He would, of course, have blanched—or barfed—if you had ever addressed him that way (probably the only blasphemy he’d refuse to utter). Yet is it really any more outlandish than the conversations we had about another adamantly avowed atheist? About our intellectual “secular saint” and fellow intellectual big brother? About the English patriot and incarnation of “decency” whom he cherished as his personal hero, “St. George” Orwell?
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), skeptic and scoffer, would have roundly protested his posthumous canonization. No matter: the crusading legions of the Hitchens faithful these days do not, as they brandish his ever-quotable bon mots, binge-watch his pugilistic punditry (on YouTube segments numbering in the thousands), revisit his provocative essays (another collection, A Hitch in Time, was released in January), and surf the half-dozen websites honoring his memory.
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