Let us exercise compassionate conservatism toward Christopher Hitchens -- by compassionately refusing to read his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving ourselves for more important tasks.You know, it has long been fashionable to criticize Christopher Hitchens for his appalling adherence to the gangsters of the Bush Regime, whom he for many years painted in the kind of bold, heroic tones we've not seen since the heyday of Socialist Realism. And while Hitchens is now trying to get back to where he once belonged to some extent -- washing his hands of a war whose failure he now blames largely on the anti-war left and instead shooting a few fish in the barrel of religious absurdities to regain his "contrarian" cred -- he has remained a much-reviled figure in quarters where once he was feted as a prince. (Indeed, no less than Gore Vidal anointed Hitchens as his successor -- but that was many years ago, and as we've seen, the indefatigable octogenarian shows no sign of needing a successor.)
But I think it's time to give over the rancor surrounding Hitchens. Let us exercise compassionate conservatism toward him -- by compassionately refusing to read his embarrassing outpourings, thereby conserving our eyesight and senses for more important tasks. I came to this conclusion after reading his piece in The Guardian in late May, a florid -- paean, I suppose he would call it -- to the literary festival in the small Welsh border village of Hay-on-Wye:
Shall I soon forget the time that the whispering limo came to pick me up, at about midnight from a dinner at the Amis/Fonseca house, and disgorged a driver who said: "It's time"? Through the flickering night we went, darting through an antique township or so, and crossing the Severn or the Bristol Channel at some point, until having been shown to a room in some stone-built hotel, I fell asleep only to wake to the sounds of bleating sheep. To this very day, I think of Hay-on-Wye as a place standing at some slight angle to the rest of the known universe: perhaps a sort of Brigadoon that isn't really there for the rest of the twelvemonth...
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