Hie Unto

Christopher Hitchens died of esophageal cancer; in an older, simpler time, we might've still blamed it on all the vile and poisonous nonsense he hacked up between great gulps of vile, poisonous sustenance.  He was never an especially good writer, which is why he crossed the Oxbridge to America, where accents are mistaken for intellect.  I read Why Orwell Matters, but I can't remember a single word of it; from the title, I suppose it makes the argument that Orwell matters.  I have it filed in my library alongside Harold Bloom's Shakespeare Was Important, Malcolm Gladwell's Noun: A Verb, and my dad's old Tom Clancy collection.  Apparently he was supposed to be some kind of iconoclast because he took some potshots at Mother Teresa, but the tipping of holy cows, like the tipping of actual cows, is better confined to a muddy adolescence.  He was supposed to be searing but was merely snide; his great intellectual trahison stank mostly of a mid-career MBA, a brief strategic necessity in order to pad the paycheck.  A person who uses a natty portmanteau like Islamofascism without a halfhipster of irony is not a writer.  As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt's impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company.  If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles.