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"  I occasionally do despair of the younger generation. They often seem so reluctant to take their elders at their word. For the sheer magnitude of its horsepucky, this column may well stand forever. Generations yet unborn will come and read it, just to stare out of the magnificent vista of presumption, self-regard, and tinpot piety the way people bring their children to look at the Grand Canyon. It takes an unusual amount of juice-box hubris to put your thoughts in a dead man&amp;#039;s head. It takes towering presumption to put into a dead man&amp;#039;s head your thoughts with which he would scabrously disagree. Here, we have a New York Times columnist, a god-bothering newsboy on his best day, presuming to think \u2014 let alone speak \u2014 for a guy who is no longer here to think or speak for himself. Ross Douthat now stands as the Pope Stephen VII of letters, digging up the recently deceased and putting his corpse on trial in Douthat&amp;#039;s own, Colorforms version of the Cadaver Synod. I guess we can be grateful that Douthat only gums away futilely at his argument. Stephen threw the convicted remains of Pope Formosus into the Tiber. Douthat just tosses Christopher Hitchens&amp;#039;s corpse into the shallow end of his intellect. As I said the other day, I met Christopher Hitchens once, for three hours, 29 years ago. We did not discuss religion. As I recall, we discussed (at length) the use of American cluster-bombs by the Israelis on the populated areas of Lebanon, and we also discussed (at slightly shorter length) the just-a&amp;#039;borning futility of a corporatized Democratic party. This is as best as I can recall our conversation, as the afternoon grew longer and more liquid. By the end of it, as nearly as I can remember, we might have been talking about Richard Petty or the last album by The Clash. I am not a reliable witness. I suspect I am not alone in this regard. Therefore, I can&amp;#039;t say what may have passed at Washington dinner parties. (If, as a journalist, I can die still making that claim, I will die proudly.) However, if Douthat really believes the bizarre interpretation he has put on what Hitchens said, he must have been drunker than I was in Philadelphia that afternoon. But my strongest memory comes from a Washington dinner party two years ago, when he cornered me in the pantry and insisted on having a long argument about the Gospel narratives. The point he was particularly eager to make was this: &amp;quot;Suppose Jesus of Nazareth did rise from the dead \u2014 what would that prove, anyway?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a line whose sheer cussedness cuts to the heart of Hitchens&amp;#039;s charm. But it also hints at the way that atheism \u2014 especially a public and famous atheism \u2014 can become as self-defended as any religious dogma, impervious to any new fact or unexpected revelation.  (No, actually, Ross, it hints at the fact that you were asked a question you couldn&amp;#039;t answer. And, forgive me as a struggling Papist, but is there a &amp;quot;new fact or unexpected revelation&amp;quot; concerning Jesus Of Nazareth that I&amp;#039;ve missed? Other than Tim Tebow, I&amp;#039;m not aware of one. Did you get knocked out of a cab on the way to Damascus? Was there a new scroll dug up at Qum&amp;#039;ran? Did I miss an encyclical? And &amp;quot;sheer cussedness&amp;quot; Really? I&amp;#039;ve heard Hitchens described in a hundred ways since he died, but this is the first time he has been implicitly compared to Granny Clampett. Whooo, doggies!) Some of this reflected his immense personal charm, his willingness to debate with Baptists and drink with Catholics and be comradely to anyone who took ideas seriously. But there was something deeper at work as well. American Christian intellectual life is sustained today, to a large extent, by the work of writers very much like Hitchens \u2014 by essayists and journalists and novelists and poets, from G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis to W. H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, who shared his English roots, his gift for argument and his abiding humanism. (Strange how, when there&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;something deeper at work as well,&amp;quot; it inevitably conforms to what the writer believes in the first place. The authors he listed may sustain Douthat&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;American Christian intellectual life,&amp;quot; but millions and millions more American Christians are sustained by the Left Behind books and the pennyante scams of people like Rod Parsley. If Douthat wants to be smart and conventionally Catholic, he&amp;#039;s welcome to try, and I applaud his efforts. But the topic under discussion here is public atheism, not being British, an essayist, querulous, and a humanist -- and I don&amp;#039;t even want to think about Douthat&amp;#039;s definition of that last word. In that, the only relevant point in the whole column, Hitchens is no more comparable to G. K. Chesterton than he is to Paul McCartney or Sting.) Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens&amp;#039;s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and &amp;quot;Brideshead Revisited&amp;quot; surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.  (If so, then &amp;quot;many Christian readers&amp;quot; are morons and someone should apply for guardianship over their affairs immediately. Hitchens drove me crazy, too. His pursuit of the Clintons made him a sucker for every poolroom liar in Arkansas, and my buddy, Gene Lyons, knows all of them. His stubborn \u2014 dare I say, &amp;quot;cussed&amp;quot;? \u2014 support for the bloody mess we made out of Iraq is a horrid legacy to have, as is his blithe dismissal of the constitutional atrocities perpetrated by the administration with which he&amp;#039;d allied himself. This is not the way an American, to say nothing of an admirer of Jefferson, should think about such things. But, god above, I didn&amp;#039;t think he &amp;quot;belonged with me&amp;quot; just because he wrote well, and admired many of the same writers I did. I didn&amp;#039;t need him on my team, and didn&amp;#039;t feel any compulsion to &amp;quot;look for something deeper&amp;quot; that would put him there. Christopher Hitchens was an atheist, period. He&amp;#039;d have argued Evelyn Waugh into the ground over it.) Certainly he always seemed well aware of the extent to which his writings traded on the unusual frisson of saying &amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; to a supposedly nonexistent being. (Bullshit, bullshit, and, have I mentioned that this is, you know, bullshit? Hitchens didn&amp;#039;t say &amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;a non-existent being.&amp;quot; He said, &amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; to the people who believed in that non-existent being, like Ross Douthat and, I guess, me. I just don&amp;#039;t feel compelled to make a cheap parlor joke out of it after the guy&amp;#039;s dead.) In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin&amp;#039;s poem &amp;quot;Aubade&amp;quot; \u2014 that &amp;quot;death is no different whined at than withstood.&amp;quot; Officially, Hitchens&amp;#039;s creed was one with Larkin&amp;#039;s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair. My hope \u2014 for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead \u2014 is that now he finally knows why.  (First of all, Ross, James Joyce is on Line One for you. He&amp;#039;d like you not to use his best writing like a garden tool any more. You know why religious people &amp;quot;felt a kinship&amp;quot; with Hitchens. It wasn&amp;#039;t because he never gave in to despair at the end, or because of how much he reminded them of C.S. Lewis. They felt a kinship because he wrote well. The people who knew him, many of them, felt a kinship because he was a good friend. And that cheesy last line, the one you cribbed partly from The Dead and partly from every cheap ironist on Facebook? That infantilizes not only Hitchens&amp;#039;s life, but the way he came to die, as well. It is not your place to do that and, frankly, I don&amp;#039;t feel any compunction at pointing out that to do so is a sin.) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12106/ross-douthat-christopher-hitchens-6618992/>