Hitchens: “I’m dying. Well, we all are, but the process has suddenly been accelerated on me. So I’m looking for ways of trying to die more like, you, say.”
Goldberg (straightfaced): “Well, you have no way of knowing how I’m going to die as a matter of fact.”
So fucking what? Who knew this guy was such a boorish oaf? Did he really think that Hitchens wasn’t aware that he had no way of knowing how this schmuck was going to die someday? Did he think his audience needed to be made aware of that fact? Did he think that Hitchens might be cheered up by the fact that Goldberg could get hit by a bus tomorrow? I mean WTF? Shut the fuck up and let him make his point!
Throughout the interview this amateurish putz just can’t help talking over Hitchens and interjecting some inanity of his own.
Cripes! This is what happens I guess when you let boys play with men.
Goldberg is a pretty poor interviewer. He did say “you don’t know how I’m going to die” missing the point that Hitchens was making, which was 'I want to die slower. Like you. Not faster, like I am now."
Then Goldberg again talks about himself, offering to get Hitchens better medical help, because he, Goldberg, is a Jewish hypochondriac and know a lot of Doctors.
My computer froze up after that, but the Atlantic should hire better journalists.
This interview was painful to watch. And not because Hitchens is dying of cancer, but because I felt like punching Goldberg in the face the entire time.
I can’t watch the video right now, but “STFU,” “I want to punch you in the face,” and such-and-such publication “should hire better journalists” are thoughts I have always associated with Christopher Hitchens. I’m very sorry for his disease, but he has a record as an unrepentant drunk abusive asshole with an ego more inflated than the Goodyear blimp. He deserved to have faded into obscurity decades ago.
You are talking about a different Christopher Hitchens apparently.
The one I’m aware of is a master of the spoken word and the cogent argument.
I don’t agree with all that he says but even when I think he is wrong he is clear, concise and cutting. Always worth reading, a great journalist and writer.
Your sloppy hand-waving away of him is the classic ad-hominem attack that he gets regularly. Of course his personal frailties neither detract nor add to the qualities of his argument.
A man of his talent and insight was never destined for obscurity. The world is a better place with him in it.
It’s a small minded, stupid thing to quibble about, and when the quibblee is a man dying of cancer it’s just a moronic thing to argue about at all. Even worse, it’s done in the “you don’t know me!” style of a petulant teenager.
Ah, so that’s how this works. Pointing out that a particular man is a genius is is a relevant and important point; pointing out that the same man is a hall-of-fame jerk is nothing but ad hominem.
I didn’t say the guy is not talented or erudite, I’m saying he’s an intolerable person. For example, a buddy of mine was unfortunately charged with editing an article Hitchens wrote a couple years ago. The exchanges mostly consisted of Hitchens making phone calls to him, while drunk, being extremely abusive, and generally trying the “Do you know who I am? Why should I have to source any facts I have written – I wrote them, and I am a genius of the first order, you miserable peon!”
I think he’s a person who should have gotten some comeuppance well short of the terrible disease he has been afflicted with. But as far as his talents go, I don’t believe that is a good excuse for being a poor human being.
If you can’t believe that someone who’s an out-and-out genius can’t also be a miserable, jerkish person…well, all I can say is you haven’t met that many geniuses. Granted, considering the stereotype it’s maybe surprising there aren’t more of them. All I can say is more than once I was told as a grad student at Oxford (by my truly wonderful genius supervisor and second supervisor) something along the lines of “So-and-so is the best in that field, but let me talk to them as they won’t stoop to talk to a grad student from America.”
I don’t know anything about what Hitchens is like in person. I know he freely admits to being a heavy drinker (though I’m not sure he’s explicitly admitted he’s an alcoholic), but I also know he’s probably the best opinion columnist out there. I find him, in general to be very well-informed (though I caught a couple of minor errors in his God Is Great book), erudite and fearless in a way that’s very appealing to me. Who else would have had the balls to savage Mother Teresa. Even I was shocked when he first did that, yet after doing some research on his claims, I discovered he was basically right on the money. Her saintly persona was more a media creation than a reality.
I have been especially impressed by his writings on the Middle East. That’s where he really shines, where’s he’s spent half his professional life and where he really knows what he’s talking about. He was the only writer or commentator that could even make me come close to considering the validity of the US invasion of Iraq (though his reasons were completely different from Bush’s). He didn’t persuade me, but he could get me to listen, which, for me on that subject, is only slightly less of an accomplishment than parting the Red Sea
However he was as a person, I’m going to miss his columns. h isn’t really replacable. I’m going to mis his occasional appearances on Fox News as well. He could strip the paint off Hannity and O’Reilly like nobody else.
