Long-time Vanity Fair writer and general anti-anythingist Christopher Hitchens passed away at the age of 62. Seconds after his death his body remained dead. He was not Christ and he promoted atheism to his dying breath.
Friends and colleagues mourning his passing. Vanity Fair represented the sell-out of an intellect, so I was not familiar with his writings, but his editor wrote that, “Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.”
That is some damned good typing at sixty words per minute let alone writing.
New Yorkers loved him; he was British, intelligent, and a drinker.
He knew the known and the known knew him for his work in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, and Free Inquiry. Few had the gall to question his Roy Cohnesque association as a neo-conman for the Hoover Institute.
A fan of GW Bush and the War in Iraq cost him deeply, but he was a man of conviction are as all neo-cons. The years at Vanity Fair tortured his socialistic roots and he declared himself a ‘conservative Marxist’ who favored international capitalism over the unreality of revolution, yet I applaud his radicalism against Zionism and his undying faith in his own beliefs.
The man spoke his mind.
Nothing was sacred and he was no fool.