Rosebud…
So, a while ago I wrote about how much I loathe Glenn Beck, CNN’s odious news commentator and radio talk show host. Today I want to draw attention to his exact opposite, the greatest man in television and print journalism since Hunter S. Thompson went out like a man, Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens.
Now, many of you are saying, “Vanity Fair? How lame!” But trust me, Hitchens is awesome. He combines Winston Churchill’s gift for language and penchant for drunkenness with George Orwell’s ability to cut through the bullshit that oozes from political discourse and call it like he sees it, all with a British accent that makes you just believe, if you forget where and when you are, that he really could be one of them.
His finest moment, so far as I can tell, came after the death of Jerry Falwell, an oddly famous revivalist preacher who had been spewing religious hatred and quasi-Biblical bullshit since probably the Harding administration. As is our national custom whenever someone remotely famous dies, all five or six 24-hour cable TV news stations went into mourning mode, satisfying our inexplicable need for vicarious grief. Even the likes of Anderson Cooper, CNN’s implacable Scud stud, took to speaking in hushed tones of the man as if he could hear from heaven and smite anyone not sufficiently reverential.
Hitchens was having none of it. He came right out on Cooper’s show, apparently drunk, and spent the best part of five minutes lambasting Falwell to no end, calling him a fraud and charlatan who was too dumb to even read the Bible, let alone preach the Word. Cooper tried to soften the tone a bit by asking that Hitchens be respectful of Falwell’s family in their hour of mourning, but The Hitch was just like “No. Fuck his family. Those assholes lived the high life because of Falwell’s crap, and they deserve whatever they get.”
It was the type of unremitting and eloquent bombardment of bitter abuse that you’d imagine Winston Churchill was capable of when on a bender in the presence of some vegetarians or something. Hitchens gave no quarter in slandering the dead man for all he was worth. It was spectacular.
COOPER: Do you believe he believed what he spoke?
HITCHENS: Of course not. He woke up every morning, as I say, pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, I have got away with it again.
COOPER: You think he was a complete fraud, really?
HITCHENS: Yes.
Hitchens is also one of the very few public figures to discuss candidly and calmly America’s options in Iraq. Most of the discourse on this subject that you will see, particularly on TV news, comes from party sycophants repeating hackneyed catch-phrases, whether they be “troops home now” or “support the troops,” or whatever, that convey little real understanding of the situation there and the likely consequences of the several courses of action open to us. Hitchens doesn’t do that, and that alone puts him a cut above the rest.
Like Winston Churchill, he’s also an unrepentant drunkard, which is uncommon in this day and age. He once declared that his daily intake of alcohol was enough “to kill or stun the average mule.” I suspect that he has taken more out of it than it has out of him.
My other favorite newsman is Carl Strock, who writes a column called “The View From Here” for my hometown newspaper, the Schenectady Gazette.
Nothing gets by Strock, and when he gets a hold of some issue or cause he latches on like a pit bull and doesn’t let go until the person or organization relents and does whatever he says. He does extensive research behind the scenes before he publishes the first word – something you’d think most newsmen would but seemingly few actually do – such that in the weeks after his initial column, when a bunch of morons write in to the editorial page with objections to his position, he just shoots them down like ducks in a bucket. Every time he states something controversial but unquestionably right, I and thousands of other readers think, “Huzzah! Here it comes!”
One of his favorite things is creationist baiting, where he will debunk some obvious creationist myth like “thousands of scientists believe that the Earth was created on October 23rd 4004 BC at 9 am” by pointing out that only two scientists have ever said anything like that, both were meteorologists, one was schizophrenic, and the other has spent the rest of his career claiming that he was misquoted. The whole thing is pretty airtight, but the editorial page of the Gazette, which will publish anyone including me, invariably spends the next few weeks printing half thought out replies that Strock systematically demolishes.
Another example is the case of a woman who left two young children at home in the care of their 12 year old brother while she went to the store or something. Alerted by a busybody neighbor, child services immediately moved in and took the kids away, alleging neglect. Strock smelled the bullshit right away and spent the next month or so laying into child services, calling them kidnappers and morons and whatnot and demanding that they give the children back, which of course they did. That’s public service right there.
A real man doesn’t need a signature.