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Christopher Hitchens

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Perhaps not a true cyclist in the terms many would commonly employ. But, the man certainly could ride a bicycle if and when he chose to. It goes without saying that he could drink (more than most mere mortals).

And, boy could he write.

Image source: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-slideshow-201112#slide=17.

Thanks for everything, Mr. Hitchens. I am deeply in your debt.

In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011.

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

29 Replies to “Christopher Hitchens”

  1. Interesting character. Can’t say that I agreed with him on much but I guess neither did his brother.

  2. Well played BJ. Hitchens new how to piss people off, but at least he believed and stood for something, more than most can say these days. Any fan of Che Guevera is a friend of mine!

  3. Holy Crap Jonny this is the last place I expected to find a tribute to Hitch. I’m with ya. Courageous enough to fight the giants and incandescently brilliant.

    I often thought he had to hold back in heated discourse so others could keep up. Whether ya liked him or not we lost a bright light when we lost that one.

    Motorcycles, intellectuals…what the hell is going on here?

    Must be the Winter of Our Dis-content.

    TJ

  5. @ Trailer Park Cyclist – We may muck about in the gutter here at Drunkcyclist.com, but we are also a well read (at times) & educated lot (mostly). Aristotle may have had his three forms of rhetoric, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos, but I pretty much just have this lone directive to steer me through life: “He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.” (http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/40073.html.) It’s from Samuel Johnson, but I read it first in Hunter S. Thompson’s iconic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. At least I think I did. Maybe D2 can confirm as presently wading through that HST classic.

  7. @bj

    Checked out that quotation page. Sweet.

    This one cracked me up.

    “A cucumber should be well-sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.”

    Gawdf I hate cucumbers.

    RIP Mr. Hitchens.

  8. A great quote from Hitch himself, from a column on finding out he had cancer:
    “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

  11. @Joe,

    Educate yourself about this man before you speak as he was far more intelligent and diverse than you could fathom. Your comment speaks to your adherence to teaism. Back in your Davka years you were more tolerant.

  12. Hitchens was a complicated character. he said something once when confronted with Islamic fascism. It sums the man up pretty clearly.

    “In the (Hitchens) hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation.

    In his love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression.”

  13. One of his best quotes about his daily intake was it was enough “to kill or stun the average mule”

    I love that

    RIP Hitch

  14. I side with Joe on this. I’ve read a fair amount about Che Guevera and am not sure why an American would be inclined to be much of a fan of his. He was certainly an intelligent and charasmatic foe to be reckoned and respected during his day, but beyond that I don’t know why anyone fortunate enough to be born in or live in the US should be required to be a fan of Che Guevera.

  16. Jonny, the quite did in fact appear at the beginning of Fear and Loathing. It can also be heard in Metallica’s “Of Wolf and Man.”

  18. I’ve said for years that I drink enough to kill a mule. And I never heard of the dead guy.

  19. Agreed with him on some things, not so much on his eternal support for Bush and all things ‘chickenhawk-ish’ but the man was well-read and knew how to take down a foe.

    I”ll be raising a glass of single malt tonight.

  20. I have serious issues with Hitchens, and I have even greater issues with the politicizing of his death. Hitchens, like the rest of us, was a very flawed human. Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder. JFK and MLK were unapologetic adulterers. History has paved over those flaws with a ten ton tractor, and we are already in the process of doing the same with Hitchens. His talent, as undeniable as it was, is no reason for us to overlook the fact that he was an unapologetic enabler of the system. His zealotry regarding the invasion of Iraq was at first, understandable. He believed what he had been told. Saddam was a mad man with weapons of mass destruction. He needed to be stopped. My issues with Hitchens lie not in his believing what his government had told him, but his refusal to maintain his journalistic integrity, when the proof about why we were really in Iraq came out. His support of President Bush, his prosaic glee about the deaths of more than 150,000 Iraquis is unconscionable. How much longer did the war last? How many more people died? How much worse off is our national security right now because he and other members of the media refused to report on the undeniable truth about Iraq and its non existent ties to both weapons of mass destruction and Al Quaida? As jealous as I am of Hitchens and his talent, my soul recoils at the how terribly he failed in his duties as a journalist.

  24. Good riddance.
    Now he’s met beings whose hatred is even larger than his.

    He was so overrated. If anything he was a boon to Christianity because he made people see how a demonic lifestyle ends up, drunken bitterness and no true friends. Sure a bunch of other people with addiction problems like him because he was a smart drunk and that perhaps justifies them wasting their own lives, but he died without true friends and that is sad and pathetic.

  25. Also, for all his wit and debate prowess, he never made an original or meaningful statement.

    Iraq War? “Islamofascism”? Cool man, just come up with new names for long standing conservative beliefs and then pretend your opinions are daring and courageous. There’s nothing daring and courageous about using your gift from God to suck up to leftists so you don’t have to spend your years fat, miserable, drunk AND alone (he avoided the last one by being the smartest useful idiot in the world).

  26. Hitch was awesome, to argue otherwise? you might as well argue the Grand Canyon was created in 40 days during the Flood of Noah’s Ark, 4700 years ago.