Max Obuszewski
Sent 12-23-11 to NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday in response to Scott Simon’s commentary:
Scott Simon’s maudlin “Christopher Hitchens' Legacy Of Defying Labels” promoted inconsistency as a virtue. I thought the commentary was actually about Simon. The one-time Quaker espoused pro-war sentiments and became an embedded reporter with the U.S. military. Remarkably, he was allowed to remain a host, yet Lisa Simeone's anti-war perspective cost her a public radio job.
Hitchens does a brilliant take on the crimes of Henry Kissinger and then loses his focus by doing an anti-Mother Theresa film. Hitchens was once a believer in supporting the 99%, but then became an elitist and a drumbeater for war. No, the inconsistency is not a value to admire. This comment by Simon is a copout: "Compromise is difficult when changing your beliefs is taken to be a moral cave-in instead of the sign of a curious, lively mind." To once favor pacifism, but later to support empire is selling out.
I would rather believe in a person of good principles who remains consistent. I have little respect for someone, whether it is Hitchens or Simon, whose political perspective is like a weather vane. The NPR commentator who promotes inconsistency in thought is looking in a mirror:
In my circles, I praise the person who recognizes that military spending is an affront to the poor and income inequality must be challenged. Give me a writer such as Howard Zinn any day, whose political perspective remained consistent after his life experiences confirmed the madness of war.
Scott Simon’s maudlin “Christopher Hitchens' Legacy Of Defying Labels” promoted inconsistency as a virtue. I thought the commentary was actually about Simon. The one-time Quaker espoused pro-war sentiments and became an embedded reporter with the U.S. military. Remarkably, he was allowed to remain a host, yet Lisa Simeone's anti-war perspective cost her a public radio job.
Hitchens does a brilliant take on the crimes of Henry Kissinger and then loses his focus by doing an anti-Mother Theresa film. Hitchens was once a believer in supporting the 99%, but then became an elitist and a drumbeater for war. No, this inconsistency is not a value to admire. This comment by Simon is a copout: "Compromise is difficult when changing your beliefs is taken to be a moral cave-in instead of the sign of a curious, lively mind." To once favor pacifism, but later to support empire is selling out.
I would rather believe in a person of good principles who remains consistent. I have little respect for someone, whether it is Hitchens or Simon, whose political perspective is like a weather vane. The NPR commentator who promotes inconsistency in thought is looking in a mirror:
In my circles, I praise the person who recognizes that military spending is an affront to the poor and that income inequality must be challenged. Give me a writer such as Howard Zinn any day, whose political perspective remained consistent once his life experiences confirmed the madness of war. ####
Christopher Hitchens' Legacy Of Defying Labels
by Scott Simon
December 17, 2011
Weekend Edition Saturday
Christian Witkin
The influential writer and cultural critic died from complications of cancer of the esophagus.
It may be telling that Christopher Hitchens should die in this season. I don't mean the holiday season but a contentious season in Congress and on the campaign trail, with politicians jabbing fingers and accusing each other of inconsistency.
Writers and thinkers are fixed with labels these days so that people can order up opinions like flavors in an ice cream shop: chocolate or strawberry, liberal or conservative. A lot of people seem to turn to news for a bolstering jolt of reassurance that they're right: news and views to strengthen convictions that they're already sure they hold.
But you couldn't fix a label on Christopher Hitchens; that's why he was worth reading and hearing.
He called himself a Trotskyite-Marxist in the 1970s, though he seemed much funnier to me than whatever I ever imagined a Trotskyite-Marxist to be. A number of years ago, after his falling out with The Nation magazine, people stopped referring to him as liberal. A little after that, as he became outspoken about his atheism, they stopped referring to him as a conservative. By the time he died, no label applied to Christopher Hitchens. I think he worked hard to achieve that.
We often seem to treat consistency of thought as a sign of character. Politicians and pundits are applauded for repeating themselves. Observers and activists say, "Aha!" if they discover a distance between what some public figure believed five years or five months ago, and what they say today. Compromise is difficult when changing your beliefs is taken to be a moral cave-in instead of the sign of a curious, lively mind.
But I wonder if always making consistency into a virtue is wise for anyone. Why strive to enjoy a rich life, filled with the deep, transforming experiences of family, travel, learning, love, daring, triumph and loss if you're determined just to cling to the same ideas that you've always had?
I think Christopher Hitchens enjoyed his rumpled, smoking, tippling, blue-eyed lizard caricature. But he was also a prolific and inspired writer, and a restless thinker who challenged his own certitudes. He thought and drank deeply and gabbed with people for hours on end wherever he went and let his thoughts be shaken by life. He was aggressively inconsistent.
"There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb," Christopher Hitchens wrote recently. "But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking."
www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-korea-kim-death-20111221,0,4751913.story
baltimoresun.com
The U.S. shouldn't prop up tyrants, even if they're on 'our' side
10:30 AM EST, December 21, 2011
I awoke Monday to news that North Korea's tyrant, Kim Jong Il, is dead ("Kim Jong Il, 1942-2011: Enigmatic leader," Dec. 19). The article in The Sun was part of a confluence of events that include the military hearing at Fort Meade for accused Pentagon whistleblower Bradley Manning and a recent Parade magazine report about the World's Worst Dictators in 2011.
The latter article obviously included Mr. Kim as well as Syrian dictator Bashir Assad. It also noted that a number of other autocrats — Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Libya's Muammar Gadhafi and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia — were banished from their thrones.
I noticed, however, that the U.S. government was very friendly to many of these autocrats. For example, our government through its rendition policy sent prisoners to be tortured in Syria. And Mr. Mubarak was receiving U.S. tax dollars second only to what Israel gets.
If the revelations in Mr. Manning's hearing are true, he leaked information about the U.S. consorting with dictators like Ben Ali. I would argue those revelations helped ignite the Arab Spring and that Mr. Manning obeyed the oath he took to report government malfeasance, corruption and illegal acts. And he is now suffering the consequences.
Instead of wasting time prosecuting Mr. Manning, our government should pledge never again to give our support to countries engaged in rampant human rights violations. And after taking the pledge, our government should close down its naval base in Bahrain, where doctors and nurses are being tortured and imprisoned for obeying their Hippocratic oaths.
Max Obuszewski, Baltimore
Copyright © 2011, The Baltimore Sun
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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