83.
Ridge and Mrs. Olyphant were out on the sun deck -- she reading the news on her iPad. 
   "Oh, Christopher Hitchens has died," she said. 
   Ridge: "He didn't like T. S. Eliot. But for all the wrong reasons. He reminded me a bit of Orwell: a man who could only read a book from a political angle. Charles Dickens, not a good Marxist. Of course with Hitchens it was, Graham Greene, just another Marxist. Don't need him." 
   "Why didn't Hitchens like Eliot, his anti-Semitism?" 
   "He just didn't think The Waste Land was good poetry. I have to admit that it isn't poetry that many people have memorized. I will show you fear in a handful of dust is a paraphrase. In Michigan we liked to joke about April being the cruelest month. There it is completely accurate. Not so much in Georgia."
   "But Eliot was so influential. Surely, all of the poets and novelists who were reading him and responding to what he wrote weren't wrong to appreciate him." 
   "We would have to ask the Hitch, and he's dead. Of course, there are any number of things not to like about Eliot's poetry. The way it is always focused on providing salvation for his people humble people like he's some kind of poetic Uriah Heep. He was the great writer making a 'raid on the inarticulate,' he was the articulate artist, don't you know. We are just the "general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion.' And now under conditions for poets that seem so very unpropitious. It truly chokes you up."
   Cole: "Don't be an envious douchebag, Ridge." 
   "What do you mean, Mr. Cole?" Mrs. Olyphant asked.
   "Ridge is trying to show you he hasn't lost the common touch. He's not a snob. There is no hierarchy of men. There are no great books or great ideas. It's just one big flat egalitarian plain." 
   "I take it you think that is not true, Mr. Cole?" 
   "I think it's crap and should be flushed with the bilge. Eliot was articulate. He had a gift and he worked hard at saying something. Faulting him for that is how we ended up with plainspeaking dunces like W." 
   "Mr. Cole raises and interesting point." 
   "Because something is interesting does not make it correct or expedient," Ridge said.