Quit Yer Hitchens
Flinging Feces at Hypocritical Hominid Chris Hitchens

In some respects, I am a well-connected monkey. Not put into print before is this little story about Christopher Hitchens, which I allege is a secondhand 87% accurate account — I’m not sure about the exact sequence of events: Christopher Hitchens knocked up his mistress-turned-girlfriend-turned second wife when she was in the girlfriend stage and he was still doing the divorce paperwork from the previous hitch. He paid for the abortion himself, with his ex-wife’s credit card.

Imagine that. Imagine opening your monthly bill and seeing that item from a medical clinic for $800 or so for an “unwanted pregnancy procedure.” Not an opportunity to restage Kay Adams’s ultimate Fuck You to Michael Corleone: “Oh, Hitch. Hitch, you are blind. It wasn't a miscarriage. It was an abortion. An abortion, Hitch. Just like our marriage is an abortion. Something that's unholy and evil!”  No, the marriage is over, and that particular Fuck You is yours to keep, and yours to pay off.

I can’t offer too much sympathy for the former Mrs. Hitchens because she must be a nasty piece of work to have enjoyed his company for the years they were married, nor can I the current Mrs. Hitchens for her marital predicament — I met her once and she was a snotty bitch.

Passing the buck on that abortion must have been tough on old Hitch, because he recently wrote in Newsweek, "Every Catholic is supposed to regard abortion as an abomination (and, if it matters, I concur)." When Hitchens gets in ink fights with respectable journalists, his main employ is pedantry—his explanation for this quote given his personal experience would likely be that he meant what he wrote: that he concurs that Catholics are supposed to regard abortion as an abomination.

It’s sad in a way about that abortion, because it means my kids won’t have the pleasure of mocking and snarling at a Hitchens-bylined piece like I get to. His two children with his first wife show no promise of success at the family business. And Hitchens has a young daughter with his current wife, but female journalists just do not rise to the kind of prominence he has. And something tells me the canceled baby was going to be a boy, but -- ha,ha -- not a goy as you might have supposed. No, no: Hitchens is a Jew!

This is something that serious Hitchens fans have known for some time, but it was revealed to me in a recent Times of London cozy interview with the man: “He discovered late in life that he was Jewish, his mother’s family having changed their name from Levin.” Levin, Hitchens, what’s the difference, right?

It really shouldn’t matter to the author of God Is Not Great, but it does. He told the Times that he observes Passover and that he is pushing that shit on his daughter, so she knows “what the tradition is.” This means in one little nutshell that despite spending his time attacking religion quite rightly as an occupation for “slaves and fools,” his own understanding of the implications of this are virtually nil — about as naive as the Welcome to the Dollhouse Wiener Dog girl’s voluntary and punctual appearance at the dumpsters after school to “get raped.” It means that despite writing pro-evolutionary statements like “we have common ancestry with apes,” Hitchens doesn’t understand that he’s a fucking monkey himself.

There’s a rhetorical fallacy identified as the “undistributed middle” — cases where the arguer states a claim and then draws a conclusion about the claim without justifying why the conclusion is valid.

The undistributed middle between Hitchens observing Passover and my conclusion that he’s not aware of his own monkeytude is that self-aware monkey humans couldn’t possibly laugh at religion yet still participate in its traditions. If Hitchens knew he was a monkey he wouldn’t just be appalled at the Jewish Faith, he’d be appalled at its rites, because notwithstanding their religious connections, rites are what monkeys use to affirm tribal affiliation — just as loathsome and destructive as God worship.

Of course, traditions like the fantasy baseball and astrology play their tribal ID role in the same way that Passover does. But we come to discern our own tribal delusions in degrees and Passover is a big bright red flag; it’s directly tied to that dangerous religious thing. And it’s the relative ideological strength of tribes, not their ever-evolving gods, that underwrites much of the world’s worst skull-piling sessions we see today. Hitchens is something of a student of the occupation in Iraq, a tribe-underwritten conflict if there ever were one, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

There are unlimited examples of tribal rites surviving as gods die or get replaced. Within the White Tribe, we have the Mormons, who do practically everything a good Christian is asked to do during Sunday services, with the only substantial departure being that the Mormon god’s approach to the “be fruitful and multiply” side of things makes the Pope sound like a virginity pledge team leader (Have you seen those portrait photos of the 80 grinning dumbfucks that make up Mitt Romney’s “immediate family”?).

Or take what happened when Western missionaries went to the Philippines and tried to sell Christ the Redeemer to a bunch of blood-loving animal killer-worshipers. They weren’t having any of the miracle-in-the-manger material, but the crown of thorns, the crucifixes, and the blood! That got them. The missionaries sent letters back home requesting paintings of Jesus after he’d been through the wood chipper and overwrought renditions of disemboweled martyr apostles, and it worked. The Jesus they worship in the Philippines today looks pretty much the same.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that it’s rites like Passover and Easter that are at the forefront of strengthening this idea that the monkeys have some deep association with each other, which are even worth dying or killing for to protect “our way of life.”

There are always moments where the god that the tribe was worshiping no longer jibes with the times — ordinary experience clashes with God’s Word, and people start to jump ship looking for something new to believe in.

This is that moment for a growing number of monkeys who make up the Grand White-Jewish Tribal Alliance (yeah motherfucker, that’s what this thing is). You have Jews in Berkeley who go through the motions of Yom Kippur and spend the rest of their time testing out Hindu chants and Hatha postures to find a viable replacement, whites in L.A. sniffing at the luxury complexes that house L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi-based faith, and lots of others hanging on as best they can to the white-knuckle rollercoaster of Enlightenment thinking, even if they haven’t fully caught up with where it’s taken them.

Hitchens is on that rollercoaster, taking occasional gulps of Manishevitz when the ride gets too hairy. Hitchens popularity as an author marks his stance as representative of a lot of the rest of us on that rollercoaster. They can see that religion is BS, but they don’t want to opt out on the other narcotic effects that tribal membership confers them. And oddly — delusions don’t have to be intellectually consistent to function — members’ annual fees still include somewhere from reluctant to unquestioning acceptance of the “value” of religious traditions and occasional participation in them, even though they recognize religious contexts as meaningless at this point.

Proof that Hitchens only sees an inch past his atheism is everywhere with him — that Passover shit is enough to put him away forever, but his sincere attempt to gin up fear and hatred for Muslims in America gives him away just as easily.

There was a militant Muslim bakery in Oakland that had some crooked dealings behind the scenes; small stuff like racketeering, some payback murders and tax evasion. A reporter started snooping and the Muslim bakers shot him too. Hitchens didn’t see it for what it was: just some thugs. For Hitchens it was another iteration of this looming civilizational clash. I’ll give him the last word:

“If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.”