Ebert to Hitchens

Roger Ebert on Christopher Hitchens. A few touching and profound comments.

I must say, for being a movie critic, Roger Ebert is a pretty thoughtful guy.

My first whiff of his extra-movie-critical prowess was his defense of the school official who sent five guys home for wearing American flags on Cinqo de Mayo, in a heavily Latino school. Here, he says what everyone knew but were unwilling to say:

The question is obviously not whether Americans, or anyone else, has the right to wear our flag on their t-shirts. But empathetic people realize much depends on context. If, on Cinco de Mayo, you turn up at your school with a large Mexican-American student population wearing such shirts, are you (1) joining in the spirit of the holiday, or (2) looking for trouble?

I suggest you intend to insult your fellow students. Not because they do not respect THEIR flag, but because you do not respect their heritage. That there are five of you in matching shirts demonstrates you want to be deliberately provocative.

Here, I liked particularly what Ebert had to say about God and Mystery: "I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence." I'm not sure about worshipping the void -- it sounds a bit nihilistic to me -- but the rest of what he says is right on. It's my perception and sense of the unanswerable mystery that gets me up every Sunday morning for church.