A Child’s Garden of Animals

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Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part Two: The Fear of and Reverence for the “Hoop Snake”

For the next week after that warning about hoop snakes on the prowl as veritable animal unicyclists, I looked hourly for hoop snakes—shovel in hand—but never found a single one or even their bike-tire like trails. Yet Joe Caron said he had grown up on the reservation and saw them hooping in packs a lot.

(I have a confession to make: Until 21, I remember this childhood incident as just folk ignorance—or maybe a wild pun on us? But one day in graduate school while reading about the Gnostics, I came across the ouroboros or “mouth biter,” a mythical Greek snake creature (borrowed from the Egyptians) that alchemists and Gnostic philosophers adopted as iconic, likely because of it transcendent “circle of life” message of the tail ending at and consumed by the head, or a reminder of death and rebirth. And I silently apologized to the long dead Joe the moment I saw that his mythologies were one with the ancients).

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Why Are They Woke?

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

There are lots of reasons why wokeism spread like wildfire once America lost its collective mind during the pandemic, quarantine, self-induced recession, and rioting of 2020. 

Wokeism was never really about racism, sexism, or other -isms. Instead, for some, it illustrated a psychological pathology of projection: fobbing one’s own concrete prejudices onto others in order to alleviate or mask them. 

So should we laugh or cry that Black Lives Matter’s self-described Marxist co-founder turns out to be a corporate grifter? Patrisse Cullors has accumulated several upscale homes and is under investigation by the IRS for allegations of the misuse of funds from one of her foundations.

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A Child’s Garden of Animals

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Hoop Snake’s can put their tail in their mouths and roll like a wheel.
Image by Alpo Barkfest

Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers

Part One: The Fear of and Reverence for the “Hoop Snake”

I don’t know when and how Joe Caron (I have slightly altered the name) moved to our farm in the 1950s, or maybe it was earlier right after the war before I was born. My earliest memories of living in our 800-square-foot house (My dad moved the ancient farmhouse to our place after buying it at an auction) were water shortages. We had an ancient pressure system in a 50-foot well, shared with two farm labor families nearby. (I think those memories are why when my present 90-foot well started failing during the last drought, I went down 440 feet with the new well and with eight-inch casing, even though the water table was 94 feet).

Of the two nearby houses, the Carons lived in one, and, closer to us, Carlos Silva (name also altered) occupied the other that my great-great grandfather and great uncle had once lived in—no more than 600 square feet in size. 

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The Culturalist: Great Leaders in History

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Or Men Who Freed Slaves

Victor Davis Hanson // Art19 and Just the News

Victor Davis Hanson with his cohost Sami Winc discuss the life and legacy of the Theban general of the 4th century BC Epamenondas and Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.

The Biden No-Go Zone

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Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

In American journalism, there are supposed to be some clear, nonnegotiable third-rails. 

One is zero tolerance for overtly racist language and comportment among our movers and shakers. Reporters, for example, for four years damned Donald Trump for his neutralizing summation that there were both “fine people” and extremists mingled among the hordes of protestors during their occasionally violent encounters in Charlottesville, Virginia

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