Christopher Hitchens, who died on Dec. 15, was like all of us: he embodied some of the best and also the worst of human nature. He did so, however, on a scale that was larger than the average life, on a very public stage, from his own bully pulpit. His vanity, his pomposity, his unshakeable conviction in the infallibility of his own opinions and in the judgment of his intellect offered a model of public discourse that was no different in essence from the fundamentalist circles he spent so much of his time deriding.
It was his life's work, he said, to combat superstition and religious totalitarianism. It is astonishing, then, that he, the arch-ironist, could not see the irony of his own absolutist position. And it was indeed a position, rather than a point of view -- a vehement, tub-thumping position -- that Hitchens always took as a matter of course, whatever the subject in hand. His blindness to his own righteousness reminded me in this regard of no one so much as Newt Gingrich, another champion of hubris over humility, who lambasted President Clinton for having an affair while he himself was busy with his own extra-marital dalliance.
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