When Hitchens Was Good

How distant the world Christopher Hitchens departed in December 2011 seems today. The vice president, Joe Biden, was a spry and limber seventy-year-old, jogging around the White House with the tender-footed Obama, twenty years his junior. Donald Trump, still toiling in the kitsch world of reality TV, was about to resume hosting duties on the fifth season of The Celebrity Apprentice. There had as yet been no Snowden leaks, no Sandy Hook, no Pope Francis, no ISIS, no Maidan Revolution, no Ferguson, no Black Lives Matter, no Bataclan attack, no Charlie Hebdo shooting, no civil war in Yemen, no Brexit, no MAGA, no #MeToo, no Battle of Mosul, no pandemic, no George Floyd protests, no attack on the Capitol, no fall of Kabul, no King Charles III—all things Hitchens might reasonably have been expected to weigh in on for the Atlantic or Vanity Fair or Slate, or in a boozy and glowering appearance on Fox or MSNBC.