Maria Bustillos on Christopher Hitchens

OH, HITCH: Maria Bustillos can find Christopher Hitchens a little annoying at times, but ultimately falls for his intellect and charm. "It's a performance, too, an almost schoolboy rendering of 'narcissistic vanity and the longing to be thought clever, smart and notorious,' as Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd described Hitchens in a 1995 TV column. And Scott Lucas has the same feeling, not just about Hitchens but about pretty much every pundit in Washington, New York and London, and it's hard not to agree: 'A commentator is usually not engaging with the purported subject at hand but using it to put himself/herself top of the totem pole.'"

While we're on the subject of Christopher Hitchens, it's worth mentioning his famous (or, perhaps infamous) stance on Mother Teresa, whom he once called a 'lying, thieving Albanian dwarf' in an interview with 60 Minutes. He not only wrote a book professing his feeling in the fallacious nature of her purported holiness, but also produced a documentary on the subject, to which Bustillos links in her article; paired rather well with numerous television appearances. I've since become something of a distant admirer of Hitchens and his work, like so many others on the internet, where he does so little as to maintain a seldom-updated website. Watching his arguments on the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta provided me with much thought (and, although it might be in poor taste to say so, much entertainment).