for Hitchens’s writing style. I’ve had a Vanity Fair subscription for 13+ years and I seldom read him. The last article of his that I did read (about being waterboarded) was excellent, though.
Conversely, I never miss James Wolcott.
scav
whew, I know nothing about Crook, but that veers near Krook level behavior.
ETA: forgive the random neuronal firing, I’ve been reading Dickens.
DougJ
@Quiddity:
He’s a pretty heavy guy, so I think he’s okay as long as he waits an hour to drive after lunch or dinner.
Zam
Fucking lightweights
licensed to kill time
If Hitchens considers that “relatively careful” daily consumption, imagine what his “what the hell” consumption must have been…
I still like reading him. He writes well, which is somewhat rare nowadays and always a pleasure even if he’s full of shit. Watching him get waterboarded was painful.
QuaintIrene
In the intro of Paul Rudnick’s published script for ‘I Hate Hamlet.’ he details a lunch he had with Nicol Williamson, the actor being considered for the title role. Williamson, a reputed drinker, assured him he was nearly abstemious. As he drank most of a bottle of wine, followed by a couple of brandys. Hitchens, you are a light weight.
williamc
This is funny, one of my best friends and I were just talking about Hitch the other day after he recommended to me an article by him in an old issue of the Atlantic that I had laying around. I think my exact words were, “I usually skip everything I read by him because even his written words sound as if they were dashed off in the middle of a scotch-fueled word orgy.”
As a professional drinker, he bothers me because he’s just so drunk and belligerent sometimes that he gives off a vibe of I’m shitfaced and barely understand the words that are coming out of my mouth i.e. his Iraq-war supporting far-left liberalism…
scav
no, upon further consideration, scratch Krook. It is far far more pleasant to envision Hitchens as Sairy Gamp with her teapot of gin and her invisible friend Mrs. ‘arris.
Amir_Khalid
If Christopher Hitchens’ ideas are wrong and stupid (you left out offensive, by the way), does it matter if his prose is wonderful? And is it all that wonderful in the first place? I myself find his wrongheadedness and stupidity unreadable.
Ailuridae
I served Hitch when I bartended in college. Nice enough guy and not a particularly bad drunk (although we only served beer and wine). He got to the bar at 4 when it opened and was there at one when it closed. I would guess he had 25 glasses of wine. We poured a heavy glass so I am guessing about 6 bottles.
All that being said he is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest recalcitrant leftist imaginable. The gist of No One Left to Lied To is that Bill Clinton was pulling some elaborate Wag the Dog move in his attempts to kill bin Laden. He was just trying to distract people about the important business of the Lewinsky scandal. To this day (and I have been reading and waiting) he has never apologized for being so incredibly wrong. Not even a Sullivan-esque “Whoops! Hocadanode!” like when he allowed his magainze to libel the Clinton health care plan. More amazingly nobody in any of his hundreds of TV appearances since has ever brought it up with Hitchens.
Jack
See, he might be annoying but we brits got stuck with his Doug Feith level stupid brother Peter who writes for the Mail. Can we swap?
Jay
I still want to know what old golf ball liver was drinking when he compared Michelle Obama to Stokely Carmichael. Juan Williams certainly loved that one.
Allison W.
@Jay:
whoah! I missed that. when did that happen?
Jay
@Allison W.
http://www.slate.com/id/2190589/
El Cid
Hitchens was a great guy to read up until Clinton, and then he just lost it. I mean, I was no Clinton fan in the sense that I was a strong critic of establishment U.S. policies in many ways, and NAFTA with regard to Clinton, but I didn’t focus on Clinton the man, or any of the ‘scandals’ which the Gingrich ultra-right and the masturbatory media jacked off to. And his position that basically any opposition to invading & occupying Iraq was because you were a Saddam & genocide loving anti-American anti-Democrat totalitarian boot-licker, well, there you go.
williamc
@Ailuridae:
Whew, thats a flashback, I’d forgotten that that is how I first heard of Hitch. He was pissing mad (and piss drunk) back during BJgate in the late 1990s because Bill and Hillary were evil and using his good name to evade charges that were all fucking crazy and baseless to start with (except of course the actual BJ), so instead of using his national airtime to call Foul on the whole ordeal, he decided to cash in and become the right’s new Leftist Misanthrope.
