They will be missed

— Getting old means, among other things, seeing the people you grew up admiring and who had some kind of influence on your life pass on. In the past year or so, the departure of a number of prominent figures hit harder than most.

James Q. Wilson was one of the most important social scientists of his time. Just about all political science professors are called upon to teach “American Government” at one point or another in their careers, and it was always made easier by having Wilson’s classic text to turn to (now in its 12th edition).

But Wilson wrote the most important books of recent decades on such subjects as crime, urban politics and the nature of bureaucracy as well. Rudy Giuliani recently and eloquently gave credit for his cleanup of New York City to Wilson and his ideas (the “broken windows” thesis).

From all accounts, Wilson was the model academic-fair-minded, careful in drawing conclusions, and with an unerring interest in topics that had the potential to improve the human condition in ways big and small and seldom obvious to others. He was, in short, what the rest of us in academe strive and usually fail to become.

Vaclav Havel was one of the heroes of the “revolutions of 1989” that foretold the death of Communism. Few “Kremlinologists” predicted even a few years before it happened that the Berlin Wall would come down and that the Red Army would retreat from Czechoslovakia and the other “captive nations.”

Scholars have spent much of the past two-plus decades arguing over who deserves the bulk of the credit for all this, with conservatives emphasizing the hard-line policies of Ronald Reagan, and liberals the reforms ofMikhail Gorbachev.

But as important as those factors undoubtedly were, special credit has to go to those who risked everything to rebel against the Communist system on the ground, of whom the playwright-turned-dissident Havel and Poland’s Lech Walesa, an unemployedelectrician in the Gdansk shipyards, were most important. Havel eventually went from a Communist jail to the presidency of a post-Communist Czech Republic; Walesa from Communist jail to the presidency of a post-Communist Poland.

To this day, Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” might be the most insightful thing ever written about the evils (and inner weakness) of totalitarianism, in particular the way in which it destroys souls by forcing people to live with lies and deceit. Samuel Huntington once said that there can’t be democracy without democrats. Havel proved his point.

Christopher Hitchens was perhaps the most persistently interesting intellectual and essayist of his time.

The name Orwell is tossed about all too casually these days (“Orwellian”), but the comparisons in Hitchens came readily because he so clearly demonstrated the qualities that made Orwell into Orwell-fearless honesty, unflinching integrity, and a willingness (eagerness?) to run apart from the herd. Like that of Orwell, Hitchens’ writing contained a passion for truth made all the more passionate for being so matter-of-fact and cleareyed. Even if I disagreed with many of their conclusions, Hitchens’ essays all read like personal letters from a close friend containing his latest observations on whatever wandered acrosshis capacious intellectual horizon.

Appropriately, his best work, like that of Orwell, attacked orthodoxy, conformity and cowardice, and highlighted the way in which tyranny relies upon such things for its sustenance.

A colleague once told me that “the only good education is a politically incorrect one.” Hitchens would be a central part of any such curriculum.

There were others, of course-the “Big Man,” Clarence Clemons, whose soaring sax solo on “Jungleland” was perhaps the high point of the album that put a thenlargely unknown Bruce Springsteen on the cover of both Time and Newsweek back when I was in high school (and when those magazines actually mattered, unlike now).

And “Smokin’” Joe Frazier, whose 1971 fight against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden was perhaps the most anticipated sporting event of all time, and one for which I sat up in the dark in bed listening to endof-round recaps on a transistor radio (and whose rubber-match with Ali a few years later, the “Thrilla in Manila,” is often considered the most exciting heavyweight bout of them all).

And finally, Levon Helm, core of the finest American (or at least North American) rock ’n’ roll band ever-a band that played music that will never go out of style because it never was in style in the first place.

It is impossible to like music and not like the music of The Band, and I’ve never met anyone with any taste who didn’t. The desert-island list will always include their first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, and perhaps even their much underrated third, Stage Fright, as well.

Each of these people meant something to me, in different ways, at different times. And at least a little piece of me left when they did.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 06/11/2012

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