Hitchens, Courage, and Our Inequality Myths
For good, ill, or neither, the death of Christopher Hitchens has left me without words. I knew him personally in a small way for several years in DC, and perhaps he knew me that way as well. Our interactions were influential to me far out of proportion to their number. My thoughts keep turning to the pounding August heat and sun coming in through the window in Dupont, while his gracious and sweet family chatted and scampered about. I sorely wish I had that large bottle of Johnnie Walker Black on the table right now, next to the bowl of ice, next to Hitchens.
But that is that. I urge you if you haven't already to read Peter Hitchens' remarks on the courage -- real courage -- of his brother. It is not very courageous of me to segue from here into a link to my latest column on Barack Obama's inequality myth, but it has also been on my mind in this context.
That's because of a brief twitter exchange I had this morning with an interlocutor who said nobody who had ever struggled to pay their rent could ever think of America's real inequality problem the way I had cast it in the column -- not as a matter of income disparity, but as matter of some of us being more independent, and others more dependent, with respect to government.
Well, I told him, I could aver firsthand that the experience of at least a few people, including myself, proved otherwise. We didn't get into it, but one of the things I have come to feel very strongly about (and I believe it's important here as elsewhere to earn strong feelings like this) is that raising a certain kind of family in America requires a pretty strong dose of the actual courage Peter Hitchens mentions. In some ways, this is a sad fact -- conservatives may find it sadder more for cultural reasons, liberals more for economic ones -- but in other ways it is so permanent a feature of human life, I think, that sadness about it is a category mistake.
If the inequality crisis that the president is so worked up about has the cast of a cooked-up myth to it, then there's something also deeply mythological about the idea that anyone who's been in a financial position demanding substantial courage can only believe that the president is right and I (say) am wrong. In the Hitchensian spirit of facing hard truths eyeball to eyeball, we all ought to be more frank, and with less shame, about the myth that an ordinary American life could ever be a life spent on easy street, or without moments -- or without months upon months -- of struggle, of factual if not always spiritual doubt, of outcomes being very much without guarantee. Sound policy does not weave either an artificial insecurity or a servile security into the details of life. But politics cannot relieve us of the trouble of courage -- national politics least of all.
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Oct '10
Re: Hitchens, Courage, and Our Inequality Myths
That was a really awesome column. I've noticed this as well. It's like Glenn Reynolds said in the podcast; political systems sometimes produce a coalition of the very rich and the very poor against the middle class and middle class aspiration.
May '10
Re: Hitchens, Courage, and Our Inequality Myths
THANK YOU, James! My apologies for the shouting. If only we had a leader who would challenge us to have courage, to remember our hard-won liberty, rather than a petty man instigating envy and strife among us.