Christopher Hitchens is the most overworked writer around, and the quality of his output is plummeting, as shown by his recent Weekly Standard article, "A War to Be Proud Of: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?" Hitch sums up with ten reasons the Iraq Attaq was a terrific idea, climaxing with this moral, factual, and aesthetic trainwreck of a sentence:
(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.
Oh, great, more wars.
And we're not "training and hardening" our poor soldiers so much as we're burning through them, using them up.
Finally, what the heck is going on with Hitchens's prose style? This sounds like a bad parody of Wm. F. Buckley. George Orwell said something about how it's hard to lie and write good prose at the same time, and this sentence could be Exhibit 1.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment