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April 8, 2005
Good Hitchens
hristopher Hitchens has written the kind of essay in The Atlantic Monthly that keeps me coming back to him. "On Becoming American" is an instant classic. If you are a subscriber, you can read the whole thing. Otherwise, sign up for a trial issue and gain access. Here's a snippet:
I had just completed work on a short biography of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and had found myself referring in the closing passages to "our" republic and "our" Constitution. I didn't even notice that I had done this until I came to review the pages in final proof. What does it take for an immigrant to shift from "you" to "we"?No loyalty oath, no coerced allegiance, was involved. In the course of writing thousands of columns and making hundreds of media and podium appearances, many of them highly critical of the government of the day, I had almost never been asked by what right I did so. My offspring were Americans just by virtue of being born here (no other country in the world is or has ever been this generous). As soon as I got my green card, immigration officers started saying "welcome home" when I passed through. Moreover, as one who is incompetent to do anything save writing and speaking, I stood under the great roof of the First Amendment and did not have to think (as I once had to think) of the libel laws and the other grand and petty restraints that oppress my craft in the country of my birth.
But this wasn't my thinking. . . For me, September 11, 2001, really did "change everything." In exploring the non-clichéd but most literal forms of that observation, and its ramifications, I began to read the press—the American press—as if it were held up to some kind of mirror. Each time I was instructed that such-and-such a fatuity was the view of "the Europeans," I decided not that my Anglo-Celtic-Polish-German-Jewish heritage was being parodied (though it was) but that someone whose claim to be "European" was at least as good as M. Chirac's should assure his American friends that they need not feel unsophisticated or embarrassed. Au contraire …
Of course, let's not forget there's the Bad Hitchens.
*** I need to learn patience: Where can I take a crash course? Ashleigh Brilliant
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Posted by witnit at April 8, 2005 10:06 PM
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