Audio recording of a message the late Christopher Hitchens left on my voice mail on November 24, 2004, in response to a note I had written him calling his endorsement of George W. Bush for a second term “bullshit.” My colleague Gabriel Voiles published my account of the affair on a website he was affiliated with at the time, which name now escapes my memory:

Me and Hitches Down by the Schoolyard

By Michael Lindgren



The past election has generally been viewed as having produced a level of ugliness and recrimination unmatched in our time. I can attest to this personally, because on Wednesday, November 24, former Nation columnist and recent neo-conservative convert Christopher Hitchens left me a threatening telephone message in response to a letter criticizing his endorsement of George W. Bush. I thought that a record of this exchange in a public forum such as this one might be an illuminating sign of the times.

Some background, perhaps, is in order. Hitchens’s column, which ran in the Nation of November 8th, is, it seems to me, a nearly incoherent rant laden with equivocation and delivered in a tone of stunning arrogance. He alludes vaguely to the “all-knowing, stupid smirks,” “sneers,” “paranoid innuendoes,” and “nihilism” of the Bush opposition before stating, of the Iraq war, “I am proud of what little I have done to forward this revolutionary cause.”

My response, quite frankly, was written more out of therapeutic venting than any hope of registering some level of dissent to this insanity. I should state that

although I accused Hitchens of waffling and equivocating and referred to his column as “bullshit,” there was absolutely nothing even tacitly threatening in my message. It was an expression of intense irritation, bluntly put, and equal in vehemence, I thought, to the tone of the piece that provoked it. On November 24 I received the following message on my answering service; for the full effect of Mr. Hitchens’s blimpish accent, the recording (MP file attached) should be heard:



Mr. Lindgren, it’s Christopher Hitchens calling you here. I get a lot of letters from uncultured idiots, as I daresay you can imagine, and I normally simply toss them. But I’m obliged to keep a list, and share it, of letters that might be menacing, or from people who are unstable or in some clinical condition, and one way I decide that is if they use, or resort to, four-letter words and sign it themselves — and you’ve just made the cut. You made the list, and it will be shared. I hope this is our last contact…but it might not be. Goodbye.



And following, my reply, by letter:



Dear Mr. Hitchens:



Thank you for your telephone message of Wednesday 24th, in response to my letter regarding your pre-election column in the Nation. I apologize for the use of the profanity, which I shall endeavor not to use, and I am sorry it frightened you.



It strikes me as amusing that you would respond to an expression of disagreement with a McCarthyite threat about “lists” of names being compiled and “shared” and so on. Regarding the denigration of my sanity, I do not agree that exercising the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment is a sign of mental instability.



Michael Lindgren



I have not since heard back from Mr. Hitchens. Obviously, I am alarmed at the idea of journalists going around and threatening people who disagree with

them with shadowy “lists.” I must say, however, that I also find the whole imbroglio really very, very funny, and also exhilarating in a strange way. Best of all, should I have further contact with Mr. Hitchens I can now tell him that he has “made the cut” on my list, and that it too is being shared.



Michael Lindgren

December 29, 2004

mike_lindgren@yahoo.com

The matter had a bizarre footnote. At Hitchens’s memorial in June 2012, his friend and Vanity Fair publisher Graydon Carter concluded his eulogy by quoting from Hitchens’s letter to me; I am referred to only as “the man” and “a man.” The whole thing really rather droll. /ml