Dear Enoch Pratt

ARE YOU EFFIN' KIDDING ME? It's bad enough the world's most unfunny "satirist" claims fealty to the Sage. Now the man who's famed iconoclast status comes from holding the same positions as those in power gets to give the public the finger once more by delivering the Mencken Day lecture. I suppose to some this is the "obvious" choice - and there are valid points of comparison, most notably their shared sense of self-satisfaction with their status as iconoclasts - but really though? When I think of Hitchens it's this passage that comes to mind:

What ails him mainly is that he is a man without sufficient force of character to resist the blandisments that surround him from the moment he sets foot in Washington. A few men, true enough, resist, and their papers, getting the benefit of it, become notable for their independence and intelligence, but the great majority succumb almost at once. A few months of associating with the gaudy magnificoes of the town, and they pick up its meretricious values, and are unable to distinguish men of sense and dignity from mountebanks."

When we heard the event announced on the radio this morning, my girlfriend fiance cheekily asked me if we were going. I managed to sort of grumble "probably not" because it was too early to say what I was really thinking: "Only if every bar in town is closed."

Tags: Mencken, Hitchens