When Blowhards Are Right
Mar. 17th, 2010 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenChristopher 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. I spent an evening defending the idea that spending billions on new stadiums--New York teams have gotten, what, three in the last year?--is a complete waste of money and that the return on that investment will never materialize. The neighborhoods around the new stadiums were pissed. The stadiums featuring overwhelmingly expensive box seats have yet to sell well, much less sell out. By the time the cost of tax breaks and loans to build the stadiums are recouped--if they ever are--the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, etc. will be right there waiting for a new handout. That's what happens when you make such a disastrously large presentation of money: by the time you make it back, the stadiums it paid for will be out-of-date and in need of refinancing. (Or replacement.)
I am not kidding. I spent an evening trying to reason with moderate--not even psycho!--sports fans that this is a waste of goddamned money. I was dismissed in several ways. The "you don't like sports, so of course you're against spending money on it" is probably the most aggravating. Because I don't benefit from better schools in New York City, but that's where I'd have sent that money. Somehow that doesn't matter in arguing why I'm wrong to hate on expensive bullshit stadiums in triplicate. If I have a grievance, or a perceived one, against the area of investment I'm taking money from, it matters more to whether my opinion is biased than whether or not I benefit from the new area of interest in which I would invest that money. That's bullshit.
Then it was "Well, what would you spend it on that would generate as much money as the stadiums?" This is also a bullshit question because it supposes that the huge amount of money would have to be spent. It doesn't. We don't have to dole out tax breaks to George Steinbrenner so he doesn't up and move his team. (To where, I'd like to ask? Aren't the Yankees pretty much loathed by the rest of the nation? And aren't they too expensive for just about any city--provided it could overcome said loathing--to afford?) Meanwhile, the money we didn't spend could be used in smaller portions to fund, I dunno, better salaries for teachers; subsidizing the rising cost of commuting (before we get to an $8 round-trip subway ride); actually building something on Ground Zero; substantial architectural improvements to the city, its parks, and its entertainment spheres, places that make money besides sports and draw in just as many tourists, thank you very much.
No. Apparently, supporting those intangible benefits--better schools equal a better future for the kids in the city, but not necessarily in a way that fits on a ledger tally--is tantamount to pissing money away when there's profit to be made. I am skeptical that profit is to be made, a, and making people in New York happier is more important to me than generating said possibly zero profit margins, b. But I draw the line there with Hitchens. He can argue that countries go to war more for sports than for profit, sex, and glory combined on his own, thank you.
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
Well, I'm not with him on that. I spent an evening defending the idea that spending billions on new stadiums--New York teams have gotten, what, three in the last year?--is a complete waste of money and that the return on that investment will never materialize. The neighborhoods around the new stadiums were pissed. The stadiums featuring overwhelmingly expensive box seats have yet to sell well, much less sell out. By the time the cost of tax breaks and loans to build the stadiums are recouped--if they ever are--the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, etc. will be right there waiting for a new handout. That's what happens when you make such a disastrously large presentation of money: by the time you make it back, the stadiums it paid for will be out-of-date and in need of refinancing. (Or replacement.)
I am not kidding. I spent an evening trying to reason with moderate--not even psycho!--sports fans that this is a waste of goddamned money. I was dismissed in several ways. The "you don't like sports, so of course you're against spending money on it" is probably the most aggravating. Because I don't benefit from better schools in New York City, but that's where I'd have sent that money. Somehow that doesn't matter in arguing why I'm wrong to hate on expensive bullshit stadiums in triplicate. If I have a grievance, or a perceived one, against the area of investment I'm taking money from, it matters more to whether my opinion is biased than whether or not I benefit from the new area of interest in which I would invest that money. That's bullshit.
Then it was "Well, what would you spend it on that would generate as much money as the stadiums?" This is also a bullshit question because it supposes that the huge amount of money would have to be spent. It doesn't. We don't have to dole out tax breaks to George Steinbrenner so he doesn't up and move his team. (To where, I'd like to ask? Aren't the Yankees pretty much loathed by the rest of the nation? And aren't they too expensive for just about any city--provided it could overcome said loathing--to afford?) Meanwhile, the money we didn't spend could be used in smaller portions to fund, I dunno, better salaries for teachers; subsidizing the rising cost of commuting (before we get to an $8 round-trip subway ride); actually building something on Ground Zero; substantial architectural improvements to the city, its parks, and its entertainment spheres, places that make money besides sports and draw in just as many tourists, thank you very much.
No. Apparently, supporting those intangible benefits--better schools equal a better future for the kids in the city, but not necessarily in a way that fits on a ledger tally--is tantamount to pissing money away when there's profit to be made. I am skeptical that profit is to be made, a, and making people in New York happier is more important to me than generating said possibly zero profit margins, b. But I draw the line there with Hitchens. He can argue that countries go to war more for sports than for profit, sex, and glory combined on his own, thank you.
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
