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“The You Decade”

Hitchens’ rant about the use of the term “You” in advertising. Unclear why he thought it was important to get these thoughts on paper in the April 9, 2007 issue of slate. One example:

I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What’s “You” about this? It’s a MeTube, for me. And I can only suppose that, for my friends and foes alike, it’s a HimTube…

Or, even more ridiculous:

It reminds me of the exasperation I

used to feel, years ago, when one could be accused of regarding others as “sex objects.” Well, one can only really be a proper “subject” to oneself. A sentence that begins with I will be highly solipsistic if it ends only with me, and if the subject is sexual, then the object of the sentence will be an object. Would people rather be called “sex subjects”? (A good question for another time, perhaps.) Or “sex predicates”? Let us not go there.

“Let’s not go there”…and yet he does. Maybe a good idea here if it was re-written by, say, Dennis Leary of Bill Maher.

New Learning: That an editor could let this sentence into a piece in his publication, “Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual.”

WTF?

New Word: solipsistic = the theory that the self is all that can be known to exist (I think I had this as a new word in a previous post as well so, I guess, it’s an old new word).

Great Hitchens YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkU3a2eor3U