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| Woodcuts from the Dance of Death, Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1525, via WikiArt. |
Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, thunders old Hefner into hell with apocalyptic hatred ("Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner"):
Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.
Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.
Poor Updike!Speaking for myself, I'm here to bury Hefner, not to praise him, or not even that—let the dead bury their dead. If you want to read about Hefner, blogfriend Lance Mannion did a great post.
The Monsignor doesn't really want to write about Hefner either, but he can hardly stop himself with the fulminations, paragraph after paragraph. He really wants to write about Bill Cosby, the nightmare Negro rapist, who literally did to women the things that liberalism figuratively does to Ross's raw heart all day long and thus proved that Ross's terrors are justified—and what he wants most of all is to link three names with hyphens, toward the end:
