(no subject)

[proximoception]

Bloom: The ultimate literary pilgrimage in Rome is to the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats and Shelley are buried, and which I cannot visit without musing on the high irony that neither poet was a Christian believer.

Reminds me of another bit of the Blair/Hitchens debate:

Hitchens: [T]he secular movement in Northern Ireland [...] is a real thing and I know many people who have suffered dreadfully from membership in it, not excluding being pulled out of a car by a man in a balaclava and being asked, are you ... are you a Protestant Jewish atheist or a Catholic Jewish atheist? You laugh, but it's not so funny when the party of God has a gun in your ear at the same time.

Comments

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

This is an old, old Northern Ireland joke; I've heard it with Jews and with atheists, but not, I think, with Jewish atheists. (It obviously works better with Jews than atheists, so it's not surprising that Hitchens would double up.)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'd heard the joke version, but he seemed to be vouching for this one. You suspect confabulation? He is one of the drunker humans.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Hitchens' usual style puts confabulation out on the table by the salt-cellar. One would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, it's plausible that he didn't use it. But it's still right there, a little aside from one hand.

Family Man has a nice visual riff on the atheist-Christian-Jew line.