Bill Murray, in the fine film Rushmore, gives a speech at the all-male prep school:
"You guys have it easy. I never had it like this where I grew up, but I send my kids here, because you go to one of the best schools in the country - Rushmore. Now, for some of you, it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs ... and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything, but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget that. Thank you."
Doug:
>It's almost enough to make you believe Hitchens is a sexist. It's ok
>to make fun of Mother T and Lady D, but John-John, a pampered dimwit
>with a crappy magazine, well he's not a bad guy after all.
Alex:
>Well said. So Diana's own "noblesse oblige" is suspect, but that little
>silver-spoonfed twit was just a swell guy. Hitchens seems to be defining
>himself more and more these days as part of the staid, dignified jetset
>Beltway elite. Christ, he even fraternizes with Christian Amanpour and
>her mass murderer husband.
In Hitchens's defense, Mother T was an icon of relgious fundamentalism while Lady D was an icon of the monarchy - two of his pet peeves. I expected him to bash away, but maybe he suspected people are tiring of his negativism and he doesn't want to be pigeonholed as an iconoclastic bastard or "bad boy". Who knows? And Alex, I agree with much of what you say and the underlying impulse, but as you probably remember, Hitchens recently ratted out one of the pillars of the Beltway elite, making himself a persona non grata for a large chunch of the rest, and will probably have difficulty getting juicy, off-the-record remarks, anytime soon.
Also, there's this from the gossip section of the Washington Post:
By Lloyd Grove Tuesday, July 13, 1999; Page C03 A Writer Hitched on His Own Petard
Best-selling Brit Christopher Hitchens--who condemns journalists who repeat "a false and malicious and disprovable allegation" on Page 12 of his anti-Clinton screed, "No One Left to Lie To"--has run into a spot of trouble himself for something he printed six pages later. On Page 18, he writes that Democratic operative Michael Copperthite, in an act of abject perfidy in 1996, advised the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indians of Oklahoma to cough up $107,000 for the Democratic Party to resolve a land dispute with the government.
Everyone agrees that the charge is baseless. Hitchens has apologized and offered to retract, but Copperthite has hired prominent British libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck to sue Hitchens and his British publisher, Verso/New Left Books, for up to $250,000 in the U.K., where libel laws are severe indeed. "It's a minor inaccuracy," Colin Robinson, managing director of Verso/New Left, claimed yesterday. Still, the publisher has stopped shipping the book until the offending pages in thousands of copies at the warehouse have been removed and replaced. Robinson said that about 90,000 copies have already been shipped. "Hitchens took me out for a beer . . . but I think he's a nasty guy," Copperthite told us. Hitchens didn't return our phone call.
-Peter, feeling a little "I'm OK, You're OK" maybe b/c of the upcoming Woodstock love/mud fest