Wall Street Journal - October 17, 2005
The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
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But in point of fact, any thinking person knows precisely why he was this year's Laureate at a moment when a person of even average literacy might have lit upon Rushdie, Roth or Pamuk. Just as with the selection of Jimmy Carter for the "Peace" Prize, where the judges chose to emphasize the embarrassment they hoped thereby to visit on the Bush administration, the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq.
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Before Hitch began that quick march to his own unique land of rightwingedness, I believed even the most subservient boot lickers might, from time to time, take a break from polishing their master's footwear and planting lips to ass cheeks to take in a book or a film or a refreshing glass of rubbing alcohol.
But this bizarrely crafted slap against Mr. Pinter (and just who was the imagined audience?), which, on the way to the writer's face, pauses to wank off Bush -- yet again -- shows that Mr. Hitchens has achieved a level of submissive industriousness and message adherence seldom seen.
One suspects that if, in his daily travels, he were to come upon a dog whose bark, in the audio fog that followed a hard night, seemed to say 'Bush is wrong' he'd write a lengthy essay about the perfidy of canines, those four legged enemies of freedom and apologists for dictators.
.d.