Rise of an A-hole

Jon Stewart likes to torture me.

At the end of every episode of the Daily Show, he conducts either a jovial, joke-filled interview with whatever actor has a movie coming out this week or on rare occasions he invites some obscure scholar to plug his book or he invites someone he disagrees with so that they can have an awkward, slightly antagonistic head to head while I cringe at home. Monday night was a sort of combination of the last two categories with the added punch of me realizing about a minute in that I already hated the guy.

The guy was Christopher Hitchens, there to plug his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. More on that little gem later.

Why do I hate this guy? It all started here. That is, where he took it upon himself to argue that women are somehow biologically formed or sociologically conditioned to be less funny than men. His proofs are plenty sketchy, from the Stanford medical study that he misinterprets to the literary sources he quotes (all men from about 50 to 100 years ago, by the way) to his own experience of social interactions, which have to be pretty one-sided when you're such a blowhard that you can't keep quiet long enough for Jon Stewart to throw in the occasional joke. I mean, no wonder women aren't lining up to try and make him laugh.

It seems almost demeaning to actually detail and refute the claims of this article. I mean, seriously? This kind of 19th century misogyny pseudo-science article is still around and getting published in Vanity Fair?

Then I began to notice that one of my regular-read sites, Slate, has been publishing this guy. I found myself reading an article called "The You Decade" that blathered on and on about some sort of cultural shift in advertising terminology without ever coming to any sort of discernable point. This was when I recognized his name and starting wondering why this guy was so successful.

I looked him up on Wikipedia. According to that august publication, he's some sort of extremist political flip-flopper with denial issues about it. So, how did he end up on my TV, plowing over my beloved Jon Stewart?

Here's where we come back to that new "provocative" book he's shilling. It is just what I would expect him to write. Put alongside his Vanity Fair article, you can see him angling for all the attention he can get out of being contrary. From the book's cover design (with "God" uncapitalized and overshadowed by the towering capitalized "great") to his stated objective of attempting to devalue belief as a virtue, you can tell he's trying to get a rise out of the majority of the American public. I mean, what other possible motive could he have for parading around the "newly-discovered" loopholes in the Bible? Athiesm is not a novel thing. It's been around. Plenty of people who don't believe are doing exactly what plenty of people who believe are doing. That is, quietly living their lives and respecting other people's convictions without feeling the need to get in their faces with an age-old argument.

Which leads me back to my ultimate question. Who is this guy? Why is he so popular? How has he managed to invade my liberal stomping grounds with his pointless caveman campaigns? Because, you know, Jon Stewart said it best. Christopher Hitchens is an asshole.