They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Hitchens at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV (January 2007)*

This will be as useless and banal as any obituary or tribute, not only because memorializing a person’s life is, in its own way, an act of barbarism, but because I am limited in what I’ve read of Hitchens’s work to his last eight or so years’ worth of essays.  I’ve not read God is Not Great, nor have I read Arguably.  I will, but that’s not the point.  Reading one Christopher Hitchens essay should be enough for any reader to realize, without doubt, that they are drinking deep the work of a virtuoso, a true master of written English, and a wit unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.  When he died last night, the world lost perhaps its finest living prose writer.

I have always marveled at Hitchens’s fearlessness.  A person can be born with intelligence, … Read more

An Iraqi court handed down a sentence today for Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who became instantly famous worldwide for throwing his shoes at then-President George W. Bush back in January. Three years in prison. Three years to sit with his pejorative from that day ringing in his ears: “This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.” Al-Zeidi can sit in his cell for all that time knowing that his actions were not lost on his fellow Iraqis nor on the millions of Americans who only wish they’d received a similar opportunity.

It’s been less than two months since Barack Obama took the Oath of Office and formally ended Bush’s eight-year reign of shock and terror. It seems like a distant nightmare now — or it would if we weren’t still quaking from the aftershocks of an … Read more