On speaking ill of the dead.
There are days when the universe manages not to seem like a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. I’m permitting myself a small degree of encouragement from the interest that the general reading public has demonstrated over the past few years in books that are calling religion to account for its crimes and fatuities. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and now Christopher Hitchens have all moved boatloads of product with texts of this sort. Hitchens’s brand-new God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is No. 3 at The New York Times, and Dawkins’s The God Delusion–which appeared last September–reached the No. 1 slot at the Times and then remained at or near that wintry pinnacle for several weeks. Even now, eight months later, it’s fallen only as far as No. 17. And then what do you know but Jerry Falwell goes tits up, and I’m blown if I don’t notice in the media a somewhat more just appraisal of the reverend’s life and works than I had been bracing for. It’s true we’ve had to rely on Hitchens–both in a Slate column yesterday and also two nights ago on the TV with Gloria Vanderbilt’s boy–to carry the greater part of the load all by himself, but attention to Falwell’s more disgusting public pronouncements, his primitive eschatological lunacy, and general lowbrow hucksterism didn’t seem to be entirely lacking in the mainstream media. I had expected the major organs of American journalism to greet Falwell’s expiration with a wall-to-wall soft-focus affirmation of all that is faith-based–not that there wasn’t plenty of that: see, e.g., yesterday’s New York Times–but I was pleasantly surprised on the whole. Spring is here. The buds are on the trees; the lambs are in the meadow.
And I’m sure I’ll be better tomorrow. Here, meanwhile, is the clip of Hitchens with Anderson Cooper:
And here he is, appearing slightly the worse for drink, having his way with Sean Hannity:
