Perhaps it is because I (and other residents of the District and, indeed, almost everyone in America) have been protected by what has become a comforting layer of incompetence that covers everything he does like a bulletproof vest whose actual purpose is to protect everyone around the wearer.

Or maybe it’s because he’s never here and is busy inflicting himself on the patrons Palm Beach County’s Mar-A-Lago retreat for the super wealthy.

More likely though, I have been deluding myself.

After all, I have spent my career trying to make things better for this country. More specifically, I have spent more than a half decade helping to make tangible improvements in the lives of several groups working people in the DMV (that’s DC, Maryland, and Virginia). And this administration really has no time for that kind of thing. Insofar as they have an interest, it is in seeing that kind of work stopped.

Because his comforting incompetence has stalled so many of his priorities (so many of them hilariously and depressingly opposite from those he campaigned on), I haven’t had to think too much about the ways they would devastate the lives of my friends, my family, my neighbors, etc.

I assume the United States of America will survive this. It seems an article of faith. We survived a Civil War. We survived moral blights like chattel slavery, Japanese internment, and a mixture of accidentally and deliberately genoicidal actions towards native peoples, and while we didn’t come out as well as we might have hoped, we did come out a little better, surely. Of course, that ‘we’ is a white people ‘we.’ A reminder of an easily slippery slope. unless you somehow think American Indians came out better for my ancestors arriving and eventually founding this country, in which case, you are too stupid for me to even bother trying to sell you a bridge or mineral rights of a magazine subscription.

That easy slope is why he is so dangerous, too, right?

And maybe I’ll be fine, because I’m white and male and straight. And maybe my person of color better half will be fine because she will be protected by my beneficent aura of whiteness.

Or maybe we are all simply f–ked.

The most recent (though probably not last) of the posthumously published collections of Christopher Hitchen’s essays lends itself to a sort of narrative arc, as the pieces inch closer to his terminal diagnosis with esophageal cancer and the reader’s mind naturally tends to see relationships (prophecy?) between his death and the chronologically later essays.

As someone who spent the first five years of the new millennium as a professional political campaign professional, the political essays around the 2004 election and shenanigans in Ohio were a painful reminder of a time that, until my memory was sparked, felt very long ago. Pleasingly, those and other discussions of then current events from the middle of that decade did not feel as dated as they could have.

His book reviews – at their best, excuses for lengthy rambles that show off, but provide the best platform for Hitchens ‘holding court’ – are the highlights, especially the long ones on biographies of Che Guevera and V.S. Naipul (Hitchens shows off his Britishness by referring to him as Sir Vidia).

It’s no secret that Orwell was a touchstone for Hitchens. As an essayist, he is often compared to Orwell; and I have often heard Orwell described as the great English essayist of the twentieth century.

But what have you read by Orwell? I’ll wager, gentle reader, that it doesn’t extend beyond his best known novels, 1984 and Animal Farm. And if you have read an essay, it was probably that short one he penned on the proper way to make tea. While an admirable tidbit, hardly what reviewers are referring to when they praise Orwell the essayist.

My point is related to a question that came to me when Hitchens died: how long will be remembered?

Having not written a pair of timeless novels, who will read his essays, beyond a handful of academic scholars, in twenty years? His reach will be less than that Edmund Wilson wields today (which, let’s not kid ourselves, isn’t much). His book length works are too timely, methinks. Maybe Letters to a Young Contrarian will be read, but it feels to self congratulatory to me to be the source of long lasting, posthumous relevance.