Even when Christopher Hitchens is right, he’s wrong. A troublesome ailment which has become a full-flung affliction since his veer– well– rightward a few years ago. Perhaps it is better said that the more Hitchens is right, the more wrong he gets.
Take his latest Slate piece which calls to the carpet both the media and the general public’s response to the Virginia Tech shootings. Please. If this is the best the intelligentsia can come up with to address the feeble mawkishness and selfish displays of empathy that have become a national pastime in the wake of such horrific events then the idiocracy is more real than I thought.
Hitchens has the right idea, but his boorishness emerges in the details. A minister that counted 33 deaths is subject of ridicule for saying “we are all one.” But in some way we must be or we wouldn’t really care as we do when another human does something crazy and tragic. It’s the inherent empathy that we feel for each other that leads to the subtle fear of humanity’s tragic flaws… not out of fear that something could happen to us or our children (odds are better of getting struck by a meteorite), but that we could break in some similar, personalized way. And 33 people did die– if anything, Hitchens should be crying about how many people are so shallow as to only see the tragedy from a single perspective.
Another religious figure gets skewered because they found themselves walking around upset and then were comforted by the familiar sounds of nature. “Those birds were singing just as loudly and just as sweetly when the bullets were finding their targets,” Hitchens writes. Has he never found solace in a new appreciation for something previously taken for granted? Has he never found comfort in the everyday after a bizarre occurrence? Does a human heart beat beneath his slimy skin or even a hint of something better than the misanthrope in his donkey-like bray?
The birds may have been singing while the bullets were flying, but the point is both that no one at the time would be hearing them. And they remain. And they still matter.