Drunk bastard
Ailuridae
@El Cid:
Ah, but “even the very liberal Christopher Hitchens” thought a lot of those Clinton scandals were newsworthy.
John Cole
So wait- two glasses of scotch and a bottle of wine is heavy drinking?
Brian
Eh, I like him. He’s of the rare breed that can at least back up his arguments w/facts – even if his spin on the facts are English I don’t agree with. ‘sides, any man that takes the dare of ‘waterboarding isn’t torture? Do it and see’ and admits how bad it was, and how quick he snapped, gets my respect…still waiting for Hannity et al to try it.
DougJ
@John Cole:
It’s a lot to drink every day.
DougJ
@Ailuridae:
Six bottles of wine is a lot.
jl
I am an ultra lightweight, I guess. I would be sick on that much.
And if that much is on careful days, I would be sick as a dog on the average weekly dose.
Edit: I cannot imagine getting through the 25 glass wine bar regimen. Makes me queasy just to think about it.
Ailuridae
@John Cole:
Apparently not everyone is from upstate NY. Back home that’s called Tuesday.
After TriCare looked at my old man in the late 80s they told him that he had to quit smoking ASAP and moderate his drinking to a drink a day. At the time he was a two pack a day smoker and would kill a six pack before switching over to Manhattans nightly. Quitting the smoking was no problem and he did cut his drinking down to one a day. A single Manhattan. Of course the Manhattan was full to the lip of his pint glass and had no ice but it really was only one drink.
Ailuridae
@jl:
Edit: I cannot imagine getting through the 25 glass wine bar regimen. Makes me queasy just to think about it.
It was also one of these bars that had a “drink X numbers of different beers and get shirt saying so”. Our number was 51. I would be astonished how quickly some people got to 51 beers especially since there very very few (except Guiness) that were less alcoholic than Budweiser (5%) and many in the 8-12% range (like barley wines). Probably 40 or 50 people did it in a six day week and there were definitely some people who did it in three days.
jl
Public health prudes would say that more than two ‘standard drinks’ per day is heavy drinking.
So one hard likker drink and half a bottle of wine (seems at least two standard drinks?) puts you at the high end borderline of moderate drinking, on careful days.
But the BJ crowd is apparently quite party hardy, so people here may have a different perspective.
DougJ
@Ailuridae:
Still, Hitch could have done it in two, by your reckoning. Got to give that drink-soaked former-Trotskyite popinjay props for that, at least.
I agree with your assessment of him, just awful since Lewinsky. I also agree that he is less crazy than his brother.
goatchowder
This really explains everything.
jl
@Ailuridae: If I drink too much at once, I get very sick. Maximum retch setting followed by dry heaves. I will never ever challenge anyone to a drinking contest. It would be a drinking Dunkirk for me.
I was going to say my grandmother could drink me under the table, but one of them could put it away pretty good, so that is not apt in this case.
Corner Stone
I’ll never understand why some people half ass the really important things in life.
DougJ
@jl:
The definition of “standard drink” varies, though. A lot of times that means a Manhattan or a martini. Two of those is the same ballpark (a little less, but not much less) as a bottle of wine.
jl
@DougJ: I will not argue with the pros here.
Violet
I find him a disgusting, pretentious twat, no matter how much he does or doesn’t drink. He’s got a way with words, but that’s about it. He makes my skin crawl. I don’t get his appeal at all.
Pococurante
Damn Jews.
Sorry it’s a DougJ thread. I got caught up in the excitement.
