Interview with Hitchens

If you’re interested in Christopher Hitchens’s new memoir, Hitch-22, but don’t want to plow through the whole thing, you could do worse than to read his interview with Hugh Hewitt.  It reads a bit rough in places (it’s the transcript of a radio interview, and I can’t find the podcast), but it’s as good a summary of the book as I’ve seen.

There are also a few tidbits that don’t appear in the book, like this:

HH: I’ve got so much to ask, but with so little time, I’ve tasked you. So I’m just going to ask you about Obama. Has he disappointed you greatly, a little bit, or not at all?

CH: Quite a bit. He just seems to believe, it was same watching him with Netanyahu this week, as if all this can be resolved, you know, man to man, these are just misunderstandings that can be ironed out by people of goodwill. He doesn’t seem to have the concept of radical conflicts of interest at all.

HH: And so you expect him to fail in a reelection campaign?

CH: I don’t know how I’d make myself a strong case for his being reelected.

Crikey! Yes, Obama has seemed pusillanimous at times, but he’s helped congress pass a healthcare bill, a banking bill, and they’re working on campaign reform—all against the “we-have-no-platform-but-opposition” Republicans. I’d say that’s pretty good.  Now if he’d only realize that our struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq are futile, and bring the troops home.

We all know that Hitch isn’t well, and he talks about his illness. It’s depressing, but he seems stoic:

HH: Now Christopher, since we last spoke, your illness you disclosed on the web, and people will want to know off the bat how you are doing, and how your treatment is going.

CH: Oh well, I have, in case people are just tuning in, I have cancer in my esophagus, which has I think spread a little to my lymph nodes as well. And I’m two weeks into the chemotherapy course. So I feel pretty weak, and my voice isn’t what it was, but that’s supposed to be a good sign in that the amount of poison I’m taking is presumably working on the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. And this morning, I found that my hair was beginning to come out in the shower, which is a bit demoralizing, I have to say, even though it’s the least of it.

. . .

HH: Now I want to go to the other…

CH:  In fact, if I had a wish, if what I’ve got turns out to be terminal, I wouldn’t mind my last act being an interview with him [the most evil man in the world], followed by a nasty surprise. That would be, I’d feel then I was dying in a good cause.

HH: How much time are you spending on that thought, Christopher Hitchens?

CH: As little as I can, because it’s morbid and mock heroic.

HH: All right. I want to…

CH: But it avoids the boring thought that one is suffering, in effect, for no reason. I mean, I’m not suffering in a good cause, or witnessing for any, you know, great idea or anything or principle. It’s just boring.

HH: The number of people I’m sure who are praying for you, including people who come up to me and ask me to tell you that, people like Joseph Timothy Cook, how are you responding to them, given your famous atheism?

CH: Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts. It’s, I’m afraid to say it’s almost as well-founded an idea. I mean, I don’t, they don’t know whether prayer will work, and they don’t know whether I’ve come by this because I’m a sinner.

. . .

HH: And the audience would love to know, what are you going to work on next during your treatment, and how are you going to conduct yourself in the course of a long sort of chemotherapy?

CH: Well, I’m just hoping I won’t be as exhausted in the next phase as I am now. It’s been very nice talking to you. I hope I haven’t sounded too weary, and, by the way, it’s been less of an effort than I feared, but it’s quite an effort now even for me to read anything very demanding. So I’m going to have to husband what I’ve got for a bit, and perhaps not make any too grand claims about what I intend to do.

I’m leaving out all the biographical stuff.  If you haven’t read Hitch-22, and don’t plan to, go read about Hitchens’s choice of the most evil man in the world, his take on Bob Dylan and the Mamas and the Papas, his so-called alcoholism, his parents, the Middle East, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and, of course, Iraq.

And get well, comrade.