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Entry: Hitchens' Hubris Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris#2628 Post contents: Cut with a machete through Hitchens’ art of the wordsmith, puncture his bluster, take some sandpaper to his entertaining repartee and cute wit, and take any recording of his oh-so-proper rotund English accent (an accent that causes flat and nasal Yankee Anglophiles to swoon, and Anglophobes to be on guard) and play it on high speed to sound like The Chipmunks, and what do we have? Not much, and Mr. Piatak correctly awards this “Public” school lad his merited grade, a grade that resembles the shape of an egg. In my years as a schoolmaster, I’ve met many such adolescents. When confronted with an examination’s essay question about which they know nothing, the lower social classes (and the heirs of Nobility with titles going back to 12th Century) have the honesty to write nothing, and thus sadly merit a grade that resembles the shape of an egg. The Upper Middle Class, the Grand Bourgeoisie, and nobility by letters-patent, when in a similar circumstance, habitually write yards and yards of prose – most of it well-written, much of it clever, and some of it witty – and all of it still nothing, and thus meriting the same grade, not only because it is nothing, but also for wasting the examiner’s time and not sparing the tree that provided the paper. To this nothing Hitchens’ adds his Two Minutes Hate. So fierce indeed is Hitchens’ temper tantrum against Christianity that I suspect, however self-confident he may appear, that his purblind hatred is in fact the product of a deep, penetrating fear – a fear shared by his fellow village atheists, who have not been shy this year to mount crates at the publishing world’s Speakers’ Corner. That fear is a fear of Islam, a religion on the march. The mindless strategy of these panic-driven men is to open fire instead on Catholic Christianity, probably because some adherents of Islam simply would undertake to treat Hitchens as it has Rushdie. Ought we call him a coward and a poltroon? Maybe that’s below the mark. In his (desperate) defense: Is it true that he opposes killing children (“abortion”)? Is he an Orwell fan? Well, as Anna Frank liked to say, there’s a little good in everybody. Sent at: 2008 07 06