Well, I guess no one else could have said it better than the prodigal pro. Pithy, accurate, unforgiving and no punches pulled. The great thing is that Hitchens wasn’t speaking only about the harm that the now dead Falwell had perpetrated during his lifetime. He indicts the whole living hypocritical brigade that continues in the same vein. In an interview on CNN lasting only a few minutes, Hitchens invokes conscious charlatans, evil old men, Elmer Gantry, Chaucerian frauds … and more. The most interesting thing I heard was that unlike other skeptics, Hitchens doesn’t even give Falwell and his ilk the benefit of the doubt that they really believe(d) what they say. He describes Falwell as akin to any other huckster and bully who "woke up every morning pinching his chubby little flanks and thinking, " I’ve got away with it again!" [link: 3 Quarks Daily]
May be I will buy Hitchens’ book after all.
Update: Here is a hilarious article from Slate’s recycling bin describing Jeffrey Goldberg’s meeting with Jerry Falwell. Goldberg wanted to find out if he as an adult male Jew, could possibly be the Antichrist. Falwell had claimed (as have many other evangelical Christians) that the feared beast, A.C. is Jewish and alive in today’s world.
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “Christopher Hitchens on Jerry Falwell”
I still haven’t got past George Galloway’s dismissal of Hitchens as a drink-soaked popinjay, but all your marketing has persuaded me that there might be some redemption at hand for the ‘popinjay’, disreputable as he might be after selling out to the far-right crowd.
To mullahs, madrassas, Christian or Islamic, ayatollah Falwells and the like, I propose a toast “Peace (indeed) be upon all of them!”
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Galloway and Hitchens come from the debating tradition of British public schools – inimitable in throwing well placed barbs. Which is why the confrontation between Gorgeous George and Hitch, the “popinjay” was so enjoyable.
I am not marketing Hitchens. He has disappointed me too much on Iraq by getting into bed with the right wing nasties although I must say in his defense that Hitchens had been clamoring for Saddam Hussein’s head long before Bush-Cheney hatched their diabolic war plans. He wrote extensively about the gruesome fate of political dissidents in Hussein’s Iraq. But the purity of his purpose does not absolve him of the role he played in supporting an illegitimate enterprise.
Since Hitchens is too stubborn to recant and repent for what he did on Iraq, he may have decided that the god/religion debate may be a good platform for him to redeem himself with the liberals. It is a tightrope he is walking. I don’t know that he will be forgiven so easily. He is as unpredictable and complicated as he is entertaining. For example, even during his support for the Iraq war and the neo-con warmongering, he stood steadfast in his opposition to the Israeli hawks and their right wing supporters in the US. I am just glad that Hitchens has entered the religion forum because no one (except perhaps, Galloway) can skewer the opposition as mercilessly as he can. But like him, we too can pick and choose what suits us. So we’ll listen to him when he talks about hypocrisy and falsehoods of religion but not on Iraq. (Hitchens by the way, is opposed to any adventurism in Iran.)
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