* * * * *

Between the Hitchens-haters and the Hitchens-obsessed, Dinkelspiel is packed, which in itself is unusual, given that said auditorium is usually only entered by flute enthusiasts and the intensely bored. There are throngs outside in the drizzle, hoping to join the audience, which comprises an unimaginable variety of the Stanford-and-nearby-area population. There are the enthusiasts sitting in tizzied cliques, hopping into the aisles to pass out pamphlets. There are piqued professors, enthused professors, strangely eager older people from Palo Alto, and the Atheists of Silicon Valley society. There are apathetic students, pathetic students, super-godly youth, pagan youth, and, most noticeably, and the kids who are organizing the thing – young minions from the anally conservative Stanford Review, a club called IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness), and Vox Clara, a Christian journal. These young things are whippersnapping about in their best suits, checking tickets, fixing mics, closing doors.

A painfully clean-cut theist leaps onstage and shuts everyone up. He’s hosting the televised broadcast of the debate, which is being done through the Christian Communication Network. As Theist Man tells the audience to look normal and ignore the cameras, everyone immediately stares straight into the lenses with manic glee. The already-heady apprehension coursing through Dinkelspiel is reaching fever pitch, something like the pre-match anticipatory excitement that is surely felt by WWE patrons. Teasing the tension to fever pitch, our celebrity guest shuffles his be-sneakered way onstage.

Decked out in a suit, pink Oxford, and tan sneakers, Ben Stein is functioning in the dubious capacity of ‘host.’ One may remember Stein’s infamous cameo in the film Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, which features Stein as a soporific econ teacher droning on about ‘voodoo economics.’ This is also the same Ben Stein of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Turn Ben Stein On. Also the same Ben Stein who wrote speeches for Nixon and is, as it turns out, a pretty militant theist. He elicits applause. But why is Ben Stein here? One wonders.

The man who is being sent into the arena to grapple with Hitchens is the mild-mannered Jay Richards, a research fellow and the media director at the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based foundation that combines a frankly odd mix of Christianity and rampant capitalism. Their website announces, “It is our hope that by demonstrating the compatibility of faith, liberty, and free economic activity, religious leaders and entrepreneurs can contribute by helping to shape a society that is secure, free, and virtuous.” Although Richards handles Acton’s media, he’s certainly also qualified to talk about God; he has a number of degrees, including a combined PhD in philosophy and theology. But he’s not a scientist. For that matter, neither is Hitchens. And it seems frankly odd that “the scientific evidence of intelligent design” should even be on the table. Why bring in two philosophy-types to talk evolution? Why not bring in Richard Dawkins instead and let him chat up a Catholic biologist? Knotty questions indeed, but more on this later.

* * * * *

Summoned into the ring by the drawling Stein, Richards and Hitchens enter and station themselves at their faux-wood podiums. Richards is a tall, bounding, gangly Aryan specimen with a leonine shock of blonde hair, and he looks so wholesome. At times, he almost resembles a bespectacled, string-bean-y Ellen Degeneres. Hitchens, on the other hand, looks haggard. He’s short-ish, pudgy, silver-haired, a bit hunched, and his expression is one of rapt, unflinching attention. With his sharp features, graying skin, and peak-y eyebrows, one might almost say he looks Mephistophelean. Hitchens is called upon to make the first rhetorical move by Michael Cromartie, the debate moderator. Cromartie was, incidentally, President Bush’s choice for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and is, predictably, a staunch theist.

Hitches begins his opening remarks by mocking Stanford, mocking Ben Stein, and scoffing, “I can’t imagine it’ll take me fourteen minutes to demolish intelligent design, as I refuse to call it.” He then launches into a rapid-fire précis of his atheistic treatise, God is Not Great. The book was published in May of 2007, almost a year after Richard Dawkins (his bosom friend) published The God Delusion, which covers much the same territory as Hitchens’ treatise. The two much-celebrated books are both anti-God, both anti-religion, and both written by suave, heathenish Brits. Dawkins makes an elegant case, drawing parallels between Darwinian evolution and the coming-into-being of the universe, after which he sets in on the evils of religion. Hitchens is a far sight bitchier than Dawkins, and more flamingly anti-religious. He devotes few pages to disproving the existence of God, choosing rather to anecdotally enumerate religion’s varied crimes against humanity. Read together, Dawkins & Hitchens are a nice good cop/ bad cop pairing.

