Sundown: You Don’t Mess With the Hitch

Well, I like them both, but even if some of Hitchens’s criticisms of Mamet are on target, he’s been guilty in the past of some of the same rhetorical excesses, deployed with the same kind of vigor for the sake of making a larger point. And the fact is, he’s made a similar ideological migration as Mamet. At times it’s as though he still feels compelled to beat up on the occasional right-winger to show he hasn’t entirely renounced the old religion, as often as not when the subject is Israel. Maybe it’s the narcissism of small differences.

I wasn’t impressed by Hitchen’s review. Mamet is a playwright for the ages no matter his politics of the moment.

Mamet is definitely a playwright for the ages(well,our age anyway)and he’s not a bad moviemaker,either…ironically,one of his best(though vastly under-rated)films,”Spartan”,makes the opposite case to his neo-Con conversion…on matters of patriotism,tribe,country,loyalty and honour,the drama is much more convincing than the polemic…

In the NYTBR piece’s last paragraph, Hitchens writes that Rabbi Hillel’s definition of the golden rule can’t entirely be redeemed from contradiction, because one _does_ want bad things to happen to villains. But that’s not exposing Hillel’s definition as contradictory: it’s exposing _oneself_ as having a desire that contradicts a view one holds. (And actually it doesn’t even contradict Hillel’s definition as it’s traditionally been understood, which is as having a clause attached to it along the lines of “as long as your neighbor isn’t a villain.”) A person can (a) hold two or more views that contradict each other, or (b) any individual view he/she holds can be internally contradictory. Hitchens writes as though (b) is the case for Hillel’s definition. It isn’t.