I suppose that brings us around to the question of who contributes more: nice untalented people or talented jerks? Hitchens seems to lean toward the talented jerk answer, and now that I think about it that’s consistent with his view of history and the world: he thinks history is made by the bold and not the nice. Is he wrong? Probably not.
Couldn’t agree more. I’m pretty much on the opposite side of the fence from Hitchens politically, but on the issues where we disagree he really makes me stop and think. And on other issues where we don’t disagree he’s wonderfully and authoritatively informative. He’s also a courageous person, whether in foreign lands, on foreign battle fields, or in his willingness to suffer the slings and arrows of the enemies he inevitably creates by virtue of his role as a polemicist. He’s a passionate man of a humanitarian nature and he speaks with integrity and conviction about the issues that concern him
I don’t know about how he behaves to underlings in the publishing business, but even if he’s a jerk in real life, the talents and thoughts and arguments he brings to the public stage make him just as valuable, and his loss, should he fail to beat the odds, just as great.
If he dies I will miss him a great deal, both as a writer and as a person.
No, that’s not it at all. You seemed to be saying that he deserves obscurity because of his personal issues. I think that is pretty much the definition of an ad hominem attack.
And…errrr, you were the first one to mention “genius” no-one else said it. Nor did anyone seek to excuse his bad behaviour because of it.
But ultimately, the quality of his work will live on long after the whisky fumes have died away. He may be a dick but he has the virtue of being right on many occasions and entertaining pretty much always.
Well, Goldberg had a copy of Hitch-22 on his lap and based some of what he asked Hitchens on it. He also mentioned at one point that he was asking Hitchens something because it was a question that people would want to know about.
Goldberg may indeed have been trying to make it look like a conversation between friends, but his remark to Hitchens was still out of place even so. I can’t imagine talking to a friend of mine who’d contracted an almost certainly fatal illness, and then challenging a throwaway line like Hitchens’ in the way that Goldberg did.
Frankly, I felt that Goldberg was desperate to be viewed as one of the big dogs, and was therefore trying too hard to appear curious, analytical, animated and intellectual. In other words, he came off as trying to appear to be one of the gang rather than someone who’d merely been granted temporary access to it.
I think you need to brush up on your logical fallacies.
I’m not deriding anything he has argued as being false because of his character issues. I’m not trying to invalidate anything he has said or written. I’m not saying he should not be taken seriously as an opinionmaker on a number of issues throughout the years. Saying someone is a jerk and should pay for it isn’t an ad hominem argument, although it sure may be mean-spirited.
I’m saying there should be consequences for being an asshole, whether he is a pauper or a pope.
Mr. Hitchens’ career was little affected by his personal behavior. So, for that matter, has Naomi Campbell’s, whose looks and modeling career was not impacted by the fact that she’s a crazy jerk. I would have hoped that society would dole out some consequences to such people, and I also would have hoped that the people would reform themselves to practicing a mere bit of decency to other people around them.
So you agree with me that there is no excuse for his bad behavior?
Well, we don’t know the particulars of it, for one thing. Perhaps your friend was being a tad too officious or maybe going a bit overboard in dealing with his celebrity author (and I’m not saying that he did, only that it’s a possibility). But I do know that Hitchens seems to routinely offer in both his written and spoken pieces more attribution than anyone else I can think of - so much so in fact that can become distracting at times. So it seems unlikely to me that Hitchens would be likely to object to reasonably expected fact checking on the part of his editor.
Then there’s the fact that I haven’t heard nor read of his behaving that way before. I would think that, given the huge number of detractors he has, behavior of this sort would be fairly well known. Even Vanity Fair, a magazine that seems to have no trouble making between-the-lines asides about its difficulties with the writers and other personalities it features in its magazine, has not to my knowledge ever indicated that Hitchens is difficult to work with.
I do recall an episode on Bill Maher’s show though, where Maher persisted in asserting a point that Hitchens disagreed with, and finally Hitchens raised a brow, gave Maher a knowing look, and said: “Caution. Contents under pressure.” In other words, “If you don’t drop it, I’m going to eviscerate you and make you look like a total fool in front of your audience…and we both know I can do it.” Maher wisely took the hint and let the subject drop. So who knows, perhaps your editor friend just happened to catch Hitchens at a time when he was under undue pressure of some sort. We don’t know. But I’m not willing at this point to consider Hitchens an utter ass based upon this one anecdote only.
In other words, “If you don’t drop it, I’m going to eviscerate you and make you look like a total fool in front of your audience…and we both know I can do it.” Maher wisely took the hint and let the subject drop. So who knows, perhaps your editor friend just happened to catch Hitchens at a time when he was under undue pressure of some sort. We don’t know. But I’m not willing at this point to consider Hitchens an utter ass based upon this one anecdote only.