* * * * *

After Hitchens works his magic, Richards begins his remarks in vaguely Midwestern tones, pitching his address to “Mr. Hitchens,” who has incidentally hardly deigned to look at Richards, let alone mention him. As Hitchens stares into space, Richards attempts to administer a little swat to Hitchens’ proverbial nose: “A sneer is not an argument,” pouts Richards. Well, yes, Hitchens has been sneering, but the audience loves it. Hitchens has ignited blood lust. So why won’t Richards sneer back? Come on, Richards, you can be funny! But, no. Richards is not funny. He is sweet. And he is smart and earnest, but he cannot argue. Instead, he spends his fourteen minutes expounding a rambling “list of facts” about our world that makes theism ‘a better fit’ than atheism. His logic rests heavily on the concept of an innate morality ‘written on our hearts,’ which Richards cites as evidence for the existence of God.

* * * * *

During the heat of the debate, Cromartie, the moderator, doles out questions on Darwinism, evolution, and the ‘cause’ of the universe. Never mind that neither of the debaters is a scientist; both have done their research, and they are able to dip into science-chat with ease. The debate boils down to the weary question of irreducible complexity: is there, or is there not, some facet of the natural world that cannot be explained through Darwinian evolution? The former-favorite example used to be the human eye, which, until its evolutionary development was explained, was considered an example of something so complicated and ingenious that it could not possibly have developed through evolution; only that wily God fellow could have fashioned it.

* * * * *

As Hitchens performs his rhetorical aerobics, Ben Stein sits antsily on stage left, barely able to cope with the discussion. He gets incensed just asking a question of Hitchens. So he deals with his alternating boredom and fury by doodling on his notepad and consuming, in slow succession, a large cup of coffee, a bag of chips pulled out of his briefcase, and a peppermint, which he unwraps perilously close to his mic. Why is Ben Stein here? We find out as soon as the broadcasted portion of the debate ends. Clean-Cut Theist springs onstage and announces that those watching the CCN will, for the next 90 seconds, be viewing a preview of Ben Stein’s upcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Further investigation reveals that the film, released in February of this year, follows Ben Stein as he ‘investigates’ the university-level stigma against questioning intelligent design. With the song Bad to the Bone playing in the background, one trailer for Expelled features Ben Stein interviewing a small, balding Scottish man who pipes cheerily, “Just stand up and question Darwinism, and you’ll find out how risky that is.” Another trailer simply shows Stein in knee socks and a schoolboy uniform looking impish.

* * * * *

As Dawkins and others have opined, living without God isn’t always a party. Christopher himself admits it’s a bummer that he’s not going to live forever, but he presses on stoically. As he says, there simply isn’t evidence for God and heaven and angels, and he simply isn’t going to be a self-deluder. But, one must wonder: God and religion are removed, how can we fill the God-shaped emptiness? It takes most atheists a great deal of thought (and in many cases liquor) to come to peace with their own nonbelief and find solace in secular sources of ‘wonder.’ In God is Not Great, Hitchens writes that he has the marvels of the arts, literature, nature, etc. to keep him going. But is this voyage of replacing-God-with-other-things a journey that humanity is ready or willing to take en masse? When that comfortable little bath mat of hope is pulled out from under the world’s feet, what next? Are large chunks of the polis capable of replacing Jesus with Tristan Und Isolde or The Sound and the Fury?

At the conclusion of God is Not Great, Hitchens calls for a secular enlightenment in which humanity will become independent from religion’s efforts to ‘poison everything.’ And we may well ask, ‘What then?’ But perhaps it is enough that Hitchens has brought his readers and his faithful to this place, where the ‘hows’ are not quite worked out, but the ‘whys’ are abundantly clear. And, like it or not, Hitchens has made his smoker’s rasp heard. Yes, he has turned off herds of theists and atheists alike by being snarky and abrasive, but perhaps his bitchiness isn’t gratuitous. He is, after all, living and writing in a country where the religious vote is astoundingly powerful and only abut 5% of citizens identify as atheist or agnostic. And bitchiness is an understandable reaction to the smothering evangelical right. But Hitchens doesn’t need his excuses made for him. He is knowingly, unabashedly Christopher, and one suspects that he has always been this way, that he popped out of the birth canal with a G&T in one hand and a Marlboro in the other. Perhaps this is his truly redeeming quality: by being himself, Hitchens has drawn people into debate, into thought. He is tirelessly shouting his message, and – if his audience’s attentive giggles are anything to judge by – people are listening.

Download “The Wicked Hitch” as a PDF.

