Well actually, I don't, missed the whole kit and caboodle. But our sweet Hitchens does and in a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy ( at City Journal) he eulogises over his leftist past as a member of the 68's and his play times with the radicals of the period.
"we demanded the right to hurt the feelings and ruffle the susceptibilities of others. A tiny memory comes back to me. In proposing that my Oxford college no longer ban female guests from staying overnight, I came up with the slogan, “Equal Rights for Heterosexuals.”
As the Paris revolt faded from its May glory, and as the blooms of the Prague Spring began to feel a pinch, I vanished to Cuba and spent a hot summer in a camp in the province of Pinar del Río, where sixty-eighters of every stripe had forgathered, ostensibly to plant coffee but mostly to drink it (and rum) and to discuss new horizons of revolution."
So what?, we groan. I thought blockading the US embassy and the South African embassy was cool when I was a teenager. A good friend was married to a senior member of the ANC ( then proscribed) and was followed everywhere by men in grey; we squatted a certain South East Asian embassy when our government refused to recognise the new junta and the old diplomats had been recalled and killed. So what?
The reason I raise all this old history is not to say "hey our generation was just as cool as the aging baby boomer pom". It's because I'm really pissed that Hitch can attack Obama and Michelle for their teenage and early adult contacts, while reveling in another article about his own personal contacts within the IRA.
And Hitchens says his move to the right is not a betrayal. No, say it ain't so! Hitchens move to the right is the only thing clever people like Tom Stoppard and Hitchens could do.
However both Obamas (and the Clintons for that matter) must be forever giving mea culpas for any early indiscretions.
Now I see why he says only boys are funny, you couldn't make this crap up.
|