@Violet: You just described Sullivan.
maus
@Violet: I’m not one to buy into the media hate on the media-categorized “New Atheist” movement, but he’s a crappy neocon atheist who’s famous for publicly speaking out against religion, but whose horrid political views are downplayed in contrast. I mean, I’d understand it if the Glibertarians and South Park Conservatives were the only people supporting him, but he’s not Taibbi. He’s not even a Sully, for chrissake.
@Ailuridae: Is he really a “leftist”, or does self-ascription count?
JohnnyC
As often as I find myself disagreeing with Hitchens, I’ll always treasure his comment on the death of Jerry Falwell: “If you gave him an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.”
chrismealy
I disagree with the part about the quality of his writing. Half the time I can’t tell what his goddam point is. I’m pretty sure he’s using the sneering tone thing as a substitute for making an actual argument. I don’t think Hitchens’s moods and feelings are that interesting.
eemom
do any of y’all like him enough to read his insufferably titled autobio, “Hitch-22”? That’s what the WaPo link is about.
Anya
@Violet: I feel the same way about him. He is repulsive and mean spirited. I think the British accent can make alot of things seem more benign but he is a racist ass. His vendatta against the Clintons drove him and his attacks on Michelle Obama are just disgusting.
DougJ
@eemom:
God, no, no way I could read it.
Violet
@Pococurante:
Sully’s got an earnestness to him that I find both annoying and endearing. I think it lessens his twatishness.
@maus:
Hitchens comes across as trying to be a rabble rouser. I suppose there’s a place for that, but it seems to work less and less well the older he gets. He seems like more of a dick and less of a curmudgeon. I don’t mind dickish behavior if it’s backed up with something real or interesting, but with him it just seems like the intellectual version a B-list celeb doing something outlandish so they can get on Entertainment Tonight. Yawn.
eemom
@Violet:
I am totally stealing that.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Two drinks and a bottle of wine is what he admits to. I’m guessing that’s lunch-to-happy hour, and I’ll admit a part of me is jealous. Though I’d just fall asleep.
Is that a scotch and a perrier, or a scotch-and-perrier? I’ve always been curious about Perrier et al as a mixer.
Seems to me Hitchens’ writing has gotten more baroque and more strained as he’s gotten older and meaner and more intellectually incoherent, but IMHO he’s still a pretty good literary critic.
Warren Terra
I found him lazy but often readable until he decided to cash in on Wingnut Welfare after 9/11. The worst were his “book reviews” in the Atlantic, which usually barely mentioned their alleged subjects.
AndrewJ
From the linked article on Tom Wolfe:
In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. “The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I’m a child molester.'” For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, “and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves.”
Self-pity much, Tom?
Batocchio
When Hitchens is on, he’s great. He wrote a harrowing piece on the effects of Agent Orange, and some of his critiques of theocracy and religion have been very sharp. However, he often tends toward the blowhard style of writing and speaking, and when he has no facts or sound argument as a foundation, he’s not witty, he’s just insufferable.
scav
@Batocchio: thanks! the moment where I saw your name as Borachio commenting on Gin Soaked Boy was choice.
Josh
Hitchens is a moral imbecile, but to compare him to the pro-Franco wingnut Tom Wolfe is a nasty insult. Indeed, one of Hitch’s most useful essays is his takedown of A Man in Full, reprinted in Unacknowledged Legislation.
I really admire a lot of his pre-9/11 writing, including the volume that Basic Books unfortunately entitled Letters to a Young Contrarian, and the fact that he produced so much of his work while drinking more than all eight of the Pogues plus Dorothy Parker is impressive in a way.
SpaceSquid
I’m not sure you have mixed feelings at all. I think you’ve just forgotten that it doesn’t matter how well Dali painted a watch, they still don’t actually melt out in the real world.
jeff
I have to say that I am, at roughly half Hitch’s age, struggling to cut down on drink and smoking. It’s taking a toll, and I don’t feel well. How in the hell can he sustain that lifestyle? Good for him, I suppose, though it’s really no fun in the first place–and certainly doesn’t make one smarter. (OK, it does make one smarter, but only early on.)
