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Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens has lost his voice. Now in the final stage of throat cancer, the journalist who launched a 1000 invectives (he first came to my attention for bagging Mother Teresa in a book titled - with appropriately inappropriate loucheness - The Missionary Position) is now largely unable to talk.
Further comment is unnecessary, because Hitchens describes the affliction here .
Reading this at my kitchen table in Spanish Harlem evoked two very middle-aged pleasures: regret and nostalgia.
Hitchens, of course, is a famously pugnacious atheist, but he'll forgive me I hope for the provocation of describing finding him as a Road to Damascus moment.
His mid-90s greatest hits For the Sake of Argument was loaned to me by art director Jenny Nicholls (we were both working on a magazine that no longer exists). I can still remember the cover depicted the Hitch standing behind a moat of empty drink glasses, cigarette in hand, and an expression that said, 'You only think I'm wrong because you're stupid.'
Urbane, snarky, well-read, funny and cruel: it seemed a hypertrophy of everything I'd absorbed by reading The Economist while teaching English in Japan.
In locally reared models of journalism that I'd had - shall we say offered to me before then - cleverness was a sin. You were discouraged from reminding readers they may not have taken the time to peruse the required books, or stray beyond a certain vernacular vocabulary.
The Hitch was a living example that none of this was true, that the contrary, using words that sent readers to dictionaries, referring to books they hadn't read (or even assuming they had) were virtues to be spread like a peacock's tail.
I didn't get into journalism because of the Hitch, but he seemed to offer some very compelling rationales for staying there. You found things out. You got up people's noses. You were funny, and dismissive. You mocked too much, slept too little, and you tried to talk well.
Naming an icon exposes curious fissures in one's identity. "Oh, that explains a lot," people will say, when said preference is voiced. Of course they're right, and wrong.
Admiration is revealing in that it details who we want to be, and suggests why. I wanted to be a smartarse. I'd say I've largely succeeded in that ambition.
So it's a sorrow to read that the writer who lead me into the promised land of wit is falling silent.
Having interviewed him a couple of times; once on the phone, once in person; I can confirm that he spoke as he wrote, without hesitation and with verve.
Those two qualities are always valuable in journalism. As to being a smartarse, well some will say there's enough of that already.
We need good faith, rather than sneering; we need more positivity.
Actually, we need that like a dose of throat cancer.
Follow Tim on Twitter @TimWilsonBarrio
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