martedì 31 agosto 2010

 

Christopher Hitchens, the famous author and journalist, lays out his life story in his recent bestseller Hitch-22. In many ways, he embodies the generation which came of age during the 1968 revolution, throwing over political and sexual conventions, and, over time, shedding their illusions about socialism and pacifism. His memoir leaves nothing for anyone else to embellish on, from his early sexual escapades, to his high profile fights with prominent thinkers, artists, and politicians of the day, to his political reversals. It offers a fascinating history and perspective on the last forty years of world events and the people who made them, recalling for baby-boomers the ride they have taken through the decades, through for most from an armchair.

 

Hitchens' father was a career military man and World War II veteran who had found his war years to be the best and most meaningful. His mother was free-spirited and pushed his education forward. Her tragic suicide while he was a young man was a bitter experience, particularly knowing he had missed phone calls that he might have intervened. Later he discovered the Jewish roots she had concealed and found more places from his past.

 

His years at Oxford's Balliol College he described as follows: “a training in logic chopping and Talmudic-style microexegesis [that] can come in handy in later life, as can a training in speaking with a bullhorn from an upturned milk crate outside a factory, and then later scrambling into a dinner jacket and addressing the Oxford Union debating society under the rules of parliamentary order.”

 

Hitchens traveled from place to place as a young revolutionary supporting the cause, from Greece to Cuba, Portugal to Poland, and his observations during these engagements would test his socialist leanings. On a field trip to Cuba for young revolutionaries, in answer to his question about whether free speech was allowed, he was told: of course, except in the case of the “Leader of the Revolution” himself. Hitchens replied to the effect that “if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail” and was amused to find himself labeled a “counter-revolutionary.”

 

He soon discovered that journalism was best-suited to his tendency to straddle both sides of the fence and his relish for argument. Hitchens realized he could not support the curbs on freedom that a socialist regime imposes for the supposed good of all. “Whatever I might argue, I was more profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom—freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgment and independent judges.” A leading figure in the Solidarity movement in Poland, Adam Michnik, told Hitchens: “The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.”

 

 

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