Consummatum Ecch

Writing a good hit piece is harder than it might seem.  You have to stay focused on the target while constantly coming up with fresh angles of attack, lest the audience conclude you are a crank.  You don’t want to sound like you’re preaching to the choir, but you should also avoid temporizing qualifications and caveats; trust in your cause, and express yourself clearly.  Stop short of hyperbole, but just.

Christopher Hitchens is spectacularly gifted in this field, which is why I continue to read him even after he succumbed to "the Orwell temptation."  As delightful as Hitchens’s most recent rhetorical sledgehammer is to read, I can’t help noticing that Hitchens requires the urgency of combatting anti-Semitism abroad to excuse this digression from his day job of rewriting Bush Administration press releases.

I have very little interest in commenting on Mel Gibson’s re-make of Battlefield Earth, and less interest in viewing it.  All I have to say is that any film whose dialogue is entirely in Aramaic and Latin wouldn’t earn a dime without a raging controversy to give it free publicity.