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The blog lady and the Pope

I knew blogging had sunk in as part of the mediascape when, on Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, the prolific Arianna Huffington was listed, not as a mere writer, but as a blogger. She's only blogging once a week (and like many high-profile political bloggers, she's getting tons of comments).

Arianna has a nice blogroll; I followed the link to Marc Coooper's blog, where I found a post about the inane media coverage of the Pope's death, which reminds me of the running Saturday Night Live gag (Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!) three decades ago. Cooper links to an essay, "On Not Mourning the Pope", by Christopher Hitchens and says

Hitch further reminds us of this juicy irony: The same yammering media airheads who have spent the last week breathlessly proclaiming that it was the “Polish Pope” who had single-handedly dealt the death blow to World Communism are the same geniuses who, less than a year ago, had credited Ronald Reagan with this same superhuman achievement. Then again, these are the same folks who told us Diana Spencer was “The Princess of the People” just as Wojtyla is now “The Pope of the People” (someone should buy the networks a thesaurus).

The bigger story the gushing media misses, says Hitchens, is not the Pope’s anti-communism but rather the striking similarities between today’s crisis of the Church and the crisis of Stalinism a half-century ago.

Unbelievers are more merciful and understanding than believers, as well as more rational. We do not believe that the pope will face judgment or eternal punishment for the millions who will die needlessly from AIDS, or for his excusing and sheltering of those who committed the unpardonable sin of raping and torturing children, or for the countless people whose sex lives have been ruined by guilt and shame and who are taught to respect the body only when it is a lifeless cadaver like that of Terri Schiavo. For us, this day is only the interment of an elderly and querulous celibate, who came too late and who stayed too long, and whose primitive ideology did not permit him the true self-criticism that could have saved him, and others less innocent, from so many errors and crimes.

(Technorati tag: Blogging)

jon posted this at 5:26 AM
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