Comments on A Regrettable Photograph

I want that poster.

I thought that chip I ate from your shelf was a blue tortilla chip , Dan. Ewwww.

Best Example Of War Hawk Narcissim Yet: Christopher Hitchens' Brave And Heroic Iraq Confession
December 28, 2007 -- 12:24 PM EST // //
Okay, everyone, let's give a hearty round of applause to Christopher Hitchens for the long piece he's now published in Vanity Fair. War-supporter Hitchens did a very brave and heroic thing: He admitted that he feels really, really bad about the death of a soldier in Iraq -- and devoted an entire magazine article to his own feelings about it.

Now, most people go about their lives enduring their most painful burdens in private. Not Hitchens. He fearlessly went public with it in paragraph after paragraph, and even courageously admitted that his guilt places him in the same class of great writers like William Butler Yeats and George Orwell, who also confessed to such feelings. This must have been very, very difficult for Hitchens to admit indeed.

Really, we should immediately put Hitchens' essay into the time capsule as the most perfect expression that we've seen yet of the narcissism and extraordinary delusions of historical grandeur that our war hawks keep revealing themselves capable of.

Hitchens' piece is all about a young soldier named Mark Daily, who had initial misgivings on the war but was turned in favor of the war by Hitchens' writings and was subsequently killed in Iraq. Upon learning this, Hitchens confesses in his article, he felt dismayed, asking himself if it was "possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D."

Hitchens then recounts in great detail the horrific emotional journey he then endured.

Hitch tells us he thought of Yeats, who "was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths" quoting his work. Hitchens assures us modestly that he "abruptly" dismissed any comparison between himself and the great poet (though of course Hitchens went out of his way to explicitly float this comparison in his article). He tells us he had a similar thought about Orwell. And he assures us in the article that "I don't intend to make a parade of my own feelings here" -- before going on to do just this at great length. He even went to meet the family of the dead young man, and to his tremendous relief, they treated him well.

Now, a few points immediately present themselves. Why does Hitchens feel so much more angst-ridden about this young man than he apparently does about the other 3.899 Americans who died in Iraq? After all, the case he and other hawks made for the war is also indirectly responsible for lots of other deaths and injuries, too. The key difference here is that this one kid...read Hitchens' writings, creating a jumping off point for this narcissistic little Yeatsian fantasy and subsequent act of self-aggrandizing emotional exhibitionism in the pages of a glossy magazine.

I'm sure Hitchens does harbor some genuine emotions about this somewhere. But really, Hitch -- show some decency and keep them to yourself. You want to write long articles about the Iraq War dead or about how devastated the parents of the dead are? I'm all for it. But let's focus exclusively on them and how they feel, not on you. Writing about them, and only them, would be a genuine gesture towards these people. Neither they nor the rest of us really give a crap about your heroic self-cleansing efforts or about where you think they place you in the pantheon of immortal writers.

Oh, and here's the perfect coda to all this: Hitchens' courage and heroism was lauded today by -- who else -- David Brooks, another war-supporter obsessed with the intellectual bravery of his rarefied war hawk class. It's a nice little club they have going there. It works for them.

BTW, I can't post a link, but today's Rocky Mountain News reports that one James Brown, "music minister" of Heritage Christian Center in Arapahoe County, Colorado, was arrested Tuesday for "sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust" and several other charges.

wtf was the matzo letter all about?

Fun in theory, nasty in practice. I was surprisingly grossed out by that picture.

I do, however, want one of those handy-dandy "F*ck the sh*t out of someone!" posters you have there in the background. Perhaps I'll go poster shopping now that my lunch plans are - uh - postponed.

What does this have to do with Benazir Bhutto or the Carnation dairy cow murders?

Oh Dan, don't you just LOVE that Protocols of the Elders of Zion cookbook? So much more adventurous than that Bellevue Junior League crap.

Try the Star of David pork and cheese sandwich -- it's a Revelation!

I hear San Francisco has about 350 pounds of tiger meat they don't know what to do with....

I think it's funny how people who eat kosher are insistent about how certain foods can't touch or be on the same plate. It's OCD at its finest.

@10: No, it's an early sanitary meat-handling practice. Get it right.

I regret looking at that picture before lunch.

The most troubling part of this for me is the inference that some "innocent Christian blood" was to be found in Dan Savage's kitchen. It would be news to a lot of us - especially Mr. Savage - that his blood was either Christian or innocent.

@9 - no, sorry, that was why I flew thru SFO on my way back. I needed it for this recipe I've been making for tiger taquitos.

Number 13 beat me to it. No self-respecting Jew is gonna look around Savage's place for "innocent Christian blood."

Innocent Christian santorum, perhaps?

a freakin' Terra Chip... (MY matzos never looked like That). The perfect dip? That'd be the sauce I made with the bottle of beer fermented with vaginal yeast... mmmm... chow ^..^

ps Aren't they selling the tiger parts online? god- they're worth a Fortune! ^..^

This reminds me of the Slog post about that woman who did art with blood. Remember she had a blood scarf and some other things? That was nasty and so is this.

Tiger references? Uhm, did anyone read Jonah's post about feeling bad about joking about the woman's death? Come on.

So what's the full text of the College Republicans poster in the background?