The psychology of Christopher Hitchens

2004.02.20 — Culture | News Media | by BB Rodriguez

Christopher Hitchens* is a crazy motherfucker. I can't help but admire his solid writing style, tho. He writes for Vanity Fair but I read him on Slate. He always seems to have carefully examined the evidence, determined the right side of the issue to be on (liberal or conservative at any given moment), and then strapped a fact-checker to his back and leaped into the battle, guns blazing.

* Ironic note: "Hitchens" spellchecked to "bitchiness." There's no predicting the wit and wisdom of the spellchecker.

Hitchens favored war with Iraq, but his biography admits to a leftist past, far more left than most Americans (his adopted homeland), and it colors his tirades today. He doesn't actually come out in support of socialist ideals, but he acts like a gun nut demanding an end to gun control while holding a Glock 9 mm behind his back. You get the feeling that he's not just marching on principle; he has an agenda, and it involves bullets.

Others have noticed that Hitchens has a weird, obsessive hatred for religious fundamentalism, but always backs up his wild-eyed claims with good (tho slightly slanted) evidence. One current piece rips Mel Gibson for being a homophobic anti-Semitic holocaust denier... and makes a pretty good case for it. Then another warmly embraces John Edwards as a sensible, likable, electable guy and casually whacks Howard Dean and Bill Clinton for being unserious and needy, respectively. Weird.

I like John Edwards, but he's basically Bill Clinton without the bite. He doesn't have the air of bad-boy danger that mama always warned us about. Clinton wanted to fuck us, slow and hard. Edwards just wants to snuggle.

Hitchens cultivates a deliberate grace, the image of the prototypical left-leaning newsman: smoking, drinking, paunchy, rumpled, a bit shaggy. He's at his best on television, where he can disarm callers with actual facts and dismiss them with what always feels like a mere summary of why they are not only wrong but possibly brain damaged. With the rest of us all so dense, it's a wonder that he can even rouse himself out of bed in the morning.

Even so, Hitchens is one of the most entertaining writers and pundits alive today, all the more so for his humorless, bloodless English mannerisms. And if he doesn't get arrested for murdering a Catholic archbishop or Henry Kissinger, I look forward to his future tirades.

f e e d b a c k

s i d e b a r