A Thousand Shards of Glass by Michael Katakis

Author:Michael Katakis [Katakis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925030440
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

7 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE HEROES THAT NEVER WERE

I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.

P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens (1906)

Journal entry

3 November, 2010

University of California Medical Center

San Francisco, California

I’m in room 805 where Kris is resting after undergoing her third brain operation in eight months for what started out as a brain tumor.

Over the last few days I have been reading Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, Hitch 22, which is moving, substantive and, as always with Hitchens, well written.

As I watch my wife sleeping, I am well aware that Hitchens, too, is struggling for his life and it makes me sad for I like the man’s spirit and intelligence as he stands up for those who get pushed around. It is not all roses however, for even though I have learned much from this intelligent man, I also have a serious quarrel with his conduct leading up to the Iraq war and afterwards.

This self-described Marxist poses in one photograph in the book holding a gun with ‘Saddam’s enemies’ in Kurdistan and in another with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz in Iraq. I find it disturbing that this man of sizable talents used his intellect and powerful words to enable a lie. After reading his memoir, I can see how it happened but still cannot find a satisfying rationale or excuse for such decisions.

At one time I thought Hitchens just a ‘celebrity adventurer’ or a solipsistic opportunist but he is much deeper, more moral and brave than that. His heroes, if I can call them that, are also mine: Orwell, Sassoon and Owen among others and, based on what he has written, men from England like his father, who fought in WWII with stoicism and humility only to be betrayed by his country when he was no longer of any use. Being an American I am well acquainted with betrayal and understand completely what he is referring to. I have come to believe that his morality is based upon a certain time that is perceived by him as a moral time, or more accurately, a time of actionable morality (really the only kind).

I have always despised and share Hitchens’ great aversion to the bully. Unfortunately, I also share what I perceive as his romantic bent toward the adventurer type, the type that wishes to fight in noble battles and die for a just cause. He has said as much in a recent interview on National Public Radio. It is because of those very views and traits that I believe he was pulled into the ‘great con’ that so many of our shared heroes warned us about. And this is what is so odd. Hitchens writes so movingly about his father being betrayed by a new British government but also by a new ethic, or lack of one, where more and more of England was being privatized and the hills and countryside were being cut up for those contemptuous people who ‘made’ money rather than ‘earned’ it.

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