Archivo

After a few days off for the Holiday and traveling...

“Suck It Up”

Hitchens was evidently “disgusted” by the response to the Virginia Tech shooting. Here are few excerpts:

Those who died…were not martyrs…

…the exhausting national sob fest…

For an academic president to have equated thirty-two of his fellow humans with their murderer in an orgy of “one-ness” was probably the stupidest thing that happened last week, but not by a very wide margin. 

Almost everybody in the country seems to have taken this non-event as permission to talk the starkest nonsense.

I watched disgustedly as the president of the United States declined to give his speech to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner…

…everyone united in mawkishness and sloppiness and false sentiment. 

What,,,is the dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time?

…the signs of sickness and foolishness were incipient…

…Billy Graham’s disgusting sermon at the National Cathedral 

Wow.

To Hitchens’ credit, Billy Graham is prone to disgusting sermons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k_n-q_0qej4

New Learning: The phrase “no man is an island” is not from Ernest Hemmingway, but from John Donne’s Devotions. Also where the source of the title of the book, For Whom The Bell Tolls:

No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

New Word: lachrymose = tearful or given to weeping