He was in the hands of medicine. He was hopeful but realistic. He will come to feel increasingly like a member of the audience in the theater of his own illness. I've been there. There were times when I seemed to have nothing to do with it. One night, unable to speak, I caught the eye of a nurse through my open door and pointed to the blood leaking from my hospital gown. She pushed a panic button and my bed was surrounded by an emergency team, the duty physician pushing his fingers with great force against my carotid artery to halt the bleeding. I was hoisted on my sheet over to a gurney, and raced to the OR. "Move it, people," he shouted. "We're going to lose this man."
I don't think he is dying.Well, look, what does "dying" mean? We're all going to die. Some of us are going to die of things that we already have. Some of us will die of those things next week, and some will die of them in fifteen years. I don't know what Ebert's prognosis is, but it's possible that he will eventually die of his cancer. I think that he's decided not to think of himself as dying, because he wants to focus on using his remaining time productively and as happily as possible. Maybe Hitchens will get to that place, and he's not there yet because his diagnosis is too recent and all he can focus on is that his cancer will never go away. Or maybe Hitchens will think of himself as dying until he dies. I think that people deal with their imminent or semi-imminent mortality in different ways.
Hitchens' remarks on the passing of Jerry Falwell were on the mark. Interviewed during a CNN obituary of Falwell, Hitchens brought a sharp turn in the program's tone: "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishmen -- if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?"It resonated with me today because I've been reflecting on H.L. Mencken's Aftermath, his final Baltimore Sun piece on the Scopes Monkey Trial, specifically these bits:
True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.If I may tie the Chomsky article posted earlier today and this Ebert article together, I think, perhaps, those of us who are athiests, leftists, or just rational thinkers would do well to embrace those who forcefully and intelligently defend our positions without fear of offending. Sometimes we are so afraid of coming across as "intellectually elite" that we forget that being intelligent and having a rational basis for your positions is actually a good thing.
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.
I do not know how many Americans entertain the ideas defended so ineptly by poor Bryan, but probably the number is very large. They are preached once a week in at least a hundred thousand rural churches, and they are heard too in the meaner quarters of the great cities. Nevertheless, though they are thus held to be sound by millions, these ideas remain mere rubbish. Not only are they not supported by the known facts; they are in direct contravention of the known facts. No man whose information is sound and whose mind functions normally can conceivably credit them. They are the products of ignorance and stupidity, either or both.
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posted by spicynuts at 8:06 AM on August 13, 2010