www.hooverdigest.org/052/kay.html
Jonathan Kay is a 2005 media fellow at the Hoover Institution and managin g editor of Canadas National Post. s aspire to tenure-track pro fessorships, think tank jobs, or careers in government. When Stanford Un iversity awarded Victor Davis Hanson his classics degree 26 years ago, h e chose to become a farmer. My grandmother was 93 and living alone, Hanson tells me as his pickup b ounces along a dirt road winding through his familys grape vineyard. M y brothers, cousins, and I decided wed come home and see if we could pu t the farm right. But his career as a full-time farmer lasted just four years. In 1984, the price of raisin grapes fell from $1,300 a ton to $450. Struggling to ma ke ends meet, Hanson reluctantly dusted off his rsum, got into his tru ck, and drove to the closest university, California State at Fresno. I was dressed like this, he tells me, gesturing to his red and black lumb ermans jacket and work-worn blue jeans. The dean couldnt believe I wa s a Stanford PhD The chairman suggested that I go home and get my dipl oma as proof. On weekdays, Hanson would wake at 5 am to prune his grape vines, then d rive 25 miles to Fresno, where he taught Greek and Latin to Mexican immi grants and working-class students. In what time remained, he managed to author a slew of weighty tomes on the wars of the ancient Greeks that ma de his name as one of Americas preeminent military historians. Farmer and classicist in equal measure, Hanson has led something of a dou ble life. But read his work and it becomes clear that the two identities are intimately joined. From his early books on the Peloponnesian campai gns to his widely read post-9/11 essays on Afghanistan and Iraq, the con nection between agriculture and war emerges as a constant theme. Most classicists trace the advent of Greek democracy to the urban culture of Athens. In his 1995 book, The Other Greek s: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, he ar gues that such institutions as constitutional government and property ri ghts originated in large part with rural landholders. The patterns of ru ral life also influenced the way Greeks went to war, he believes. As Han son notes in Carnage and Culture, most Greek foot soldiers (hoplites) we re not full-time conscripts, like those of Persia or other Eastern power s, but rather volunteer farmers who were needed back home at harvest tim e Greek armies thus favored quick, decisive infantry battles. The resul ting theory of war, Hanson argues, has survived through the centuries an d even finds echoes in campaigns fought by modern Western armies. Hanson, representing the fifth generation of his family to work this same land since it was first homesteaded by his mothers Davis ancestors in 1871, also sees an important connection between farm life and Americas role in the world. The farm is a crucible of character and martial val or, no less in the United States of today than it was in ancient Thebes. Hanson takes as his model the citizen-soldier, a humble creature of the land who puts d own his hoe and takes up the rifle in a proud tradition carried on by America alone. Theres an element in this country that is unchanged in the last 200 yea rs, he says. They are the pe ople who made this country unique and retain a tragic sense. They gravit ate to the military or live in rural America or work with their hands. I f you talk to captains or lieutenants in Iraq, you wont find anything i n them that is different from their equivalents in World War II. And so, even as Hanson has spent the years since 9/11 filling the pages o f Commentary, City Journal, and National Review with articles about figh ting militant Islam, he spends as much time worrying about what corporat e agriculture and demographic trends are doing to his native San Joaquin Valley. Fresno County is home to six of the ten poorest towns in Califo rnia and attracts a steady stream of illegal immigrants looking for agri cultural work. In 2003, Hanson wrote a book focusing on their plight, Me xifornia. From watching two generations of farmhands work his property and teaching students at CSU-Fresno, hes concluded that Me xican American children must learn proper English or inherit their paren ts limited prospects. Driving toward town, we pass a row of farms, and Hanson recites the names of families who worked them back when he was a child. Most have moved o n The days of the family farm are gone, he laments, and with it, Selma s civic pride. Lawns have become dumping grounds for refuse and parking spots for mobile homes. Back roads have been turned into slalom courses of discarded garbage and old furniture. Sooner o r later, all of this land will be given over to strip malls and tract ho using. Selmas crucible of character is crumbling before Hansons eyes . Sometimes I go back and read copies of the Fresno Bee from the 1950s, an d it breaks my heart, he tells me. I was reading an article from 1957 that went something along the lines of Mr Smith was arrested when a sy ringe was found in his familys house. The family members expressed sham e Or the Lions Club failed to meet its fund-raising goal. There were high moral standards without cyn icism or nihilism. Now, you pick up the paper and there are two kinds of stories: crime hit pieces and feel good vapid multicultural be-all-yo u-can-be stories. Hanson places much of the blame for this decay on Americas elites, who h e says have fostered a cult of postmodernism, identity politics, and aff irmative actionor, as he puts it, diversity without standards. As a c lassicist, he sees this as nothing less than a renunciation of the intel lectual traditions bequeathed by the Greeks. Multiculturalism, in preference to a multiracial embrace of Western cult ure, has become what pulp was in the 1950s, he tells me as he navigates the truck between a rotting sofa and a bed frame. Plato told us this w as inevitable: The more you embrace a state-mandated egalitarianism for its own sake and radical democracy, . the more you will be driven to the common denominator of a therapeutic, happy-go-lucky culture, simple stories, lowbrow entertainment, minimal expectationsrather than the ha rd work of using education to uplift the majority. If Hansons great hero is the citizen-farmer, his great villain is the ef fete, left-wing urbanitethe relativist, the poseur, the spoiled gadabou t who has ignorantly embraced fashionable opinions. Hanson himself is a registered Democrat, but he loathes boutique liberal multimillionaires and freely acknowledges the party he admires has been extinct since the days of Truman and JFK. There are a lot of people who are simply not e quipped for capitalism, he tells me. Th e Democratic Party is supposed to be about giving ordinary people a stak e in society. But those arent the people who speak for the Democrats th ese days. The people who write for Harpers, you put them in a trailer h ouse out here, theyd go nuts. When Hanson gets on this theme, his voice rises slightly. One senses he h as not entirely forgiven the sneering welcome he received at Fresno Stat e a quarter century ago. Railing against Americas intellectual establis hment, he hits his target from both sidesboth as a rural farmer who fee ls urban Americas patronizing sting and as a scholar who can easily unm ask the elites intellectual pretensions. Look instead at the titles of their dissertations: Th e Cuban Medical System, The History of Footwear, Gender in the Revol utionary War. Do you know why Michael Moore doesnt like people filming him when he sp eaks? he asks, summoning a name that appears often in his writing. Because hes uneducated, and that s exactly how he sounds. I saw him speak on C-SPAN once and it went most ly like this: You know, like, theyre coming to getyou knowlike you a nd you. We apparently no longer apply a ny litmus tests to public figures who assume positions of wisdom. Re ad narrative history, read the great novels, read philosophy, learn fore ign languages. By twenty-first-century political typology, Hansons love of the pastoral life, distrust of large corporations, and embrace of old-fashioned valu es might put him in the...
|
http://csua.com/feed/