All of us who scrutinize North Korean affairs are preoccupied with one question. Do these slaves really love their chains? The conundrum has several obscene corollaries. The people of that tiny and nightmarish state are not, of course, allowed to make comparisons with the lives of others, and if they complain or offend, they are shunted off to camps that—to judge by the standard of care and nutrition in the "wider" society—must be a living hell excusable only by the brevity of its duration. But race arrogance and nationalist hysteria are powerful cements for the most odious systems, as Europeans and Americans have good reason to remember. Even in South Korea there are those who feel the Kim Jong-il regime, under which they themselves could not live for a single day, to be somehow more "authentically" Korean.
I was awoken this morning by the news, that I had been bracing myself for the past several months, of the death of Christopher Hitchens. He was my hero, and a great man. Great not because he stuck to his beliefs and opinions even though they might offend some, but because of how he arrived at those views. Any tinpot polemicist can hold their views no matter what (and what a poor polemicist they would be if they could be convinced to change their mind), but Hitchens was a true intellectual in the most original sense of the term. His was a talent that will be sorely missed in this world. He was brave and courageous, insightful and thorough, passionate and above all a fantastic writer. It is that last strength of his that makes me hesitate to finish the rest of my points in prose. So instead I will list them below.
-Hitchens force of intellect jarred me out of a complacent mild de facto atheism into 'coming out of the closet' as it were, as an out and proud atheist.
-He made some of the best and most forceful arguments in favor of the power and responsibility of a free press and the power of free speech in a society that wishes to call itself free:
-I will, so long as I am on this earth, regret that I never had the honor of meeting this great man in person. I am consoled by the fact that it will take me years to read through all the work that he has bestowed to the rest of us.
-He recognized the power and smoothness of Johnnie Walker Black Label. A lesser man like Churchill limped by with Red.
-If one were to boil down what animated Hitchens throughout his whole career, it would be a resistance to and fight against totalitarianism and arbitrary authority. Be it the British monarchy, religion, god, Mother Theresa or dictatorial despots, he hated nothing more than unelected and unaccountable power. On that last point, how fitting it is that he died the week that Americans withdrew from Iraq. Given his love of literature, I am take comfort in the belief that the correlation did not escape him.
The sad truth of such powerful writers is that, through they wield influence and attention in their prime, they often quickly fade from the scene. I beg of you, please do not forget this man. Do not forget this lessons, his opinions, and his writings. And through you may not like where his thinking led, please do not forget how he got to those opinions.
Hitchens provides a lesson to us all - think for yourself, and let no man shake you of what you believe to be right.
Christopher Hitchens is nothing short of my hero and idol. I'll have more to write later, but for now I will leave you with the kind of eulogy Hitch deserves:
When it comes to metaphors for the inability for Congress to function properly, I don't think you could come up with one better than this:
Due to human error, the House on Monday and Senate on Tuesday both passed a pipeline safety bill all right, but an earlier version of the bill — not the final bipartisan, bicameral compromise.“There was a House clerical error and we expect the correcting resolution to be approved in the House and Senate without issue,” said Caley Gray, a spokesman for Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who was a lead author of Senate pipeline safety legislation this year. The Senate was the one that discovered the error, Gray added.
Somehow both bodies rose above their usual stubbornness, and yet only achieved incompetence.
Romney is confronted, face-to-face and on the same level, by a married gay veteran:
It's one thing to mindlessly repeat he vapid mantra that 'I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman' to a camera or an audience. It's a far different experience to tell a gay man, and a veteran no less, to his face that he should be a second class citizen because of what 'I believe'.
When I was a teenager, my parents and I went to Rome for a week and a half at the end of my summer break. It was a great end to a summer before the school year began again, and it was also a good time to get out of New York (this was during the 2004 Republican National Convention). Like all tourists, we went to the Vatican. My mother made sure to mail a few postcards in order to have them stamped with that Vatican stamp, and of course we toured St. Peter's Basilica. In there, they had set aside a small room for quiet prayer. I went in to take a look around, repeating the mantra "There is no god" under my breath. That was my snotty teenage act of resistance to the violent religious iconography around me. This was Tony Perrottet's:
This revamped library, I discovered, was even Wi-Fi-enabled, so I logged on to my laptop and did a Facebook update, announcing that I had penetrated the Holy See.
At the age of 9, I was kicked off my home church’s team of altar boys because I couldn’t get the Mass choreography right. Now, something about being in the belly of the Vatican brought out the schoolboy in me. I logged on to youtube.com, and saw that even here in the Holy See, I could start streaming HBO’s raunchy series on the Renaissance Papacy,The Borgias: One scene labeled “hot sex” between Juan Borgia and Sancia looked promising.
A friend emailed back: “I dare you to log onto youporn.com.”
I looked around furtively. I was sitting in the last row of desks. At the click of a mouse, up sprang an eye-popping scene of acrobatic copulation.
