Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

[lektrode]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

ON CATS & DOGS

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god.”

—The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer, 2007


ON NEWSPAPERS

“Only the aspirants for president are fool enough to believe what they read in the newspapers.”

—C-SPAN, March 1988


ON MICHAEL MOORE

“The laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious, and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities,”

—MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, May 2004


ON JERRY FALWELL

“If [Falwell] had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox.”

—CSPAN, April 2009

thanks don!
altho they're all good...
these 4 sum it up for me = makes dave lettermans top10 lists seem almost irrelevant (not a reflection on dave)

[oddlots]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

Yes, great link. There are a lot of telling or poignant moments. I particularly liked Alexander Haig's sputtering denunciation of Hitchens. High praise indeed.

The moment that really hits home to me though is the episode with the transition from the Johnston administration to Nixon's. That seems like high treason to me.

That's not to say that the war in Cambodia or, indeed, the appearance that he extended the Vietnam war to further his power-lust isn't far more damning, but in terms of what might effectively destroy the man's stature in the eyes of Americans, that seems to me the prize here.

A good tribute to Hitchens (at least pre-Iraq.)

[BigBagel]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

He was a flame that burned bright.

[shiny!]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

“If [Falwell] had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox.”

Best belly laugh I've had in ages!

I hate cancer.

[Shakespear]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

Thanks LargoWinch for the "Let's put our feet on the ground" contribution. A reasoning mind will see through it all in retrospect.

[c1ue]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

Not a fan.

He seemed witty, but only in comparison to the pathetic state of MSM and most other media today.

Compared to even just his British predecessors, not so much.

And lastly his pathetic stunt with waterboarding showed that his 'tough guy' image was exactly that, an image.

C. Hitchens was sort of an amalgam of an American Hemingway character with stereotypical British intellectualism - a poor combination.

[Scot]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

Not a fan.

He seemed witty, but only in comparison to the pathetic state of MSM and most other media today.

Compared to even just his British predecessors, not so much.

And lastly his pathetic stunt with waterboarding showed that his 'tough guy' image was exactly that, an image.

C. Hitchens was sort of an amalgam of an American Hemingway character with stereotypical British intellectualism - a poor combination.

But Hitchens' comments always seemed to add, however small, a little to the collective intelligence. For some others, their comments subtract.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

jeff greenwald on hitchens

http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

long but worth the read

[Shakespear]

Re: Culture Friday: Christopher Hitchens is Dead

To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic.

That's why I like Greenwald.

Then this comment hits the bullseye,

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum” is, pardon me, rather intellectually lazy. You don’t give up your critical faculties just because somebody dies. Everybody dies. It absolves you of nothing.

PS: Looks like some people know the deceased rather well and find it necessary to take the position of the above comment.

http://coreyrobin.com/2011/12/18/yes...d-hagiography/