Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Hitchens's manner of mourning

Christopher Hitchens is, among many other things, the author of the new book-length diatribe "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything." (It was reviewed with great panache last week by Michael Kinsley in the NYT Book Review.) Hitchens has been given what he must consider a great gift for the publicity of his book by the death last week of Jerry Falwell, at age 73.

Unsurprisingly, he hasn't exactly been mourning the Reverend's passing. He did quite the contrary in Slate:

The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot."

He was also given a forum to hold forth in his inimitable way -- a combination of schoolyard pugilism with frightening extemporaneous rhetorical skill -- on Andersen Cooper's program on CNN. The video is here, and the transcript is here. Some representative excerpts:

The empty life of this -- of the little charlatan proves only thing -- that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses, to morality and to truth in this country, if you'll just get yourself called reverend.

...

Who would, even at your network [ooh], have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.

...

I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud.

And I think, if he read the Bible at all -- and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book -- at all -- that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way

...

Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man.

Naturally, the interview wends its way to a close with Hitchens saying "That's what my book is all about," to which Cooper says "The book is God Is Not Great."

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:15 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss