Missed a week of posts when I was in Dubai. Here's a catch up post, taking us to the end of this section of the book.
“The New
Commandments”
Hitchens’ walk through the inconsistencies and
contradictions in the 10 Commandments. He says, “I am trying my best not to
view things through a smug later prism,” but he totally is. He get’s it right
when he says, “What emerges from the first review is this: The Ten Commandments
were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been
man-made and improvised under pressure.“
Very funny quote, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s
house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his
maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
There are several details that make this perhaps the most questionable of the
commandments. Leaving aside the many jokes about whether or not it’s okay. or
kosher to covet thy neighbor’s wife’s ass…”
Great idea for an 11th, “Turn off that fucking
cell phone— you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.”
Mel Brooks on 10 Commandments:
New Learning: There are competing versions of the
commandments, “The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with
Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man:
the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in
Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some
heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten
commandments.”
New Word: lese-majeste = insulting a monarch
“In Your Face”
Hitchens’ support of a proposed French law prohibiting women
from wearing a veil in public places. Somehow, he manages to equate the veil
and burka to the KK and bank robbers. WTF? He writes, “I would indignantly
refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor…who hid his or her face.”
Really? His doctors don’t wear masks?
New Learning: “Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey,
the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and
universities.”
“Wine Drinkers of the
World, Unite”
Hitchen’s complaining about waiters refilling wine glasses
without asking. It’s unclear why he wrote this or why it is included in a
“greatest hits collection.” He quotes his son, “ ‘Why are they called waiters?’
inquired my son when he was about five. ‘It’s we who are doing all the
waiting.’ “ His five year old son really talks like that?
New Yorker Cartoon that Hitches quotes:
New Learning: “Until relatively recently in Washington, it
was the custom at diplomatic and Georgetown dinners for the hostess to invite
the ladies to withdraw, leaving the men to port and cigars and high matters of
state. And then one evening in the 1970s, at the British Embassy, the late
Katharine Graham refused to get up and go. There was nobody who felt like
making her, and within a day, the news was all over town. Within a very short
time, everybody had abandoned the silly practice.”
New Word: fusspot = …actually, this word doesn’t appears in
the essay.
“Charles, Prince of
Piffle”
Hitchens takes Prince Charles to task for some idiotic
comments he made in a speech about the “objectification of nature.” Not sure
why he picked this particular set of idiotic comments from the Prince with so
many to choose from, but he clearly doesn’t like Charles, “On strict
constitutional terms, this ought not to matter much. The English monarchy, as
has been said, reigns but does not rule. From the aesthetic point of view it
will matter a bit, because the prospect of a morose bat-eared and chinless man,
prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts, is a
distinctly lowering one.”
Later he writes, “One thinks of the painstaking,
cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph
Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis
Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to
see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the
usurping House of Hanover.”
Pretty much sums up the essay.
Pretty much sums up the essay.
New Learning: “Together with the Saudi royal family, he
supported the mosque in North London that acted as host and incubator to Richard
‘Shoe Bomber’ Reid, the hook-handed Abu Hamza al-Masri, and several other
unsavory customers.”
New Word: farrago = a confused mixture
