Now The Serpent Was More Subtil...

There's truth to the metaphor of politics as professional wrestling. Christopher Hitchens was a heel. He was a bad guy who went out in the public and insulted them and his opponents and he drank too much. He made all us liberals mad, but he was compelling to read because he could put together words wittily.

But there are great dangers to following advice because it is well-written and clever, and ignoring the costly implications. That's one of the lessons of the Book of Genesis. Hitchens used his clever way with words to encourage us to go invade that country, and that invasion opened up floodgates of death and human misery in a land already miserable. Better we had not listened to him.

Christopher Hitchens: As Annoying When Talking about Music as Everything Else

Ouch:

As to the synthetic Stones-Beatles debate, he states:  “I later vastly preferred Mick Jagger’s ‘Street Fighting Man,’ which had been written for my then-friend Tariq Ali, to the Beatles’ more conciliatory ‘You Say You Want a Revolution’ . . .“ Well, in so stating, Hitchens makes two tangible errors:  “Street Fighting Man” is unequivocally not a Mick Jagger song—conceding the point that he wrote its lyrics—and the Beatles’ song to which he refers is rather entitled “Revolution 1”.  Mick Jagger just is not equivalent to the Rolling Stones.  Ask Keith Richards, for instance, on this point.  And, what of Lennon’s unabashedly atheistic song “Imagine”?

The fundamental line must be drawn here:  Christopher Hitchens appreciates music but is reluctant in so doing because of music’s historical and literary nexus with the sacred and godly, as in Milton.  Moreover, such reluctance betrays itself in his several factual miscues apropos of music, and, in particular, music he claims to value.