The Shoulders of Giants

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`Commentary` - Jan 13, 2012 - `Printable Version`
- The Shoulders of Giants
by S.K. Eleton - Theocracy Watch

    This is a tribute to a great man who was also a flawed man. This month, the world lost one of the last of the great polymaths, as Christopher Hitchens succumbed to cancer of the esophagus. Already the ghouls are circling, consigning the man’s eternal soul to hell, gloating over the death of one who confronted life square on and refused to compromise. Others are preying…excuse me, I mean praying…for his eternal soul, convinced that their fervent pleas on his behalf will get him a reprieve from burning hell, or at least a slightly less gory spot. There is, of course, considerable speculation about what Hitchens will say when he presents at those Pearly Gates and is quizzed by St. Peter about his outspoken, proud atheism. I say, let them have their fun. They certainly can’t do him any harm, and it gives the rest of us a respite to quietly mourn the loss of a truly great mind.

    Like any public figure, Hitchens has his detractors, and some have dismissed him with statements such as “a misogynist, imperialist asshole is dead”. This is too bad, because it reduces a complex life down to a couple of unfortunate characteristics. Like most people, I found subjects on which I disagreed with Hitchens, sometimes very strongly and viscerally. His stand on the Iraq War was dangerously misguided, even after he lost faith in the ability of Bush to run it effectively. Still, it’s hard not to have a bit of a soft spot for a man who volunteered to have himself water boarded, and was willing to state uncategorically that it was torture. This, in spite of the fact that he was nearing 60 and the military was loathe to waterboard a man of his age, even for the short period of time that he was subjected to this horrific torture.

    As for misogyny, well, I think that word has become overused. Not all sexism is truly misogyny. Though all sexism is, at least in my opinion, founded in bigotry and intolerance, and is to be resisted with all our strength, the word misogyny should be reserved for those vile, disgusting trolls who wander into all discussions of feminism on the internet so that they can denounce women as “cunts” and “twats” and other such foul epithets, many of which can’t be repeated in polite company. Hitchens probably was a sexist; many men of his stature are, having gotten to a pinnacle where they can look down on us little people with amusement, pat us on the head, and send us off to play while they talk with the big boys. This is, of course, a huge failing, but the entire corpus of the man’s work should not be dismissed on this account.

    Unfortunately, in this modern world, we have come to expect our heroes to be perfect, and when we discover they are only human, we will either desert them or deny their imperfections. We can’t seem to accept a messy, nuanced world where people are neither all bad nor all good, but instead are a complex mixture of conflicting emotions and beliefs. And Hitchens was perhaps one of the most complex, an oddball mixture of communism, liberalism, and elitism, stirred up and seasoned with a large dose of arrogance and kindness. It would be impossible to describe such a man in one word, or one phrase; in fact, it might require an encyclopedic mind and a comprehensive vocabulary just to scratch the surface. It is very easy to say he railed against tyranny with a visceral hatred; he promoted life and rejected a woman’s right to choose based on his gut feeling that a fetus was a life; he believed with all his heart that religion was a vile and dangerous delusion; and that he lived large, out-smoking and out-drinking the best of them. All these things would be true, but they would fail to capture the full essence of one of his cells, let alone the entire complicated, messy human being.

    So, I won’t try. I won’t try to explain Hitchens to anyone; I won’t try to defend him against those who render him into a broad caricature to revile. I will simply say these few words: of all the people in the world, few if any could annoy, anger, or irritate me like Christopher Hitchens. Conversely, few could inspire me like Hitchens. Whether I was reading him with pleasure or throwing the book across the room, I could never help but be impressed by his eloquence, his use of the language I love so dearly, and his ability to turn any argument on its head and twist it until it squealed for mercy. He challenged me to think, to question my most cherished ideas, and that is never a bad thing. For those that remained intact after examination, I now have a much stronger understanding of why I hold that belief, and why I should fight for it if necessary. For those I have abandoned, I feel no loss as they lie withering on the scrap heap of my distant memory. And for all the times I’ve flung his words across the room, for all the times I’ve bookmarked a particularly cogent passage to savor again later, I would just like to say, Thank you, Christopher Hitchens. You have left a hole in the world that will not be quickly filled.

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Commentary - Jan 13, 2012 - Printable Version- The Shoulders of Giants by S.K. Eleton - Theocracy Watch

`Commentary` - Jan 13, 2012 - `Printable Version`
- The Shoulders of Giants
by S.K. Eleton - Theocracy Watch