Just because there’ll never be another one, you should read Christopher Hitchens’ final column for Vanity Fair: on the eve of Charles Dickens’ bicentennial, a look at the contradictory impulses inside Dickens’ own heart and how they influenced him as a writer and as a human being. It’s probably not the last shot across the bow one might have expected from Hitchens, but it does leave you wanting a little bit more. Clever bastard.
You can’t ever accuse Christopher Hitchens or Penn Jillette of not telling you EXACTLY what they think. I hope the same could be said of myself, but I will leave that for someone else to judge. I don’t agree with Hitchens or Penn on much politically — Hitch continues to espouse a flavor of neo-con that gets more and more twisted as time goes by, and Penn is too libertarian for me — but every time I come across one of them talking or writing about having to deal with religious people, I find myself in firm agreement. Here are a couple of examples:
Recently, I linked to a post by historian Adam Hochschild about the historical parallels between the First World War and the Iraq-Afghanistan War. Last week, Christopher Hitchens reviewed Hochschild’s new book in the New York Times. There’s also an excerpt from the book, if you’re interested.
Required reading:
This Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross hit the web yesterday. Let’s hope it does for her career what the VF profile of General Stanley McChrystal did for his.
Jane Mayer’s profile of the Kochs, David and Charles, in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago also helps to put a little sunlight on the monsters behind the Tea Party. If nothing else, it shows that Rupert Murdoch isn’t the only evil supervillian trying to take over the world. Now we just need a real-life James Bond to take these motherfuckers out.
Matt Taibbi is up to his usual snuff with a Rolling Stone post about the recent primary elections and the influence the Tea Party did and did not have on the outcome, and the insidious race-baiting of Murdoch’s FOX News.
Christopher Hitchens proves that he isn’t dead yet by giving the ol’ one-two to the Beckapalooza of last weekend. As infuriating as he is, we are going to sorely miss Hitch when he is gone. (If you’ve got the time, I also recommend this long video featuring interviews with teabaggers at the Beckapalooza for an up-close-and-personal look at the terminally stupid)
The always-funny “stupid customer” website Not Always Right.com had a little precautionary tale about what happens when teabaggers show up to vote.
And here’s a little history lesson about the origins of the Tea Party and its ilk:
Here’s a handful of things I wanted to share with you that didn’t seem to fit into posts of their own:
Everybody’s linking to Christopher Hitchens’ article in the newest issue of Vanity Fair wherein he talks a little bit about his recent diagnosis of esophageal cancer. I think it’s pretty impossible not to have a love-hate thing about Christopher Hitchens, because he manages to hold extremely contrasting opinions on a variety of subjects and argues his case so vehemently regardless of the side he’s on, but anytime someone has to come to terms with the suddenness of their own mortality and can do so in such an honest and unflinching way, it deserves to be appreciated. Additionally, you might want to read Hitchens’ Slate piece about confronting his lifelong issues with alcohol that came out just before he learned that he had cancer.
In a similar vein, I liked this interview with Penn Jillette in the June Vanity Fair. No, there’s nothing wrong with Jillette, but he’s cut from the same iconoclastic cloth as Hitchens and is equally able to hold his own passionately on sometimes diametrically opposing ideas.
Here’s a good article from Esquire by writer Chris Jones about a fellow named Terry Kniess, who appeared as a contestant on “The Price Is Right” in 2008 and was the first person since 1972 to guess the price of his showcase exactly correct down to the last dollar. Even as it was happening, the show’s producers were sure Kniess was cheating, but they couldn’t prove it right away. Eventually they came up with some clues…but you need to read the story to get the whole thing. Additionally, I recommend this MetaFilter post from the time when the episode aired, which includes a lot of discussion and some other related links that help flesh out the whole affair.
Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has just published a new book called Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which tries to pare away the theistic/religious trappings of contemporary Buddhism to get to the philosophical core of Buddhism, which has a lot of non-theistic elements to it. This book review in the Manchester Guardian by religion writer Mark Vernon explains the root of Batchelor’s observations. Batchelor writes that the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism resonate with non-theism: the focus on self-reliance and self-awareness, the derivation of meaning from real experience, and the acceptance of the world as it is without supernatural explanations or magical beliefs. The book has drawn praise from none less than Christopher Hitchens, and has also been embraced by Harvard humanist Greg Epstein, both of whom should be familiar to readers of this blog by now.
