I always used to like him. I mean I
really liked him. All my leftward tilting friends did. Why? I'm not sure.
Secretly, in the back of my mind, I thought of him as "Hitch." It's how my friends all referred to him. "Did you see Hitch's latest?" my friend Fran would ask. We liked him for being unapologetically curmudgeonly. "Oh, he's just an old contrarian," Frances said fondly when another, leftier friend was boggling over our affection for his work. We didn't care that we didn't agree with him.
I still like him a little bit, in spite of this:
[quote begins from Slate, Christopher Hitchens, "The You Decade (There's a New Narcissistic Pronoun in Town"]
Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your side. The ways in which the corporation has your needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your views. Or, a little farther down the scale of flattery and hucksterism, come to our completely uniform and standardized food outlet and create your own salad and dessert, from our own pre-selected range of freshly prepared and tasteless ingredients!
So, whatever happened to the Me Decade? The answer is that nothing happened to it. It mutated quite easily and smoothly into a decade centered on another narcissistic pronoun. Which pronoun is that? You be the judge.
[quote ends]
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