The Right Coast

April 03, 2005
 
Hitchins the Catholic hating bigot
By Tom Smith

As anyone with a sense of humor should, I acknowledge Christopher Hitchens can be funny. And it's always nice when a man of the left distances himself from the worst mass murderer in history or allows that maybe the world's largest, oldest, most powerful and most free republic should defend itself against terrorism. By the standards of today's left, that makes him a paragon of good sense.

But the fact is, the man is a hate filled bigot, his target of choice being religious people, especially Catholics. His latest screed on the occasion of the death of the Holy Father reads like the rantings of an Oxford old boy well into his third bottle at the local wine bar. Reading his piece, one wonders, justly, what exactly does the no doubt unexemplary Catholicism of the long dead Vietnamese politician Diem have to do with anything? You can almost see Hitchens bent over his glass, muttering "Catholics . . . Pope . . . damn . . . . them" like some old Nazi muttering "the Jews." His talent with language makes it all seem a little more coherent that it is, but a moment's reflection reveals it as the boozey swirl of spite that it is. The only thing that connects John Paul, Diem, Bernard Law, and the Kennedys is the poison spinning around in Hitchen's brain. I'm surprized he didn't work in the Mafia and the Spanish Inquisition. He had better be careful nobody gets ahold of his CAT scan, or his allies may do to him what they did to Terri Schiavo.

Hitchins is a British type, and not the best that noble island has to offer, in my humble opinion. Body like a 50 gallon garbage bag filled with yogurt, drink and cigarette always in hand, belching vitriol (or just belching) at anything inconsistent with his tiny little take on the world. It doesn't look a pretty picture, and it's not. Putting himself out of his misery a little more every day. But I think sodden British faux upper class Catholic hating is as passe as what Germans used to call good old-fashioned Jew hating. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic here, but I think the widespread grief at John Paul's passing indicates an appreciation and acceptance of Catholicism and Christianity generally that is broader and deeper than ever before, in this country anyway. In Britain, who knows. They're not so big on the papists, what? In America, though, a tough time to be a good old fashioned Catholic hater. Somebody buy poor Christopher a drink. It brings a tear to me oiy.