Portland, Oregon. Tuesday night. The hall is packed. The crowd waits with bated breath to be entertained, validated, recognized by virtue of their attendance at this lecture as bona fide fringe members of the intelligentsia, to see someone tell the truth and not be struck down by the wrath of god or tortured, exiled, sanctioned, assassinated or crucified by his minions. Look! He dares comment publicly upon the emperor's nudity, and yet he lives!
We are hungry for courage, for truth, for science, for eloquence, and we shall not be disappointed.
With the vocabulary of a William F. Buckley or a T.C. Boyle, combined with the wit, flair, and name-dropping ability of Gore Vidal, he treats us to a grandiloquent display of linguistic largess. He gives us a brief glimpse of discourse at its finest, shows us what it can be, perhaps once was, before the dumbing down of America.
He comes bearing news from the finest minds in the world. Physicists, theologians, biologists, historians, writers and poets.
Word. They're all represented.
Employing facts, logic, humor and wit while revealing new theories and discoveries, he's got us spellbound. We're on the edge of our seats, straining against the shackles of our religious upbringings, eager to evolve past our mental middle ages.
His protestations against intellectual totalitarianism reawaken the inner struggle within each of us--the struggle between the need for courage enough to express our truth without regard for social consequences---and the need to be complimented by our co-workers on the handbag and matching pumps we purchased at Nordstrom's on Saturday, or the younger, blonder wife with bigger boobs on our arm.
Sadly, despite having the courage to publicly renounce the evils of religion and the folly of building a moral code dependent upon a non-existent entity, it is a struggle that Mr. Hitchens himself has apparently not yet completely won.
I present as evidence the pin he wore upon his holy intellectual vestments, a symbol of hope for the future statehood of Kurdistan.
A symbol, too, of the continuation of Britain's history of drawing new borders in order to reward those who have sold out their own countrymen to secure their natural resources for Britain and its allies and punish those who have not.
We don't need religion to give us hell. It has already been written, and quite rightly, that war is hell. It seems that despite Mr. Hitchens objections to religion, he is intent on assisting certain powers that be in leading us there. Perhaps not in a handbasket, but rather, a handbag purchased at Nordstrom's.