We hate Christopher Hitchens. We recognize that he’s an
elegant writer with a vast understanding of social and political issues. We recognize that, despite a few truly odious theories, he remains one of the
great intellectuals of the 21st century, a bon vivant and a drinker and a
dandy and an iconoclast. Also, he is a class-A dick. He is the kind of guy who
burns up all the oxygen at a cocktail party, spills Scotch down your dress, and
then has the temerity to ask for a blowjob. And that’s just how he treats the
help.
There is one problem, though. It’s a big problem, and we ask
you to take your judgment and tuck it away temporarily on the shelf. Put it up
there beside the Don DeLillo book you will never finish and the picture of your
big orange cat, sleeping at the foot of the bed. The problem is that we
secretly want to fuck Christopher Hitchens. We want to fuck him, bad.
We only realized this recently, while reading a particularly
elegant--even compassionate--column that Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair. It was
about a kid who enlisted in Iraq after reading Hitchens pro-war writings, and how
that kid eventually died, and how Hitchens found out about it, and contacted
the family, and stumbled into a bout of (admittedly self-indulgent)
soul-searching. It is a beautiful, heavy, difficult piece. It is sad without
being emotional, if that makes sense. And as we read this story, we found
ourselves swelling with desire for Christopher Hitchens. No, not Christopher
Hitchens, exactly, so much as the enormity of his ego and talent. We wanted to
fuck his word choices. We wanted to go down on his elegant phrasing. We wanted
to grab his huge cockiness and rub it all over us. We read this article while
getting our hair done. Let us tell you, it was a bit of an awkward moment.
(Brief sidebar: Usually at Scanner, we use the editorial “we.” I
think I need to stop doing that now. Because I can feel Nicole vomiting into
the sink, and I can feel Bryan
hiding his head under a pillow, weeping into the sheets. To be clear: I feel
this way, they do not. Very well, then, let’s continue.)
I have similar feelings for Simon Cowell. I have similar
feelings about Jonathan Franzen, an incredibly gifted writer who is probably a very
frigid and difficult lover. I feel this way about Rush Limbaugh BUT DO NOT TELL
ANYONE. There is a rather obvious pattern here: swaggering confidence mixed
with cruelty mixed with precision. As much as I hate these men, hate the way
they treat people, hate their cold worldviews and/or intellectual narcissism,
there is something in me that is deeply drawn to them. Yes, it’s their charisma
and talent (and if you don’t think Rush Limbaugh or Simon Cowell has talent,
you are sadly misguided). But I also suspect it has to do with being female,
with growing up afraid to raise my hand in class, with being someone who
constantly peppers her opinions with “that’s just what I think” or “for me, at
least.” I have, for decades, lacked the authority of my own opinion. So
blah-blah-blah, I’ll work that out in therapy.
What I’m asking you to do now is to search your own database
for people you hate but want to fuck anyway. And Nicole and Bryan, I expect you to
play.
