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.