Hitchens is an enigma to me. When he is exposing the idiocy of religion, he is dead on. When he is spouting about the Iraq war, he seems to lose all touch with reality. His comment that we are all contributing a “great deal from our common treasury” is ludicrous. Have taxes gone up to support the war effort? Have there been massive spending cuts of which I have not heard? WE are not contributing from the common treasury at all; our grandchildren are. Americans are simply not asked to sacrifice: no rationing, no metal drives, no victory gardens, no war bond drives, no attempts to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. Americans simply bellyache when the price of gas goes up. Bush’s idea of sacrifice is to shop more so the economy doesn’t stagnate. (To be fair, though, Bush’s life has afforded him little opportunity to learn the value of sacrifice.)

As to the agony Americans suffer when one of our own dies, sorry, not seein’ much of it. I live in Boston, and the Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots (savor the irony), and Bruins each get literally hundreds of times the column inches that the war dead get. In any case, the agony that seems to go so unfelt would not be a sacrifice if even it were. I suspected that the word was being used incorrectly so I looked it up just to be sure. I was right. Nothing is being “offered for the sake of a cause”. Nothing is being “given up or lost” when we feel bad for our dead and dying soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. (I suppose we could be giving up our good mood and therefore sacrificing our pleasant round of golf. How this helps the service people is beyond me.) Odd that a man who once said, “I make my living scrutinizing words” should have used this one so badly. Of course, then again, it seems as though the administration he supports has no idea what the word means, so I guess that’s appropriate.