Cronenberg does Martin Amis

[Mr. Tea]

I wouldn't say I get Eeyore vibes from you. In the original A. A. Milne stories he's the most passive-aggressive cunt in all of literature, always insisting he's "fine" while making it abundantly clear to the other characters that he's not.

Deliberately leaving open the implication that @Corpsey might be a bit like Dahmer, for humorous effect.

 

[version]

Does it feel like , these days… people that aspire to be public intellectuals need to position themselves as healers or was that always the case?

I don't think it was always the case; Hitchens was known as a self-professed contrarian who lived to skewer.

Christopher Lasch's definition of a public intellectual sounds about right:

"The intellectual may be defined, broadly, as a person for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play; more specifically, as a person whose relationship to society is defined, both in his eyes and in the eyes of the society, principally by his presumed capacity to comment upon it with greater detachment than those more directly caught up in the practical business of production and power."