Many great HST memorials, but Hitchens blows it (again).

A lot of varied opinion and differing levels of appreciation and intelligent thinking on the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. The best included Gideon Yago on MTV’s site, which edged ahead of Kurt Loder’s piece on same for style and insight. David McCumber in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was good; same for William McKeen in the St. Petersburg Times, David Carr in The New York Times, the Boston Globe story/interview with Thompson’s lawyer offers some insight about how this came to happen, in addition to more insight, and finally — worth waiting the extra day for, definitely — Ralph Steadman in Britain’s Independent.

Of course, as might be expected, there was a lot of shameless, sub-par, crummy mock-Hunter fakery intended to honor his memory but which only profaned his achievement. Perhaps worst of all, though — worse, even, than the doltish imitation of the legions of witless fans who missed the point and the truth and the poetry, was the always-contemptible Christopher Hitchens. His crapulent extrusion turned up on Slate, which was surprising, since Slate’s usually a lot smarter, particularly about popular culture, politics and writing. Were all the good writers busy? Did Hitchens’s bolus of self-aggrandizing, off-point mumbling come over the transom?

Regardless of how it happened, it was certainly unfortunate; of all the people who could have written an obituary for Hunter Thompson, Slate had to make do with Hitchens's damp, flaccid squib.

At least this “effort” is in line with everything else the worthless sot has ever done; solipsistic to a fault, too long and yet perversely insubstantial:

“I, Christopher Hitchens, was in Aspen. I, Christopher Hitchens, was insufficiently inebriated. I, Christopher Hitchens, pointlessly shoe-horned Saddam Hussein into my lead. I, Christopher Hitchens, determined to become sufficiently inebriated, deigned to brighten Hunter Thompson’s day with my wobbling, doughy presence . . . [lucky Hunter]. I, Christopher Hitchens, shamelessly padded my word-count with flabby, meandering sentences that read like something from a 19th-century Grub Street penny-dreadful slushpile . . .”

Eventually, after 326 words about Hitchens, we get to the putative subject, and are rewarded with what may be the lamest entry in a crowded and mostly disappointing field. It misses the point of Thompson’s work and shows no evidence of appreciation for his journalistic abilities, reportorial diligence, analytical ability, insight, foresight, the places, times or people that Thompson was writing about or Thompson’s mastery of the language. Even if the political analysis was too cogent or incisive for Hitchens, you might hope he’d at least be able to appreciate that Hunter Thompson could write.

But I'm being unfair. How could we expect Mr. Hitchens to appreciate qualities in someone else’s work that are so glaringly absent from his own?

Fortunately, the Web and its contents and connections mean that there are plenty of obits that admirably accomplish what Mr. Hitchens couldn’t be bothered to attempt.

Where most of us familiar with that old SNL sketch line, “Yeah, but what does it mean to me, Al Franken?” recognize it for the joke it is, mocking extreme solipsism, Hitchens — not surprisingly — did not understand it was supposed to be a joke and apparently adopted it as his standard modus operandi.

Really, every single thing that oozes off Hitchens’s desk should begin, “I, Christopher Hitchens, regain consciousness . . .” Every scrap of ill-wrought yawp he extrudes comes with a built-in deniability option: “Urp . . . sorry . . . that must have been the booze talking.”

Unfortunately, that can’t be the case; booze would have been less tedious, more illuminating and more generous of spirit.

Montgomery Burns said it about U2, but it applies to Hitchens just as well: “Wanker.”