Volatile times make for strange bedfellows, it seems. To wit, Chris Corner’s endorsement of one infamous Vanity Fair correspondent, as stated in “I Salute You Christopher (Ode to Christopher Hitchens),” which opens the new IAMX album:
Song lyrics are centered around Hitchens’ famous atheism; “Console yourselves that a scientific death is better than a fairy-tale of the eternal life” (although your favorite line might be “I declare you as our king, or queen, depending on your mood”). One has to question how much of Hitchens’ other writings Corner has digested: the recent case for an “entrance strategy” into Libya, Hitch’s suggestions regarding Iran, the the claim that Julian Assange is “an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda”, or virtually anything surrounding the Iraq war.
This is not to say that Hitchens is some rudderless hack whom we should marginalize, sight unseen. Quite the contrary: his essays are witheringly precise in both fact and context. His sense of humor is vicious, yet accessible. He is persuasive even when he shouldn’t be. His militant strain of contrarianism turns the lens on the readers, their beliefs, their delicate assumptions. It only seems odd that Hitchens’ writing would appeal to Corner at all. After all, Corner is the artist who wrote, “I hate money. I hate that we are money dependent. It is a disease of society and the controlling tool of the elite.”
Maybe Corner’s worldview is a bit more nuanced that it first appeared. And we read now that esophageal cancer has taken Hitch’s voice.
Strange, but it seems highly likely that anything could.
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