Iraq War

Everyone is telling their Christopher Hitchens stories so here is mine.

I met him in Kuwait in the opening days of the Iraq war. We were in the same pointless scramble, trying to convince Kuwaiti border guards to let us cross into Iraq.

I said G’day and was sucked immediately into conversation. He laughed a lot. He was cock-a-hoop. The war was just as he wanted it. I was in a sour mood, tired after weeks in Baghdad, cranky at having been pulled out when we were the last Australian TV team there. I was bickering bitterly with Kuwaiti officialdom. Hitchens cheered me up.

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Christopher Hitchens is dying. That the 61-year-old’s body has finally given out after four decades of heavy smoking and drinking enough “to kill or stun the average mule” on a daily basis comes as little surprise to anyone, least of all the man himself. In an archly elegant and coolly analytical column for Vanity Fair, Hitchens has described how advanced his oesophageal cancer is and how he “can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair; I have been taunting the Reaper for into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

No doubt, the now near-mandatory beatification of deceased public figures that saw Princess Di transformed from (in Hitchens’ own clear-eyed description) “a disco-loving airhead” to the People’s Princess, Steve Irwin from a cringe-inducing national embarrassment to a beloved folk hero and Kerry Packer from a ruthless business titan to kind-hearted philanthropist in mystical communion with the common man will all too soon befall Hitchens.

It will be interesting to see what kind of obituaries will be written by those on the progressive side of politics and, in particular, how they deal with Hitchens’ refusal to toe the party line in recent years. For decades, the brilliant, acid-tongued Brit was one of the Left’s fiercest and most effective ideological warriors and that rarest of all beasts — a radical intellectual capable of engaging and entertaining a mainstream audience.

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