Two minutes into Stanford and I’ve spotted a girl with blonde hair and a California smile. She rolls into the Wilbur quad with wheelie-bags while I sling duffels like a real man should. She gives me a first-day half-wave, the kind that says, I’ll be seeing you around, but my hands are stuffed with linens and other things so I grin back the East Coast way, my best warm-hearted grimace. And here’s the thing. I never see her around. Never once in three years. Maybe she was someone’s sister. But that pretty half-wave was all I ever got.

At the beginning of my Orientation Week in the Junipero Dorm, our RAs transform the lounge into a map-metaphor and tell us to sit ourselves down according to where we came from. “The Pacific Ocean is over by the piano and TV,” they instruct us. “North is in the direction of Cedro. So – imagine Canada is Cedro. And China is, uh, Okada.”

“Where’s Okada?”

“That’s Okada.”

“I’m from Thailand.”

“Oh, fuck, the international kids.”

“They can sit on the pool table.”

We are tightly-coiled and in near hysterics. Our parents have about-faced and alighted for the real flyspecks on the map. They left twenty minutes ago – and left us restive in a state of giddy abandonment. A girl wanders in from across the Mexico border and her face shows the freshly flushed and scrubbed-out stain of tears. We are stirred by (and a little embarrassed for) this tender sacrament. She sits Indian-style in the Midwest, maybe Missouri or Illinois, and looks cheerful. I myself am pinned against the lounge windows, where Canada should be, if not in Cedro. I am desperate not to be segregated on the pool table like the rest of the international residents, who are from Greece and England but mostly Asia. I have a defense prepared. “I am from Toronto,” I will explain to them. “It is at more southerly latitude than Seattle. If you’re going to make me sit with the foreign kids, you’re going to have to make all of Washington State and Maine sit with them too. I skipped international orientation. I’m assimilated! Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Like any new posting, college freshmanship takes guts and a steely resolve to fit in. For the same reason that you won’t wear a polka-dot necktie to your first day of work on Wall St. – and the same reason I carefully roll up the sleeves on my first-day-of-Stanford blue button-down, and wear my most winsome pair of distressed cargo pants (sartorial splendors that I now regret) – for that exact reason, Orientation Week unfolds like a high-wire tiptoe, where acting too gauche (or droite) risks a freefall tumble to the circus-ground. Whispers and hissing beneath the social frequency. “Umm… so what’s his deal?”

That’s what we are afraid of.

And as a consequence we are exceptionally boring. We are meant to recite our names and places of origin, geographical clump by geographical clump, but after the first eager beaver tells us just how excited she is to be at Stanford and among so many potential new friends (she is Very Excited), we feel compelled to reveal something of ourselves as well.

“Hi guys. My name is Sam Lipsick. I’m from Palo Alto – that’s just around the corner!” This is said zippily and maybe apologetically. “And, uh, I like to play tennis.”

“Hey everyone. I’m Meghan Daniels. I’m from Pawling, New York. So happy to meet everyone! In person, since I know a few faces from thefacebook.com!” Everyone laughs. “I like to meet new people and play tennis.”

The good news is that we have rock-bottom standards for humor, partly because we are nervous and trying to be agreeable, and partly because we are freshmen. Virtually everyone in the dorm likes to play tennis, which is eventually deemed funny, and by the time we reach the Eastern seaboard the joke, “Well , I don’t like to play tennis” is funny too.

After Michigan it is my turn. I am at a distinct advantage because I am from Canada, and Americans find Canada funny just for existing. Canada is large and unwieldy but usually benign, and it contains moose and Mounties and mountains and igloos, each of which is inoffensively comical in its own way. Sometimes I will tell someone that I am from Canada and they will giggle to themselves, like small children might when they visit the hippopotamus at the zoo.

“My name is Nick,” I say. “And I’m from Canada.” I survey the room. People seem to be smiling expectantly. “Well, Toronto, Canada.” I have dialed into two attractive girls out west who look bored. Probably Canada is not working because some wisecracker from Kansas tried the exact same swindle. “I play hockey. Not very well. Really excited to chill with everyone.” I nod my head slowly, to signify, Chilling with Nick will be fun. A college beat. Then, “Tennis is O.K.”

Laughter; relief; the globe keeps spinning. High stakes is how I remember it. It doesn’t matter that three Orientation Weeks later the whole racket seems charmingly trivial. Come December I will be ass-naked except for a strategic red cup, belting out my national anthem, atop the foreign kid pool table. But by then we had our expectations managed.

