Fragmenta Philosophica

Sufficiency

In the normal course of things, my sense of whether I have "enough" is not conditioned by the judgment that others have more.

The Rise of the Righteous

We look to "poets" - or the articulate in general - to give voice to something we've felt, or intuited, but lacked the wherewithal to express clearly.

Even speaking extemporaneously to Bill Mahrer, Hitchens finds rough and ready words for a certain self-important sort that ones meets ever more frequently these days:

I've been on the Jon Stewart show, I've been on your show, I've seen you make about five George-Bush-IQ jokes per night. There's no one I know who can't do it. You know what I think? - this is now the joke that stupid people laugh at. It's the joke that any dumb person can laugh at because they think that they ... can prove they're smarter than the president (like the people that make booing and mooing noises in your audience ... none of whom are smarter than the president). [The transcription is mine - see original video here - at approx. 1:50]

As I often say, I had a very dim opinion of GW Bush in the run-up to the 2000 election; the patent hyperbole and unjustness of his critics gave me pause, and then cause to reconsider my initial opinions of him. While no great admirer, I - to put the matter in negative terms - think of him neither as devil nor idiot. But I guess that if you're not with his fervent detractors, you're against them; this is an entailment of their demonology.

Though an atheist, I do believe in a congenital religious impulse or instinct which all-too-often - because its very existence is denied, driving it into the subterranean realms - seeks to apply its suction to whatever creed or cause promises a kind of "redemption." The secular-but-religious haters of GW Bush are a case in point.