Wish I'd Written That

In this "ode" to his good friend Christopher Hitchens, novelist Martin Amis describes him as a "rebel" rather than a mere "contrarian", a label one often finds attached to Hitchens.  In the course of making that distinction clear, Amis writes:

Most of us shakily preside over a chaos of vestigial prejudices and pieties, of semi-subliminal inhibitions, taboos and herd instincts, some of them ancient, some of them spryly contemporary (like moral relativism and the ardent xenophilia which, in Europe at least, always excludes Israelis).

I love that sentence and am extremely jealous of the facility with the English language that can produce it.

Anyway, read the entire piece.  That sentence is not the only part well written and it's interesting and insightful to boot.