JGabriel
Speaking of gin:
So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass you see your Alice.
You know she has no sense for all your jealousy.
In a sense she still smiles very sweetly.
Charged with insults and flattery,
Her body moves with malice.
Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?
And now you find you fit this identikit completely.
You say you have no secrets, then leave discreetly.
joel hanes
By comparison, W.C. Fields drank at least a fifth of gin nearly every day, and not uncommonly two fifths.
And he was a lot funnier than Hitchens has ever been or ever will be.
maus
@joel hanes: Yeah, Hitch is definitely Fields sans wit, charm, and the good looks.
scav
and for drunken English curmudgeons with pens, I’m sticking with Evelyn Waugh.
Redshift
I happened to be in the audience when he was on Bill Maher, and I certainly didn’t think much of him then. He was obviously drunk enough that it was affecting his ability to speak (much less think.) His level of argument was “I’m right and everyone who disagrees with my is an idiot.” When the audience booed some asshole point he was unconvincingly making, he flipped us off under the table. He appeared to think he was doing it off-camera so he could bask in apparently spontaneous audience hate, but it’s HBO and they went with a camera angle wide enough to show it. He lurched off stage in the break before the last segment and apparently left without telling anyone.
I hadn’t read much of his stuff before that, and that performance didn’t give me any reason to. Asshole drunks are no fun when you have to deal with them in person, why would I want to seek one out?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
For a good time look up his skirmishes with George Galloway and Alexander Cockburn. If you’re in a more rational mood look up his exchanges with Noam Chomsky. The latter never attacked his drinking as far as I can remember, but what do you expect.
asiangrrlMN
I don’t find his writing to be wonderful; he is insufferable; however, he has earned my respect by undergoing waterboarding and changing his mind on it. In actuality, I dislike him and Sully for similar reasons: Insufferable narcissistic personalities who have to be convinced over and over again of the same point. Boring.
As for drinking, I don’t understand why the ability to knock back copious amounts of alcohol is an admirable quality.
maus
@scav:
Hrm, what should I start with?
@asiangrrlMN: If only there was a way to make him undergo every other stupid suggestion he offers.
Toast
Well, Hitch and I have that in common. That’s my typical intake on days that end with “y”.
But yeah, he’s an idiot and an ass, and I refuse to be charmed by him even when he’s arguing my position. The man makes a great case for atheism (not hard to do) but he’s still the same asshole who smeared the left for being against the Iraq War (possibly the best short-form IQ test in human history).
Corner Stone
@asiangrrlMN: Hey young lady!…nom…I have a big problem…nom nom…to discuss with you…nom…
asiangrrlMN
@maus: Offer him a drink if he does it?
@Corner Stone: Shouldn’t that be gulp gulp?
Corner Stone
@asiangrrlMN:
I’m a refined gentleman, and sip my copious cocktails.
No, the issue I have with you is the recommendation about chips the other day.
I made the mistake of buying Lay’s Carolina BBQ chips and…umm…have enjoyed a bag or two since.
I..nom…blame you…nom nom
asiangrrlMN
@Corner Stone: Ah! Got it. Found some, did you? They are rather addictive, aren’t they? Don’t say I didn’t
tauntwarn you. By the way, the store here that sells them seems to sell them once a month or so. I don’t get it.Corner Stone
@asiangrrlMN: What was strange? It being Memorial Day and all, the chip aisle was destroyed – except for like 5 bags of the Carolina BBQ and a couple other Kettle Jalapeno.
I consider it to be Fate. Or maybe the Devil.
asiangrrlMN
@Corner Stone: Oh, the strange part is that here, I can’t find them all the time. Not this weekend and not a few weeks ago. Maybe they are just that popular. Who knows? So, were there any bags left once you found them? P.S. If you blame me, then it’s definitely the devil.
