Thomas Seay wrote:
>
>
> The above statement agrees with my suspicion about
> Hitchens.
> What seems to matter most to Hitchens is to maintain
> (at least in his own mind) the status of "contrarian"
> (ergo he can continue to imagine himself still a
> revolutionary) while getting his ego stroked by his
> appearances on tv, etc.
Something analogous occurs among many professors in non-political contexts. I noted it when I was writing a history of late 19th and early 20th-c criticism of Pope's poetry. Quite a few of the critics I read would (a) want to join the chorus of sneers, but they had to pretend that this fashionable opinion was no longer fashionable and they were raising their voice against the current. Another analogue is the conservative plaint about the liberal media. There must be many such instances.
Carrol