Like many on here, he was obsessive, and it doesn't take an expert to spot that.
Somebody with delusions of being a smartarse once asked Hitch - wearisomely, tiresomely, as do you on a regular basis - why he bothered to fight religion when he could be at home or out somewhere else doing something else. This was his reply:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRSS5IshjEhttp://goo.gl/1m2ET7That's the way to do it
And since when are you qualified to dispute it?
I'm qualified by virtue of not being a psychiatrist and thus not qualified to diagnose "serious psychological problems" (least of all in someone so polished, learned and urbane) and knowing that you're not one either.
As to his being vicious, then I am not surprised you find that endearing, since you are vicious yourself, no doubt based on his unpleasant example.
Yes, you're actually right - how incredible is that. What I took from the late, great Hitch probably more than anything else (and there was/is much) was the example of speaking the truth as you see it without fear or favour - of stating your opinion, as you as the citizen of a supposedly free, open (K. Popper) society are entitled to do, in the terms which present themselves to you, balls to the wall and bollocks to the lot of you, catch the barman's eye, in short
There'll never be another Hitch - the man was a gift to the world but, alas, one whose like we'll never quite see again - and I could never hope to touch the hem and all that; but if I took anything from him in recent years, like a slightly earlier but no less acerbic hero - I refer to the magnificent H. L. Mencken, almost as sour, cynical, misanthropic and have-at-you as I am - it was a certain, shall we say,
bullishness in argumentation which I never used to have when I first started out as a comparatively (only comparatively, mark you well) callow stripling all those years ago. In his debates and lectures there was a life-affirming, life-loving, joyous, take-no-prisoners, my-dick's-bigger-than-yours, fuck-you-royally-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on
駘an of which I never and never could and never will tire. Hey, sue me: he was a marvel and I can't not respond to anybody as brilliantly, gloriously, thrillingly devil-may-care obnoxious as that. Being
right was just the cherry on top of the Mr Kipling's cherry Bakewell. There's a good reason why "Hitchslap" has entered the demotic - search YouTube for details.
As anybody should know, debates are theatre rather than effective and reliable means of ascertaining truth, but in terms of theatre few, if any, ever did it better. He did vastly, vastly, vastly more than debate, of course - that goes without saying, or should, since the man did more (often in his own words pissed enough "to kill or stun the average mule") than twenty-five excellent minds all brilliant in their respective fields can do and do do stone cold sober. (His ability to toss off fifteen hundred or two thousand words of excruciating polish, elegance, clarity, cogence and brilliance, at breakneck speed, whilst hammered is and has been more than ably attested to. Details available on request). The man who may have given up on socialism but who remained a Marxist to his dying day never gave up on the dialectic, the thesis and antithesis, the point A and the point B, the point and counterpoint, the discussion, the debate, the discussion, and I hope I never will either until I am forbidden by circumstance. In his own inimitable words:
"Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence." He, tragically, is silent now - at least in terms of the spoken word, rather than the written word which lives on - but I think he'd be quietly satisfied that others have taken up the cudgels and in the name of the same causes that animated his once lithe and latterly portly frame while it was wonderfully with us
So in this case for once you are -
mirabile dictu - absolutely correct.