There’s a line in a favorite IHUM poem, Do I dare disturb the universe? This is such a viciously unfair question that we read it rhetorically. The universe gets along well with or without us.

II. ANTI-CELIBACY LEAGUE

The question of fucking. Slamming, shtupping, Roxy-Sassing. We have more brains then the national average, but we’ve probably had less sex. No sooner have we cracked the spines of IHUM 1A than we’re told the real objective of our college careers is to pair off and lose it. This is no racy revolution. Hardly! We are attending passively our sexual evolution, which will sidle in like the hangover after a freshman bender. A little messy, painful, or awkward – but carrying the unimpeachable badge of adulthood.

But the problem (we learn) is that sex at Stanford is difficult and highly-regulated. For example, we’re not meant to have it with people who live near us, because that’s dormcest. We’re not meant to have it with people who live far away, because they are scarcely known and likely sketchy. We’re not supposed to do it drunk for the risk of non-tumescence. If we do it sober it will probably be extremely awkward (and quick). It’s strongly advised not to have sex with friends, neighbors, or strangers. There’s no dating at Stanford, but you should really try to lose it to someone who you’ve been dating. And so on.

I have heard statistics some of which I am certain are untrue. 40% of Americans lose their virginity by the age of sixteen. 90% by the age of twenty. 80% of Stanford freshmen have never had sex. Three quarters of those 80% will still be virgins at commencement.

That we manage to mate at all speaks to the anarchy of our species. To the thrill we take in breaking rules that we imposed ourselves, piece-by-piece. Why not screw same-floor girl? Because we’re amigos? Because we’re drunk? Because she has a boyfriend back home at the U. of Pittsburgh?

Give me one good reason why not?

As Orientation Week fades into Fall Quarter, we get told by our RAs to complete the Anti-Celibacy League (ACL) online “100 Point Purity Test.” This test, which purports to measure sexual purity, is considered definitive in these parts. You have probably taken it yourself. It asks awkward, probing questions. Have you ever:

4. Danced cheek to cheek?
17. Had an erection, clitoral erection?
19. Tasted semen?
70. Read a pornographic book or magazine?
87. Engaged in intercourse with an unconscious person, while conscious?
100. Committed bestiality?

The quiz-answering itself is a private affair, conducted behind closed doors and dimmed computer monitors. In contrast, the results could not be posted more publicly. We scrawl them in blue dry-erase beside our names on hallway whiteboards. Leland Q. Freshman: 46% Pure.

I take the test in the dorm computer cluster and try to decide whether to lie, and if so, to which end. I have an intuition that my sexual experience will fall somewhere within a standard deviation of the mean, but it is too soon to be sure. The Purity Test nibbles at a freshman’s insecurities. Were we all too busy in high school, trading in sky-high grades and chess club memberships, to take a breather and get it on?

But instead of lying, I wait until nearly everyone else has written their scores on the whiteboard – until it is clear I will pass under the radar. There are three marks under 30 and two above 90. If I am witnessing exhibitionism, then it is unapologetic, and I am envious of it. Like confidence, sexual purity is a state of mind.

This reminds me of Maggie Pollitt, the cat on a hot tin roof, who by willing herself pregnant made it so. To advertise bluntly our painful-past inadequacies is to acknowledge a conscious remaking of our prior selves. The object of the Purity exercise, after all, is to become Less Pure. In May when we retake the quiz we’ll marvel at how much Less Pure we’ve become.

III. CATHOLIC CHURCH

After the geography icebreaker there is some awkward milling about. We have very little to say to one another because our entire first-day conversational arsenals have been exhausted. We can think of nothing to say except, “Where do you come from?” and “What is your name?” queries both of which have been answered so recently that it is impossible to bring them up again (until tomorrow). No more than twenty minutes from now the scheduled programming will resume and we will be whisked to the first of endless pseudo-fun pseudo-events at Memorial Auditorium.

In the meantime twelve of us pile into a first-floor dorm room. We’re a big bunch of dudes and we look each other over. This is the sort of the ritualized posturing that we never got to do in high school because other guys were doing it for us. The whole gig is unrehearsed but doesn’t ring false.

“So what did you, uh, think of the girls in our dorm.”

“They seem nice,” I say.

“They went to Catholic school.”

“A lot of them did, yeah.”

“What’s that mean?”

Cautiously. “Some… cute ones.”

“Lots of Catholic schoolgirls…”

“Looking to experience new things…”

There’s a gleeful pause. The nut’s been cracked. “I like that,” we say.

Download “Dolls, by a Palm Tree, in the Sand” as a PDF.