From Dave Zirin, in The Nation
Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it’s his rapturous support for Bush’s Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Great) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch.
Now Hitchens has turned his attention to sports and the ensuing essay in Newsweek, called “Fool’s Gold: How the Olympics and other international competitions breed conflict and bring out the worst in human nature” is everything you might fear. I’m no fan of the politics that surround the Olympic games but when Hitchens takes out his dull saw, nothing connected to sports is spared.
As he writes, “Whether it’s the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars’ homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay ‘The Sporting Spirit’ after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.’ “
