well, that just about wraps it up for God

I was thinking of writing a blog post on the subject of the death of Jerry Falwell, who represents a subject close to my heart (regular blog-watchers will groan as they recognise the scraping and grunting sounds of me hauling myself up onto a favourite hobby-horse), the rank fetid cheesy evil of corporate religion in the USA and its sinister tentacly insinuation of its interests into the political arena, despite, ironically, the USA being one of the few places where the separation of church and state is explicitly enshrined in the constitution.

Then I noticed that someone had done it for me, and bugger me if it wasn't my old mate Christopher Hitchens. A man whose views (on the Iraq war, to name but one topic) don't always coincide with mine, but who can always be counted on to entertain, if only to watch his awe-inspiring articulacy and intellect wrestle to the death with his unabashed penchant for heroic public drunkenness on a variety of talk shows. It's hard to believe those who invited him to comment on Jerry Falwell's death on CNN and Hannity & Colmes expected him to assume a respectful (and, as he points out, entirely hypocritical) speak-no-ill-of-the-dead tone, but if they did then they got disabused of that notion pronto, with both barrels. He's got a certain amount of previous with Sean Hannity, and if I'd been Hannity I'd have been slightly wary after being skewered pretty mercilessly first time round. And he wants to cancel Christmas! You've got to admire his massive clanking brass balls, if nothing else; to go on TV in the most overtly religious (not to mention heavily armed) country in the western world and say: this so-called Reverend you're all eulogising was a fat stupid evil bigoted charlatan and fraud and we're better off now he's wormfood, and if that sounds a bit insensitive to his surviving family and friends, well, fuck 'em, takes a certain amount of chutzpah, or possibly just a couple of carafes of Château Lafite Rothschild.

Well worth linking to this article as well, and reproducing this nugget from it:

Civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.

Amen to that, if you see what I mean.