way more vicious than calling hitchens a drunken racist mediocre writer
By shag carpet bomb • Dec 18th, 2011 • Category: WGAF Fileswow. I read Dennis Perrin’s letter to Hitchens upon his death.
I’m totally impressed with Perrin’s attack on Hitchens. Of course, the rhetoric is nicely crafted so you can’t see it as an attack at all. It just seems like a nice, understanding, generous letter written by a protege to a man who…
is such a fucking small minded mean spirited asshole that, upon his death, he couldn’t be bothered to mount and give a final hump to the guy licking his balls, begging for forgiveness.
and I can’t think of a better way to honor Hitchens’ legacy, to show how well you learned from him, than to manage to demonstrate what a fucking asshole Hitchens was without looking like an asshole for doing so. DP comes off, of course, as just a totally nice, loving, respecting guy, just telling his story and who doesn’t have a meanspirited bone in his body. He’s all cowered down in beta male position, showing his belly.
Bottom fighter, like a cat.
Which is great because Amanda Marcotte and whomever else will be told they are childish, one sided critics who have no heart. And yet, Perrin leaves, at least for me, the worst portrait of Hitchens I’ve yet read: a man who was apparently warm, kind, generous to underlings, who apparently didn’t lord it over even the smallest person among the literati. Yet, apparently he only did so on the condition that you never, ever betray him - and Hitchens got to define the terms of betrayal. If, at his feet you believed that it was all about the good, the true, the beautiful, if this was all about the good fight for the good society, and that what mattered most was the strength of your intellectual ideas and not the character of your person. If you made the mistake of thinking that you could criticize Hitchens just as he once criticized you, that you could hold Hitchens to the standards he’s held others and expect an explanation of the deviation if Hitch disagreed — then you would suffer for that grave error. You would be punished, banished, scorned for life by an unforgiving manipulator who dished out generosity in order to cultivate a fawning crowd around him, to protect and defend him no matter what he did.
That is a far worse character portrait than anyone paints by calling Hitchens an alcoholic, racist, mediocre writer.
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