{"id":12618,"date":"2011-12-16T10:34:17","date_gmt":"2011-12-16T15:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12618"},"modified":"2011-12-16T10:41:13","modified_gmt":"2011-12-16T15:41:13","slug":"reason-tv-christopher-hitchens-bah-humbug-on-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/16\/reason-tv-christopher-hitchens-bah-humbug-on-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Reason.TV: Christopher Hitchens &#8211; Bah, Humbug on Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OZJ0mo0r3zs\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2011\/12\/16\/christopher-hitchens-rip\/singlepage\" target=\"_blank\">Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. <em>Reason<\/em> extends its condolences to his wife, family, and friends.<\/p>\n<p>As is clear to anyone who has read even a sentence of his staggeringly prolific output, Hitchens was the sort of stylist who could turn even a casual digression into a tutorial on all aspects of history, literature, and art. As a writer, you gaze upon his words and despair because there&#8217;s just no way you&#8217;re going to touch that. But far more important than the wit and panache and erudition with which he expressed himself was the method through which he engaged the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/world\/article\/1103062--13-unforgettable-christopher-hitchens-quotes?bn=1#.TutVIId4q24.twitter\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Toronto Star<\/em><\/a> has a small collection of quotations which do give a sense of the man&#8217;s range and wit:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>5. About Sarah Palin: \u201cShe\u2019s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>6. \u201cIf you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>8. About Mother Teresa: \u201cShe was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>9. \u201cEverybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that\u2019s where it should stay.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>12. About Michael Moore: \u201cEuropeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they\u2019ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. I&#8217;m saddened to write that the great essayist and writer Christopher Hitchens is dead at the age of 62. He had been weakened by the cancer of the esophagus that he disclosed publicly in 2010 and the treatments he had undertaken to fight his illness. Reason extends its condolences to his wife, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,10,41,73],"tags":[345,622,200,293],"class_list":["post-12618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-liberty","category-quotations","category-randomness","tag-christmas","tag-ideology","tag-music","tag-obituary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3hw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12620,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618\/revisions\/12620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}