Victor Davis Hanson By midnight, the fever had climbed higher, and there was minimal choice. The Libyan minders arrived, worried that I had food poisoning or some other bad experience that might sour our once-happy plans for national conciliation. After a brief consultation, they notified the proper port authorities. I was allowed off the boat, […]
Victor Davis Hanson By 1996, I had settled down to an academic life, if teaching four and five courses a semester seemed a normal scholarly career. I puttered rather than worked with my siblings on the farm and turned my attention to my great-great-grandmother’s house that was falling apart. We had no money, but I
Victor Davis Hanson I was feeling great by 1987, some eight years after my near-death experience in Greece. True, I had been deemed a “failure” at 25 for having a PhD in Classics from Stanford only between 1980 to 1984 to prune vines, drive a tractor, and do manual farm chores, with a growing family
Victor Davis Hanson The plane to SFO landed at 2:00 AM on a delayed flight in July 1979. At the airport my father was waiting with his Vista Cruiser used station wagon, all the seats down with a bed made up. By the time we got out of customs, the garage, and on the road,
Victor Davis Hanson Four years after my Greek sojourn I came back in 1978–79 for another year of study, this time at the American School of Classical Studies. It was a wonderful year, walking each Saturday over the Attic countryside with the legendary Professor Eugene Vanderpool, or taking the class tours with the dynamic archaeologist
Victor Davis Hanson I studied Classics at age 19–20 in Greece from August 1973 to July 1974. It was quite a crazy year to be in the Eastern Mediterranean. Not long after I arrived, there was a Greek coup resulting in the removal of the Prime Minister/Col. Papadopoulos and his “colonel” junta. It was replaced
Victor Davis Hanson I was teen-aged, broke, had never been out of the state, or flown anywhere. And I quickly learned the Greek class was mostly for graduate students in history, philosophy, and linguistics, with a few undergraduate Latin students who wished to take Greek. The course was designed to help students master all of
Victor Davis Hanson I’ve been very lucky in dodging bullets but even more unlucky in finding them. Over some 55 years, I found myself in some of the worst situations imaginable. And post facto, I realize that I got myself into these jams due to my own negligence and lack of circumspection. And yet somehow,
Victor Davis Hanson 5. Why is DEI dying? Like all commissariats, DEI is expensive. It requires legions of drone commissars to monitor and audit ideology—in this case, tribal essentialism. How many nonproductive auditors as overhead can a society afford? Go back into time and ask the former Soviet Union or Mao’s failed Cultural Revolutionaries? And
Victor Davis Hanson 4. What were the costs to America of DEI? Once race, sex, and sexual orientation were pronounced proof of victimization, then preferences and exemptions obviated the very tenets of civilization, law, and culture. Swarm the border, enter unlawfully, reside illegally—and what followed? De facto amnesty and non-enforcement of laws. Subsidies for housing,