Corner Stone
@asiangrrlMN: One day I will regale you with my theory of Fate and Timing.
But not tonight.
ETA – yes. i only bought 3 bags. or maybe it was 4. I’ve lost count
DougJ
@JGabriel:
And now you find you fit
This identikit completely
You say you have no secrets
And leave discretely
(from memory)
God, I’m a loser.
(EDIT: worse, you already had these — I don’t like the next part of the song very much so won’t quote it)
asiangrrlMN
@Corner Stone: Regale me with it NAOW!
cokane
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120062413171299477.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
This is the epitome of drunken buffoonery by Hitchens.
Read his first sentence very carefully:
“Let us give hearty thanks and credit to Rudy Giuliani, who has never by word or gesture implied that we would fracture any kind of “ceiling” if we elected as chief executive a man whose surname ends in a vowel.”
One sentence in. Already an unbelievable bonehead factual error.
scav
@maus:
if you are at all serious, it depends how obvious you wish to be. I’m rather fond of Scoop myself, although The Loved One is also an unexpected place to start.
jakeb
While I tend to half-agree with Hitchens in re atheism, detest his views on the Iraq war, and admire his unending persecution of Henry Kissinger, my favorite thing about him is a comment someone made, on Crooked Timber I believe, about his attempts to empirically determine what torture is: “Ah, but what if they had tried liquorboarding?”
David Berliner
A Divine Comedy reference? Okay, I’ll give you a poseurish hipster head-nod for that.
Bill E Pilgrim
Christopher Hitchens claimed in this column that Robert Novak didn’t out Valerie Wilson because he read her name in “Who’s Who in America”.
It was at that point that I decided once and for all that he’s really nothing more than a verbose idiot, and I mean idiot in a clinical sense.
This really had to be one of the most transparently moronic right-wing talking points put forth in that whole affair, but rather than rant for half a page about why, I’ll link to Hunter at GOS who did so in one of my favorite rants ever, from back when I still read GOS.
I think this guy can write circles around Hitchens, by the way, who strikes me as having the flowery, pompous style of an eighty-year-old Victorian woman. I guess a lot of Americans are still impressed by that sort of thing.
asiangrrlMN
@Bill E Pilgrim: That’s a righteous rant, Bill E Pilgrim. I need a cigarette now. And, I agree with you about Hitch. Not my kinda thing.
EconWatcher
I’d probably agree with just about every bad thing anyone here has to say about Hitch. But I’ve been reading him since the late ’80s and can’t quit him.
Here’s the thing: George Will obviously has some researcher working for him, who finds obscure literary references and allusions to include in his columns so he’ll look like a real intellectual. Hitch once described Will as “the idol of the half-educated,” which is dead-on.
But Hitch actually knows that stuff. He has an old-world Oxford education, with an almost panoramic familiarity with history and literature. I don’t have anything equivalent, but I have just enough education to recognize a fraud when I see one. In this sense, Hitchens is no fraud. Most others who try to write the way he does are poseurs. He’s not.
And while I think that Trotsky was a murderous thug who would have been as bad as Stalin if he’d come out on top, there is something fascinating about a guy like Hitchens who has mostly let go of the left but can’t let go of Trotsky. I think it must be because Trotsky was a great writer, and Hitchens thinks that absolves him of any crime. Come to think of it, it’s not hard to see why Hitch would think that way!
Brian J
@EconWatcher:
Interesting.
matoko_chan
I have forgiven Hitch all his transgressions in light of his elegant description of Sarah Palin “cockteasing the rabble.”
AC in BC
I recall Hitch bellowing at Clinton week after week in The Nation for not intervening militarily in the Balkans, and then when he did (ultimatley successfully, too), he bellowed about that. That’s hitch’s principled leftism for you.
Maybe someone else mentioned it already, but his antichoice views are pretty noxious, if little-advertised of late.