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2005-08-29 Home Front: Politix

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Posted by tipper 2005-08-29 12:37|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Hitchens states/borrows:

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999.

That line is from a poem written by W.H. Auden upon the outbreak of the Second World War.The poem begins and ends well:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

The last stanza is an uncanny description of Rantburg:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The use of that phrase in the article is not by accident in my opinion. Hitchens takes his political cues from those pre-war literary types that opposed fascism when fascism was cool. He has been consciously emulating their fight in my opinion for the last 4 years. The use of that phrase is his hat-tip to them.

Posted by Zpaz 2005-08-29 22:07|| 2005-08-29 22:07|| Front Page Top

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