Prick the Bubbles, Pass the Mantle

"There are an awful lot of bubble reputations floating around," Christopher Hitchens once told Brian Lamb. "One wouldn’t be doing one’s job if one didn’t itch to prick." That was some time before he rose to his eventual prominence, but it was a bubble-pricking habit that took him from the pages of the left-leaning Nation to the glossy pages of Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair. He was a famous, or infamous, pricker of so many bubbles — Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and, most notably, God himself — and of bubbles with such shining reputations that it earned him a reputation as a latter-day sacred cow slaughterer. When interviewing Hitchens for Newsnight, Paxman said of his interviewee that no matter how tough the hide, "if he wants to he'll sting it." Seems like an accurate assessment.

One of Hitchens idols, though he professed not to keep any, was George Orwell. Anthony Lock makes the case for Hitchens (one of my own 'idols') as Orwell's successor:

Hitchens was known to dismiss claims to Orwell’s mantle by listing Orwell’s struggles both in life and as a writer, claiming no desire for either. Nevertheless, it seems that he was incredibly happy to receive such a comparison, and his love of Orwell was so strong that it would be dippy to say that he wouldn’t have felt some verisimilitude for such a title. But his personal concerns about “being one’s own thinker,” and even humbleness when comparing himself to Orwell would have been fighting with him on this. Still, Hitchens deserves the mantle of Orwell simply because his contributions to thought have been the most Orwellian since Orwell. There are many who have employed the blueprints Orwell gave us, but the simple practicality of Hitchens’ “pricking bubbles” principle, whether it be applied by voters, politicians, academics, or bon mot-spilling essayists, is one everyone, everywhere needs to know dearly.

(Image: Charlie Hopkinson)