When Blowhards Are Right

Christopher Hitchens is a prick. Even when I agree with him, I find myself hating just about everything about the way he makes his arguments. This article, for example, makes the case that the idea that international unity and fellowship is engendered by sporting events is complete horseshit. I'm as cynical as the next person who dislikes sports, but the way he states his case makes anyone who raises an eyebrow at the inordinate, unjustified waste of money on sports look like a total bastard. Question the orthodoxy, the common wisdom that money spent on sports = more money for cities/countries (in tourism and merchandise), and you're with Christopher Hitchens, claiming that the World Cup causes terrorism.

Well, I'm not with him on that. ( Very. Annoying. Assumptions. Debunked. )

So he's a jerk and one who wounds his fellows as much as his enemies. He and Stephen Fry took up the part of "The Catholic Church is Not a Force for Good" part of a debate, and Hitchens used Stephen Fry's sexual orientation as a weapon. I'm glad Stephen Fry is out and open and unapologetic, but that's an issue for him to use in debate, not the blowhard next to him. It felt uncomfortably like he was just returning to the meme "Stephen Fry's a queer! And you hate him for this thing you find disgusting!" And it came across as salacious and hurtful more than supportive.

Anyway, this long rambling introduction to Hitchens is just a prelude to this article he wrote about Pope Benedict XVI's culpability in the ongoing, ever-renewing, ever-being-revealed sexual abuse scandals. It's a tough but fair indictment of Benedict, not because he's a rapist, but because he protects them, shelters them within the church, and makes the only crime worthy of excommunication that of telling any non-church people about the abuses of the church. I admire the article most for his unapologetic description of abuse and how little he likes a word that covers up assault and rape--the word "abuse" being used to clean up the worst offenses is, indeed, a crime in and of itself.

My favorite turn of phrase, that made me find this article, which is not groundbreaking, news-worthiness-wise, is the following:

The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.

It's concise, beautifully stated in hard, uncompromising, literarily vengeful words. "Foulest inequity." Has there ever been a better phrase to describe this sex scandal, now decades in the offing? (And, their God alone knows, still being added to daily?)

I restate my opener here: Christopher Hitchens is a prick. But he can be right, so right.

h/t Savage Blog

A less ranting post

Okay, enough RAR-RAR-RAR-ing. Onto the stupid stuff I'm doing that nobody cares about either!

My father and I are still waiting on word that power has been restored. I slept better on the couch for being more tired last night and for having my sleep mask, but I still did not sleep well. And I'm nobody's friend when I've not had sleep and am awake against my will in the morning. ( It's almost over. Almost. )

More new developments:
-I have my vacuum cleaner! It's powerful, tiny, light, versatile, and loud as the roar of a car engine. I love it. It saves me time over sweeping and works better because the tufts of cat hair don't go wafting away on the breeze from sweeping! As soon as the guest cats are gone, I'll make a real go of cleaning my kitties' room proper with it. I'm ridiculously excited about that, not going to lie.

-I'm clearing out my e-mail at work because if I don't take a job at Columbia, I'll lose the account. For most people "cleaning out" means deleting. I've done some of that. But I'm mostly just forwarding everything--and I do mean everything--to my gmail account. I will probably never use it. But as feiran pointed out, I've had this account for ten years. Over the time I've had it, I forwarded most of the undergrad e-mails along, but there are still nearly five years of work e-mails, too. I can't bear to part with them because that's my life, you know? It's also potentially useful in the future. I wouldn't want to lose contact there. I'm also busy at rearranging registrations with places online that have used that account. As I go through e-mails, I keep discovering new ones to redirect. From 1000+ e-mails in the inbox yesterday, I'm down to 200+. Go Team Trinity!

-Someone's doing a Bebop rewatch on Tor.com!!! I gotta gobye...