Havel vs. Hitchens: Blogosphere have you no sense of decency or proportion?

It's rightly called by the clumsy and unattractive term "Blogosphere," a word that does not trip lightly off the tongue. It has, as usual, no sense of proportion and less sense of shame. This has been particularly evident in the last few days with the passing of two men, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens.

Along with untold hundreds of other's I had my pass at Hitchens soon after his death foretold was announced as a fait accompli. I was saddened by his passing as much as I am saddened by the passing of many whom I do not know except via their work but for whom I come to have more than a passing interest if not a bit of respect. I wrote what I had to say about Hitchens fairly early on the day his death was announced but was unprepared for the tsunami of comment that came along on the heels of my own marginally interesting reflections and continued..... and continued.... and continued... until one would have thought that the revealed author of the New Testament had passed on without finishing the Book of Revelations.

I mean, really, the outpouring of memoirs and memory and sheer unadulterated name dropping was somewhat nauseating to behold. At one point it looked like this:

Pretty dense, right? And all for a man who evidently was the very model of hale fellow well met and, from what I could tell, a pretty good and workmanlike writer of the wiseass Oxfordian mold. A kind of latter day Kingsley Amis, a dedicated alcoholic of a writer that I used to edit monthly back in England in the late 70s. In habit and in prose, Hitchens was sort of a shadow of Amis and, I think, a pal of Amis' son, Martin.

Contrast, if you will, the much more sedate reaction to the passing of a man who, besides being a writer and poet of real distinction, also helped midwife freedom, real freedom, into the world -- Vaclav Havel:

Much more "restrained" to say the least, isn't it? Indeed you'd have to say that the "blogosphere" seems to be more comfortable with bluster and braggadocio that it does with real greatness; with dithering and blathering about the cyberealm than achieving anything permanent in the world dimensional.

Amanda Rivkin writes well on Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011:

Who in New York, Baku, or its affiliate, well-to-do cities of East and West dares brave the consequence for something greater than a slogan, or greater than themselves? To be a dissident has reached the point of cliché if only because human rights is all too often the case of a competing elites, alienated from "the people"; to be imprisoned does not necessarily mean you speak for human rights, but it does mean, if only for a moment, that you spoke for yourself. Yet in many societies, this remains a grave crime. To do so creatively, brilliantly, and in a way in which the humor never fades from the voice, the laughter never subsides, and the constant cackle is one that echoes in the executioner's chamber as opposed to in society, the inmate's cell and among those who have struggled to know the difference between the two --€” this is the gift Havel gave.

It's best to remember that Havel's motto was "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate."

What does it mean in the end? Little other than the passing observation that small men sometimes have bigger sendoffs in the land of the blind. After all, if you can't see clearly it's hard to tell what someone's real stature is.

Vaclav Havel spent years in prison trying to bring freedom to a people held in slavery by a totalitarian ideology that Hitchens worshiped. In the end he helped to liberate around 100 million people.

Hitchens, on the other hand, wrote for, can you dig it?, Vanity Fair. Whew! Dude! What a winner! In the end he help to liberate about 1,000 cases of whiskey. Double winner!

Posted by gerardvanderleun at December 18, 2011 10:05 AM