Christopher Hitchens is partly right to criticize Garrison Keillor’s attack on Bernard-Henri Lévy. The bit about the Space Needle was, if not quite “humorless philistinism,” at least philistinism. But Hitchens surprises me when he goes after Keillor for a stray phrase: “‘As always with French writers,’ says Keillor, ‘Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions.’ I would give about, oh, five cents to know which ones Keillor has in mind. Perhaps he has been boning up on his Foucault or Balibar or Derrida, in which case he modestly makes no show of his own learning. He cannot mean Albert Camus or Olivier Todd or Michel Houllebecq. Nor can he have read BHL’s last book, which was a very detailed investigation of the murder of an American reporter named Daniel Pearl. I think BHL did a service to America there. . .”

Keillor was joking. He was referring back to an earlier comment in his review: “[Lévy] admires Warren Beatty, though he sees Beatty at a public event ‘among these rich and beautiful who, as always in America . . . form a masquerade of the living dead, each one more facelifted and mummified than the next, fierce, a little mutant-looking, inhuman, ultimately disappointing.’ Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like ‘as always in America.’ Bombast comes naturally to him.”