When I was a young man, I took no small pleasure in reading Christopher Hitchens and listening to him hold forth in interviews and on television programs. He was different. The accent, the razor sharp wit, the tool bag of cigarettes and alcohol, the willingness to attack almost anyone. In addition to being a daring journalist, he was clearly light years ahead of the typical media pundit, which of course isn’t saying much in and of itself, but regardless, he was obviously quite bright and in many ways a welcome change to the standard prattling.
Of course it helped that I often agreed with him. I too thought there was a compelling case for labeling Henry Kissinger a war criminal. I too thought Mother Theresa’s actions, particularly as laid out by Hitchens, were rather unsettling.
My last great memory of enjoying Hitchens, and in some way the turning point, came during the late 1990s. I was with my father in Fresno, California visiting his mother. Hitchens came on the TV. All of the elderly people had gone to bed and so it was just me and my dad, who at that point had recently turned into a conservative crank. His dogmatic partisanship was new enough that I still tried to engage him on politics from time to time. So when Hitchens came on, I thought to myself: Dad’s gotta see this.
“Check this guy out,” I said, or something like it.
After about five or ten minutes, my father had had enough. He sneeringly and disgustedly dismissed Hitchens as a smug, self-satisfied, know-it-all, baby boom brat, and then went off to bed.
Ironically, I eventually came to share my father’s opinion of Hitchens. It started with that damn war.
I was against the war from the moment it was suggested, and predictably my father supported it. I never believed there were any WMDs, he did. So we made a deal. I proposed that if any WMDs were to be found in Iraq, I would admit that I had been wrong and that the invasion was worth it. If it turned out that there were none, he would admit that he had been wrong and that the United States never should have gone into Iraq. We shook on it.
Vindication often brings little more than much frustration.
My father renegged. When it eventually became clear that there were no chemical weapons or nuclear bombs buried in the sand, and I confronted him, seeking contrition. He refused to give it. Following the Neo-Con propaganda cues, he was by then peddling other excuses. The casus belli, it seemed, would be a moving target.
I can forgive my father. He’s my father, goddamn it, an old man with fake teeth and little money who spends most of his days with his dog.
I need not forgive Christopher Hitchens. I didn’t know him, and he most certainly did not stick to himself. He was a public intellectual, even if he was more public than intellectual, and until his dying day he used his growing celebrity and diminishing credibility to support an indefensible war, to dismiss the dead civilians beyond counting, and to bully his opponents with canned arguments and cheap insults.
Over the last several years, when any knowledgeable person with even a shred of objectivity and intellectual honesty had long since stopped trying to defend the Iraq invasion, and when only partisan lackeys and the grossly ignorant still celebrated it, this one-time private school Trotskyite had finally found a violent revolution he could believe and even revel in, albeit 
This is the part of the memoriam where I should probably say, whistfully, that I’ll choose to remember the pre-Iraq Christopher Hitchens, whose searing wit and graceful piercing of sacred cows once made him a modern day mix of Socrates and Lenny Bruce. But so far as I’m concerned, he has quite a bit of blood on his hands, and if I weren’t an atheist (though not nearly as sanctimonious, simplistic, reductive, or rigidly dogmatic about it as Hitchens was in his own atheism), I’d simply say that he can rot in Hell for all I care.
From talking with many people, it seems almost certain to me that the public persona Hitchens created is what many of them loved, as much as the ideas he championed. But the superficiality of his enlightened rogue motif grew tiresome for me as the ideas underpinning it turned fetid. The courage now seems like thuggery; the witticisms seem tired; the charm seems smug; the bravado seems shallow; the anger not nearly so righteous and horribly misplaced.
And there it is. I came to bury Christopher Hitchens, not to praise him.