A lot of my own approach to an atheistic worldview is similarly informed by those parts of Buddhism, though I would never consider myself a Buddhist in any way. I’m not sure how I feel about the effort to attach that to the touchy-feely humanist movement, but I can see where using the sort of arguments Batchelor is making about demystifying religious cultures certainly can be applied. Looks like this book and it’s predecessor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, are worth a read.
Papa Ratzi has been keeping a pretty low profile for a while, but he’s back in dutch once again over a couple of problems: first, one of his personal attendants was discovered to be buying services from a gay prostitution ring inside the Vatican being run by a Vatican choir singer. The attendant, who is also a prominent construction contractor in Rome, was being investigated for corrupt business practices, when investigators discovered him “ordering for delivery”.
And while that’s embarrassing, it’s the second item that puts those red-soled feet on the fire: the Pope’s own brother admits beating young boys in his church in Germany over a period of 30 years, and it appears that the Pope himself (during his tenure as Archbishop) played an important role in covering up the abuse along with a number of incidents of sexual assaults on boys by German priests.
You know things have gotten pretty bad, because the Vatican’s “Chief Exorcist” has publicly stated that “the Devil lives in the Vatican”. Of course, he also says that Harry Potter is the work of the devil, so he *might* be given to hyperbole, you never know.
Christopher Hitchens, always on the lookout for new ways to badmouth the Catholics, weighed in today with this fine screed at Slate. Money quote follows:
Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism!
ADDENDUM: Here is a less charged, more thoughtful, yet nevertheless very critical piece about this Pope from the British newspaper The Independent which I came across after writing this post. I think it puts Ratzinger into the broader context of the struggle with modernity that the RCC has faced since the mid-20th century, and even in the big picture finds him wanting.
ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM: Here’s Jon Stewart’s version on “The Daily Show”
Slate has a new piece by our old friend Christopher Hitchens which addresses whether or not John McCain is nucking futz. Hitch plays it a bit cagily, but for the most part seems to say that he, too, goes along with the conventional wisdom that McCain is a loose cannon and who the hell knows what might set him off. After all, McCain is the guy who called his wife a cunt in front of campaign staffers, and has been known to get physically violent and verbally abusive with his peers.
But the quote I wanted to share isn’t even about John McCain. It’s about former Republican senator from New Hampshire Bob Smith, who is probably best remembered by people outside of New Hampshire as the guy who quit the Republican party after his own failed presidential bid in 2000 and tried to run as an independent, then went back to the Republicans with his tail between his legs in order to claim a juicy committe chairmanship. He lost his re-election bid in 2002, but made noise about running for President again as an independent.
Aaaaaaaanyway, this was Hitchens’ appraisal of Smith:
He combines the body of an ox with the brains of a gnat. Indeed, if his brains were made of gunpowder and were to accidentally explode, the resulting bang would not even be enough to disarrange his hair.
Well, given the amount of plaster he has to use for that combover, it’s no wonder.
Writing on his favorite topic — drinking — our old friend Christopher Hitchens pretends to review this book about cocktails while opining on the provenance of the Negroni and stating his preference for the perfect number of martinis to drink at lunchtime.
I imagine after writing this and swilling down the prescribed two martinis (here I am reminded of my favorite Julius Caesar joke: Caesar walks into a bar and says “I’ll have a martinus, please.” The bartender says “Don’t you mean martini?” Caesar replies “If I wanted two, I’d ask for two!”), Hitch probably went on to write something nasty about Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, or Islamo-fascists.
Boy, nothing says Chanukkah like a nice baked ham, don’t you agree?
Today at Slate, good ol’ Christopher Hitchens sobered up long enough to write this diatribe against the celebration of Chanukkah. Apparently the Jews are self-loathing enough that they had the foresight to set up a holiday a century before Christ just so that the Catholics could spend 2000 years calling them “Christ-killers” , and generations of Jewish families could put up Christmas trees and call them “Chanukkah Bushes”.
And here’s the obligatory link to Adam Sandler singing the Chanukkah Song, just for laughs.
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