Last night, trying to fall asleep, I started reading Christopher Hitchens memoir “Hitch 22” by means of my iPad with its “VoiceOver” speech synthesis software. Like many an English writer before him (all acknowledged) Hitchens undertakes a chapter on the horrors of boarding school replete with beatings, buggery and brutality. For my money he’s not as good on the subject as his hero George Orwell, but who could be? What interested me was a burst of neo-liberal nostalgia wherein “the Hitch” opines sniffingly that today’s incarnation of his school boasts custom cuisine for vegetarian students, and a host of programs for children with learning disabilities, and accordingly, a certain rigor may have been lost.
One problem when one is reading with the iPad is that you can’t throw it across the room. I most certainly would have thrown the hardback edition had I been reading one. But had I been reading one, I wouldn’t be blind. Rigor, Mr. Hitchens? Could you have conceived of the possibility that the students with disabilities now inhabiting your Ur-Scholastica, might be the hardest working ones?
Planet of the Blind 