In a couple of weeks, publisher Twelve Books will release A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, a collection of essays by the late journalist Christopher Hitchens . I secured an early copy of the book. Hitchens’s writing is still sparkling and insightful, even though he died in 2011.
Hitchens is still so bracing because, unlike journalists today, he operated in a zone of fearlessness and real freedom. The smog of " wokeness " had not yet descended onto the West. And the years Hitchens spent as a reporter and foreign correspondent and his deep education had given him experience that made him more than a pundit.
CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS SAY KAMALA HARRIS COULD HAVE UPPER HAND OVER GAVIN NEWSOM IF THEY RUN
An atheist, he had emerged from socialist movements in Britain yet expressed doubt about abortion and supported the Iraq War. Hitchens despised religion, harshly mocked Islam, and championed banned writer Salman Rushdie. He never held back an opinion, but he had never arrived at that opinion in a sloppy way. At one symposium, he argued to the other journalists that “no one is controlling your typewriter keys.”
In other words, be fearless. You’re free, so act like it.
That’s not the reality today. Liberal journalists can’t write anything that contradicts the official orthodoxy. Conservatives are better, but they don’t cover the arts and culture the way Hitchens did. The essays in A Hitch in Time examine war and politics but also books and culture. Hitchens even reported from the 1995 Oscars. (He couldn’t stand Forrest Gump and was right.)
If you want to write as freely and as widely as Hitchens, you need to freelance for about five different outlets. Even then, there is always the lurking fear of getting canceled.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine and a fellow journalist noted on Facebook that I have a new book out. He plugged it this way: “Let’s face it, Mark Judge is a guy who’s going to say what he’s going to say, and then he’s going to say it.” Well, of course. What else is the point of living in a free country? To hide your unpopular conclusions about important subjects?
Despite the internet, journalism is more restricted and intimidated than when Hitchens was alive. Do you ever open a newspaper or your laptop computer not knowing what Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, or Jonathan Capehart are going to say? Of course not.
The problem also exists on the Right. Ben Shapiro, who once panned the movie Black Panther without seeing it, is not going to have a lot to say about Zadie Smith, punk rock, or sex. Only Hitchens could go to the Oscars (in a piece in the new collection) and report approvingly of a vulgar gesture an audience member made about the self-adoring nature of movie people and in the next paragraph blast Forrest Gump, a movie loved by conservatives. Right on both counts.
Hitchens also came out against the Clintons when they sent their lackeys out to smear Monica Lewinsky, who had an affair with Bill Clinton. What liberal journalist would do the same today? They can’t even be bothered to investigate the Biden family corruption — and Creepy Joe’s hair-sniffing habits.
I was lucky enough to have known Hitchens in a peripheral way. I was an intern at the Nation magazine in the late 1980s. Hitchens was leaving the Nation to go to Harper’s, but our time overlapped for a brief period.
Hitchens was, of course, famous as a left-winger, but he was not predictable. When we met, he was in trouble for expressing doubt about abortion. “I don’t think feminism should contradict humanism,” he was quoted as saying. Then this: “Nobody on the Left can avoid noticing that the so-called ‘pro-life’ forces are overwhelmingly female and from income groups that traditionally voted Democratic. Yet this simple rebellion by what one might dare to term humble people has been written off as reactionary by people who can’t or won’t see the essential dignity of the right-to-life position.”
Like everyone else, I had my disagreements with Hitchens. He savaged Mother Teresa in a petulant book, and at one Washington party, we argued about the band The Clash. He called the socialist rockers “nihilistic,” and I responded that he was flat-out wrong. Yet he was always thoughtful and never boring.
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In his introduction to the new Hitchens collection, James Wolcott notes that people are still arguing about Hitchens more than a decade after his death: “Few things sink a reputation in posterity as irretrievably as a well-formed consensus that functions like enabling fluid, leaving behind a waxy, respectable relic, and there’s no danger of that with Hitchens. Even in death, he remains uncontainable.”
It’s a fate for which more journalists should strive.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
Christopher Hitchens and the collapse of journalism and critical thinking
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28.11.2023
In a couple of weeks, publisher Twelve Books will release A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, a collection of essays by the late journalist Christopher Hitchens . I secured an early copy of the book. Hitchens’s writing is still sparkling and insightful, even though he died in 2011.
Hitchens is still so bracing because, unlike journalists today, he operated in a zone of fearlessness and real freedom. The smog of " wokeness " had not yet descended onto the West. And the years Hitchens spent as a reporter and foreign correspondent and his deep education had given him experience that made him more than a pundit.
CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATS SAY KAMALA HARRIS COULD HAVE UPPER HAND OVER GAVIN NEWSOM IF THEY RUN
An atheist, he had emerged from socialist movements in Britain yet expressed doubt about abortion and supported the Iraq War. Hitchens despised religion, harshly mocked Islam, and championed banned writer Salman Rushdie. He never held back an opinion, but he had never arrived at that opinion in a sloppy way. At one symposium, he argued to the other journalists that “no one is controlling your typewriter keys.”
In other words, be fearless. You’re free, so act like it.
That’s not the reality........
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