Pretentious, Lui?

Since two makes a trend, Christopher Hitchens appears to be forming some strange cultural alliance with the French as a means, perhaps, of detaching himself from Bushism. The latest salvo comes in a review of Garrison Keillor's NYT Book Review slam of Bernard Henri-Levy's account of his investigative travels through the USA. We'll put our own lack of well-readedness on the table and admit to not having read BHL's book, but Keillor's analogy between things in the book and the kind of dopey Euro-travelogue of the US that one often sees (e.g. the cheesy information film on US-bound flights) was very effective -- enough to get Hitchens all worked up:

An arsenal of Francophobic clichés lies ready to hand, like a pile of rocks and rotten eggs stacked by a pillory: The French eat frogs and horses, fetishize fromage, practice loose gallantry, chew raw garlic, and behaved badly enough under Vichy to make Woody Allen go see Marcel Ophüls' Le Chagrin et la Pitié until he had it by heart.

Note: Hitchens the show-off has to refer to the film in its french-language title, and not, as it was referred to in Annie Hall, The Sorrow and the Pity.

Indeed, wouldn't Hitchens be well-cast as the know-it-all Manhattan lecturer who drives Woody/Alvy nuts in the line to see The Sorrow and the Pity?

ALVY: Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so ... Tell him.

MCLUHAN
I hear-I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

Christopher Hitchens -- Visiting Professor of Liberal Studies (Fall 2005) at the New School for Social Research.