On Things Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens will no doubt put cancer in a chokehold and belittle it for a few more years before finally letting it have sway, at which point secular humanists the world ’round will be gnashing teeth, but before then, a poem by Roz Kaveney.

It’s going to be hard without this guy around. Not to bury him before he’s finished his Scotch, but I can’t help considering how strange it is to have reached the age in which the public figures I admire threaten to drop off. Previously, whenever I’d hear Don McLean’s “American Pie,” I’d think his sulking over passing celebrities was not befitting a grown man. Such indulgent sorrow over deaths of those who one does not know personally seemed to me the province of sentimental, woebegone housewives addicted to E! and white wine. When Kurt Cobain died, I, who loved his albums, was in thrall to the media coverage, but to be honest, on that day I was excited, not sorrowful. A prominent citizen in the sleepy backwater of my imagination–I felt a certain ownership, you see–had made national news. Local boy done good. (Only he done bad.)

But it’ll be different with Hitchens. To my meager lights he seems irreplaceable and too important to be allowed to leave. He ought to be stopped. We ought to write nasty letters to editors, interrupt our respective neighborhood associations’ meetings, and storm the medical research labs while demanding action, action, and still more action while promising bloody reprisals if we don’t get our way. Probably, someone should get working on a nice ballad, too. Just in case.