Winston Churchill looked forward to an expansive lunch. He was in his late seventies, prime minister for a second time, and this cabinet meeting was dragging on. It was nearly one o’clock and they were down to the eleventh item on the agenda, a memorandum on town planning. Wearily, Churchill said:
‘Ah yes, I know town planning, densities, broad vistas, open spaces…give me the romance of the 18th-century alley with its dark corners, where footpads lurk.’
It is possible to have this exact feeling watching cable news today. Somehow, you’re watching CNN or MSNBC, and some bloviating no-mark like Don Lemon or Chris Hayes or Ezra Klein is grimacing through air time. You are well aware than none of these people ever spun a lovely phrase, likely know not a stanza of poetry by heart, have used the word ‘wonk’ approvingly and write and speak in an English so dull and mechanical it reads and sounds like an IKEA instruction manual.
The natural reaction here is: Give me a Hitchens! Resurrect the late Christopher Hitchens and lever him back into the television studios and onto the airwaves. Resurrect the product of those classical dojos of English upper-class training (boarding school and Balliol) and set him furiously loose on the topics of the day. Give me Hitchens’s pointed, smartass raillery over the lamentable journalistic equivalent of town planning any day. If we must have cable news let us have a Hitchens to enliven it.
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