If You Can’t Get Rid Of The Family Skeleton, You May As Well Make It Dance.*
Most bloggers on the US left know of Christopher Hitchens and his drunken neoconnery (or if they didn’t George Galloway’s deft skewering of him certainly brought him to public attention), but fewer know of his brother Peter, the Daily Express’ pet rabid rightwing reactionary.
I had meant to link to this interview with them both at Hay-on-Wye when it first came out, but it got lost in the rush of Iraq-related atrocities and political corruption. But ’tis the season for family rows.
However you feel about the Hitchens brothers and their toxic contributions to the public debate on both sides of the Atlantic, this extended interview really does give some insight into how two people can have exactly the same upbringing but reach dramatically different political conclusions, something which I expect will resonate with those who’ve just spent Thanksgiving with their own families.
My own elder sister I can’t stand because of her raving small-minded, bigoted, petty-bourgeois Toryism – we haven’t spoken since my mothers funeral and to be honest I don’t miss the grief. There’s nowt quite so horribly vicious as a political argument fuelled by festive booze, family history and simmering sibling rivalry.
This political argument’s a classic example, though the Hitchens’re necessarily constrained by the circumstances. It started out unpleasantly, with Christopher Hitchens telling a woman to kiss his ass, and went on from there:
[…]
Female audience member: Excuse me. I’m not usually awkward at all but I’m sitting here and we’re asked not to smoke. And I don’t like being in a room where smoking is going on.
CH (smoking heavily): Well you don’t have to stay darling, do you? I’m working here and I’m your guest, OK? And this is what I’m like; nobody has to like it.
IK Would you just stub that one out?
CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.
FAM We should all be allowed to smoke then.
CH Fair enough. I wouldn’t object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I’m not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I’ve worked very hard for the festival. I’m going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn’t like it they can kiss my ass.
IK Would anyone like to take up that challenge?
(Laughter. Woman walks out)
IK Christopher. You’ve talked slightly with your tongue in your cheek about regretting the competition for your mother’s attention and you said in one interview with the Times: “Mothers aren’t supposed to have favourites, are they? But boys know. And to know that your mother loves you most, more than anyone, more than your father, more than your brother, which I always did know …” Did you have a firm conviction that you were favourite?
CH No, what I was expressing there and badly, too, [was] an ambition, I hoped it was true but I am sure it was not. I don’t usually use this term as a compliment but she was very even handed. Impartial. What I’m really saying there I think would be obvious to anyone who has even scanned the more accessible works of Sigmund Freud, is that had I been an only child, I could probably have handled it, to have mummy to myself and then of course to kill daddy and marry mummy. I thought I had all my ducks in a row, and suddenly to have to go to some nursing home and bring home a bundle was a shock and I may never have got over it. Took up smoking at around that time.
PH I don’t know about the parenting but there was a story, although I can’t remember anything about this, of Christopher having been discovered gleefully releasing the brake of the pram in which I was lying …
CH That’s when I took up drinking …
[…]
I still have the physical reminders of my elder sister’s anger at my own arrival, in the shape of a big scar on the corner of my eye where she hit me with a housebrick. (Was that before or after she tried to smother me in my pram? I forget.) Then there was the time she pushed me off a high wall and I broke my leg… I don’t recall her ever being punished for any of this either.
Early family experience informs our political choices much more than we think; we like to think we’ve reached our considered political positions by rational independent thinking but it’s not so simple as that; the Hitchens are a prime example. I know that it’s my own early experience of unfairness at home that made want to champion the underdog and which coloured my political views for life and I expect it’s the same for many others.
We like to think that the people we elect to take charge of our political future are acting rationally. Wouldn’t it be dreadful if it turned out that what passes for intelligent political decision-making is actually based, not on reasoning and empirical evidence, but on unresolved oedipal issues and lousy family dynamics?
* George Bernard Shaw
Read more: Politics, Family dynamics, Hitchens
