Now, don't get me wrong, I love watching Christopher Hitchens. I used to watch his Youtube videos obsessively back in 2008-2009. But then I got tired of it.
Watching too much Christopher Hitchens can have diminishing returns. He's got a stock of zingers that he uses repeatedly. The first time you hear them, you think he's brilliant, but after hearing him over and over again, you get a bit used to it.
But, it had been a few years since my last Christopher Hitchens binge, and he had faded enough in my memory that I was due to re-discover him.
After watching a few more Hitchens videos, the Youtube algorithm served me up this one in which Hitches hosted CNBC Talk Live 1991. And it perfectly captures how charming and witty Christopher Hitchens could be.
In terms of content of the conversation, there's not a lot there. The two white supremacists just basically refuse to give Christopher Hitchens a straight answer to anything for 40 minutes. It feels like a waste of airtime in a way, but to be fair, I don't think that was Hitchens' fault. He appears to have thought that because these two called David Duke out for cowardice, they would at least be willing to stand-by their convictions, and he's as disappointed as anyone when they just dance around his questions.
But, what makes this video worth watching is all those classic Christopher Hitchens put-downs. Truly, the man was a master of the dry insult. I was chuckling to myself several times as I watched this. (Even though a few of these zingers I recognized as being part of Hitchens' stock repertoire, they are still deployed brilliantly here.)
Of course, the danger with idolizing this kind of rhetoric too much is that it can be used for evil just as much as for good. So, when Christopher Hitchens used his famous dry wit and brilliant sarcasm to promote the Iraq War in 2003, then it was less admirable.
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