It was a tradition I was rather fond of: Once a year or so, like the turning of the leaves, my friend Christopher Hitchens would take aim at something I’d written. His most recent, just pointed out to me by an acquaintance on Facebook, is in the journal Free Inquiry.
Appearing under the less-than-charming title “Jewbaiter,” it attacks an article I wrote in the Weekly Standard about the recent round of Catholic scandals, and it somehow manages to accuse me of . . . well, everything under the sun, but Jewbaiting, most notably.
Ah, me. Christopher’s writing was always over the top, but his hyperbole always used to have at least some tenuous tether tied to reality. He exaggerated wildly, but his exaggerations were at least derived from the text he was attacking.
This, however, is just a plain, old-fashioned misreading. He couldn’t follow the figure I was using, so he lumped it into some handy category and wrote what he would have written if I’d said what someone else would have said if that someone had set out to be a straw man for the use of Christopher Hitchens.
It’s just too sad, and it makes my heart ache. He’s in my prayers.
September 15th, 2010 | 9:36 am
Well, your article did have passages like
Now, you don’t actually identify “one writer” or “another”, which would make it clear that neither Dawkins nor Hitchens actually wrote those passages. And while, when asked, Dawkins expressed support for the idea that the Pope should face legal questioning, he had nothing to do with trying to ‘arrange’ that. (Oh, and arguing that religion is
So when you write things like:
…without any actual quotes or analysis, I find it difficult to take you at your word.
September 15th, 2010 | 9:37 am
(Hit the dang submit button early.)
Arguing that religion is a source of evil is different from arguing that it’s the source of evil.
September 15th, 2010 | 10:37 am
The article does not even get the quote right! “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals” is transformed into “Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.” How hard is the copy-and-paste feature?
September 15th, 2010 | 12:11 pm
Hitchens is riding his high hobbyhorse into the sewer. It is a nasty way to live and an even nastier way to die. I attach my prayers to Mr. Bottum’s.
September 15th, 2010 | 1:04 pm
@Ray Ingles: Have you heard of the concept of “hairsplitting”? You might want to look that up. Perhaps when you are reading Ingersoll on Google Books?
September 15th, 2010 | 2:35 pm
Hitchens is an atheist. He hates religion and as he has said in the past,(I’ll paraphrase) it’s not just that he doesn’t believe in God but that he would be against any god that did exist. His antipathy is patholgic. What can one expect from such a brilliant and misguided contrarian?
As disgusted as I am about our scandal there seems to me to be an element of naivete about the whole thing, that is in the reaction to it.
It reminds me of the punchline of an old joke something to the effect of “you mean to tell me there’s gambling going on in there”. We are sinners, that is one serious charge. It seperates us from God which while we are alive can seem just a technical issue when in fact it is catostrophic and possibly fatal if not remedied.
No mature person, no matter how much they would wish it so, has ever believed that members of Christs Church are not sinners, all of us top to bottom and as true as this is for the Church it is true for the world at large. There is a bit of the pot and the kettle going on here as well as a lot of selective outrage given that, as you point out in your article and I have found in my own research, the incidence of abuse in the world is equal to and in all likelyhood greater than, by far, that in the Church.
That being said those who have committed these heinous acts or abetted them must be found out and punished or, as my reptilian self would have it, shot.
September 15th, 2010 | 2:44 pm
Wow, that’s really an egregious misrepresentation. It’s like he stopped reading after the first sentence of the fourth paragraph, assumed what he though you would say, and then wrote his attack based on that, without ever going back to see what you did write.
September 15th, 2010 | 3:00 pm
For years I have, as have many others, considered him an anti-Catholic bigot. On a moment’s notice one can easily come up with half a dozen or more published examples.
Why conservatives and the faithful befriend and defend him is beyond me. He is regularly vicious and insulting, typically without any basis. Notably, in the article he calls the Harvard trained historian and Pulitzer prize winning poet, Peter Viereck, a “mediocre idiot”.
In the American Conservative Tom Piatak, describing Hitchens as an unreconstructed Bolshevik, rightly notes that a “straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine”.
September 15th, 2010 | 3:07 pm
The road to hell is apparently not only paved with good intentions, but includes markers authored in magnificent prose by British expatriates.
September 15th, 2010 | 3:33 pm
Ingles,
Is it your assertion that Bottum (1) made up the quote or (2) he mis-attributed it to Dawkins/Hitchens?
(1)The quote is from Johann Hari (another darling of the new atheists) and can be found in about .23 seconds using Google.
(2)Note what Bottum actually wrote: “Dawkins, Hitchens *and the rest*” and after the quote “…opined one British writer” (presumably a clarification in case you might be thinking, well, what you were thinking.)
As for Dawkins and Hitchens having “nothing to do (beyond verbal support) with arranging…” a prosecution of the Pope before the International Court? Well there’s a problem. Nothing to do with it except hiring lawyers to do just that http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7094310.ece
So, strike three. And your point was?
September 15th, 2010 | 9:11 pm
Mike Melendez, David C – Since the actual author of the quote was so easy to find… why didn’t Bottum include it? It’s not like it’s a long name – it’s seven characters shorter than the phrase he used. It really does seem to me that the phrasing was misleading, with the apparent intent to associate Dawkins and Hitchens with that wording.
And, well, Dawkins and Hitchens didn’t hire the lawyers in question (scroll down to his reply): http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5415?page=2#478580 You can read what Hitchens himself says here: http://www.slate.com/id/2267098/
(I suppose we’ll just leave aside Bottum’s caricature of their position re: religion and evil.)
September 17th, 2010 | 11:01 am
ray,
umm no. It is not at all misleading. The context makes it quite clear that he is including them in a larger group of anti-Catholic folk. As for the idea that this is some sort of false accusation agains the men in question, that simply beggars belief. Dawkins and Hitchens in particular regularly and loudly engage in anti-Catholic screeds. In fact it is something of an obsession with Hitchens.
And yes the Sunday Times erred in stating that Dawkins and Hitchens “hired” the lawyer Robertson– apparently his work was paid for by unnamed “humanists and atheists”. It should be noted, however, that Hitchens claims responsibility ofr the idea of a legal brief against the Pope “the best dime I ever dropped”… Nor does any of what you cite change the substance of the statement Bottum made — that the two men in question would like to see the Pope hauled before the international court. Rather the opposite in fact.
September 21st, 2010 | 12:38 pm
Bottum-feeder:
You seem to give yourself far too much credit in imagining that Hitchens’s piece was entirely, or even mostly, devoted to you and your inane writings. Perhaps you’d like to explain your new delusions of persecution that we can attach to your strange idea that Catholics are being wrongly persecuted for pedophilia (though the Church admittedly has indeed systematically engaged in cover-up of such crimes). What is this “everything under the sun” that you speak of? You don’t even bother to point out how your ludicrous attempt to relate this persecution to anti-semitism was out-of-context or mere hyperbole. You say “he couldn’t follow the figure I was using”. Do tell? Please, enlighten me. I don’t follow, either. I would love to know how a history of Jewish persecution (often at the hand of the Church) can be related to holding a criminal pedophile ring accountable for its crimes? Tell me….
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