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20111220 International Herald Tribune

International Herald Tribune Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Page 13, Views,

The American Hitch, by Roger Cohen, Globalist, London,

   When I moved back to England last year after three decades overseas, the first book I read was Christopher Hitchens's "Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies." It's a good--and much overlooked--study of the quirks of the special relationship and like most good books it has you from its first sentences:

   "In the United States, it is considered insulting to say of somebody that he or she is 'history'. To be told 'You're history,' is to be condemned as a has-been. I know of no other country that has this everyday dismissal in its idiom. But then I know of no other country that has such a great weakness for things that originate in England--the has-been country par excellence."

   Hitchens is history now in the sense that he is dead and in the sense that he will be debated and analyzed for a long time; no has-been, he. In fact the Hitch phenomenon in the United States, his adopted land, has assumed vast proportions. Somewhere in his "year of living dyingly" he became--rather to the dismay of the English--a figure he might have mocked: an American hero.

   That is an apotheosis deserving of reflection...

David CK Chang, SSN057-86-4042,
December 20, 2011, Tuesday,
National Central Library,
Taipei City