Paglia first met Hitchens in the 1990s when she was participating in a panel on the culture wars that Hitchens moderated.
“Hitchens was a total ass—nasty, devious, chaotic, and slippery in his thinking,”Paglia recalls.
“I despised Hitchens from that point forth. He was glib—not at all brilliant or knowledgeable.”
Paglia calls Hitchens as “ethically contemptible” and gets nearly apoplectic when she thinks about the chorus of praise that emerged in the wake of Hitchens’s death.
“Christopher Hitchens,” she begins, “is a person who poisoned himself and killed himself with alcohol and cigarettes, a person who partied his whole life, who couldn’t stand before a crowd without being drunk—this is not a model of how to live.”
