Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.

It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

To balance “Optimism, Inc.”, I offer occasional gloomy reflections on these revolutionary times. 

Drought, drought, drought…

California did OK in March with rain and snow. It seemed for a brief moment as if the ongoing drought might end. Temperatures were below normal. The 6-7 feet of new snow in the Sierra offered hope. We thought there would be more storms, more of such “March miracles”. 

Then nada. Not a cloud followed during the last month. Temperatures returned to normal. The snow is all but melted. The rain never returned. There are rarely “April miracle” storms.

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Ed Bastian makes $17 million a year as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer. 

Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check-in.  

Yet most Americans believe voting is a more sacred act than flying Delta and, moreover, may have noticed that Delta has all sorts of partnerships with a systemically racist China. So polls show Americans approve of voter IDs.

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Yesterday I walked around the old perimeter of our home, 135-acre farm (all but 40 acres has been sold off and almost all relatives moved away). The almonds were in deep green-leaf, post-bloom glory (No one would believe by August, the now clean orchard will be dusty, faded and exhausted, long pregnant with 3,000 lbs. of almonds to the acre, and in need of immediate harvest and relief). 

Two red-tail hawks—the nth generation of hawks that were always in the sky during my six decades on the same-old, same-old walk—were circling, one quite low, eager to tip a familiar wing to us.

History is not the melodrama of faceless collectives, but a tragedy of complexities.  We should not go quietly into the night and allow a current affluent, leisured and pampered generation to hijack the past, and damn it to perdition. Given the present’s own meager achievements, it has not earned the right to rename, cancel, and Trotskyize those of the past who won Gettysburg, or built the Hoover dam, or produced a Liberty ship every week (a “racist” society who named some of those ships the “SS Harriet Tubman”, the “SS Marian Anderson” and the “SS Booker T. Washington”.) 

Today’s Pentagon (still the world largest office building, completed in just 16 wartime months) is not that of the likes of Leahy, Marshall, Arnold, or King in 1943-5. Today’s undergraduates would have real trouble with the 1965 curriculum of Harvard and Stanford. I doubt our geniuses could design—or rather would be allowed to design—and build our equivalent of a B-29 in three years. NASA of the 1960s and 1970s was not like that of the 21st-Century. Hollywood’s comic book movies are not the “Wizard of Oz”, much less “The Best Years of Our Lives”, or “How Green Was My Valley.” Al Sharpton is no Bayard Ruskin, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates is no Ralph Ellison, and Colin Kaepernick is no Jim Brown. I don’t think the 21st century has produced a group of novelists comparable to contemporaries like Faulkner, Fitzgerald , Hemingway, Wolfe, or Steinbeck. What is needed in these bleak times is a little humility, from a generation who will not necessarily age well and whose record will not be remembered by those to come as particular worthy of respect.

Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores, mox daturos progeniem vitiosiorem (Horace, Odes, III., 6, 46-8.)