Fair enough, and when you put it that way, my point about a decent lapse of time now strikes me as wrong. As a public figure (whether or not a public intellectual, on which point we differ), Hitchens is certainly fair game for criticism. And I certainly don’t recommend you start writing reverent encomiums to the recently departed (which I doubt you have any inclination to do…).

This blog is irreverent with respect to death. (Historians are generally speaking irreverent about death, otherwise it would be difficult to write anything honest about any dead person, and that’s usually who we write about.) The death of a writer makes it timely to write about him, and blogs are usually driven by current events and other commentary in the news.

Historiann, I agree with you that Hitchens on Michelle Obama was a lazy hit-piece, and a despicable piece of work at best. Certainly, his neo-con turn brought out the worst in him. Or, perhaps, allowed his former ‘allies’, now ‘enemies,’ to see what had been wrong with his approach all along (he loved to have ‘enemies,’ did Hitchens, and he was almost never fair to them). But back when he was a regular columnist for the Nation, pre-911 and etc., many an American liberal/lefty was more than happy to forgive him his rhetorical excesses, and to count Hitch amongst their ranks, and we never heard as how he wasn’t ‘really’ an intellectual.

What I mean is: why not say that Hitchens was a public intellectual who could be a real asshole sometimes, and who sometimes got it all really wrong? What is gained by saying, ‘Well, he wasn’t *really* a public intellectual at all, of course, since he got X, Y or Z really wrong?’ That just makes it sound as though a certain stance toward X, Y, or Z is a litmus test for ‘intellectualism,’ really, which the public may not stand for, you know, and the next thing you know: you’ve got Rush Limbaugh as ‘public intellectual,’ which is ten times worse than Hitchens, surely.

I don’t think it’s true that he had no intellectual values, btw. I think he was anti-totalitarian all the way, to the best of his lights and his abilities (which sometimes failed to meet his somewhat exalted notions of his own self, admittedly). That anti-totalitarian streak underpinned his atheism (and it’s not nothing to stand for atheism in contemporary America, I think), and also his post-911 neo-con turn (he made the mistake of thinking that a loose coalition of non-state actors should and could be equated with a modern nation-state: that was the substance of his ‘Islamo-fascism’ = Nazism error, and it was pretty serious mistake, I believe, and a major violation of Godwin’s law).

But his public debates over the existence of God are enough to place him in the category of ‘public intellectual,’ so far as I am concerned. Do I believe that an academic philosopher in the pro-existence of God camp, such as Alasdair Macintyre, say, would have been quaking in his boots at the thought of debating Hitch? No, not really, not at all; but I’m pretty sure that’s not really the point. And I’m struck by how many Christians against whom Hitchens directed his ire and his snark have only good things to say about him (though not about ideas, naturally enough). ‘We think he was wrong [and we pray for the eternal repose of his soul, and etc.], but he talked to us, we had something of a rapport, he argued with us only because he took us seriously.’

Also, dude died of cancer, and suffered greatly for about a year before his untimely death, and it’s unseemly, imho, to do any sort of “gotcha” for three or four months afterwards at the very least. Myself, I’d want to think that his soul was safely at rest, just a matter of common decency…

Here are people I would put in the category of public intellectual who have no connection whatsoever to graduate school or the academy, as far as I know: Frances FitzGerald, Joan Didion, Laurie Garrett, Chris Hedges, and hell–even Hunter S. Thompson, in his day. (This is just a handful of people at the top of my mind now–I’m sure I could list 20 given more time to think.) All of these folks have written book after book based on solid reporting and serious reflection. Opinions will vary about the quality of Hitchens’s work–maybe some of you like it, I don’t know. But I thought Lind’s point that being a public intellectual requires more than peddling gossip and writing “contrarian” hit pieces on contemporary celebrities was a worthy one.

What did Hitchens stand for, aside from heavy drinking, gossiping, and (in the end) atheism? Call me a snob, if you like, but that’s not really a coherent intellectual agenda.

I guess what I’m saying here (like Mary Catherine above), is that I’m a little suspicious of the attempt to withold the label of “public intellectual” from someone, such as Hitchens, who wrote books, essays, spoke in debates, and generally successfully engaged readers on the issues of the day, simply because he did not conform to our academic standards regarding the production of knowledge.