Victor Davis Hanson The worst crime I witnessed was not necessarily a crime but was surely amoral. One of the best mechanics in the class (his father was a master mechanic as well) had dropped a Chevy 454 into his 1955 four-speed and had what was considered the fastest car among many. One night he […]
Victor Davis Hanson The second occasion of witnessing a crime was more disturbing. A poor guy pulled into a 99 station about 1AM with transmission trouble. He asked if he could park the car there for a few hours, while he hitchhiked to Fresno to get a ride. Odd request? The locals assented because he
Victor Davis Hanson Drinking “Coors” was standard, Olympia was considered “piss water.” (I preferred Olympia because it tasted like water.) Again, almost everyone knew something about cars. (None knew much about our Volvo 544 and looked baffled when they opened the hood.) Most on Saturday nights parked out on someone’s safe-space farm, drank, talked, fought,
Victor Davis Hanson George Lucas’s American Graffiti is getting a lot of play recently. This year is the 50th anniversary of that brilliant film, depicting the fading high-school age of 1962 in small-town America—before the Sixties kicked in, Vietnam went to 500,000 American troops, and various cultural revolutions of the turn-on, tune-in, and drop-out sort
Victor Davis Hanson 1. Do we really believe it was unsafe to shoot down the Chinese balloon over Montana (6 people per square mile), but not over the Aleutians (1 person per square mile), or off the Pacific coast while in U.S. waters? 2. Was it really true that the Chinese balloon was of
Víctor Davis Hanson Jill Biden apparently is studying the career of another progressive icon, First Lady Edith Wilson. Edith (also a younger second wife to her widowed husband) went from First Lady to de facto President from October 1919 to March 1921, after Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke that left him bedridden. Jill has
Victor Davis Hanson Many of the dumpers—the more serious sorts with flatbeds that can unload a half-ton at once (see below for an illustration of a vineyard row after it was nearing being cleaned from an original 1/8 of a mile trail of hazardous liquid and solid trash and over 100 broken neon light tubes)—prefer
Victor Davis Hanson I know the definition of Leftism is inconsistency—from Eco-Czar John Kerry’s carbon-spewing private jet to the climate change/rising seas, race-mongering Obamas housed in a gated, segregated, and seaside Martha’s Vineyard estate or Hawaiian beach mansion. I know dozens in Menlo Park who laud teachers’ unions and detest homeschooling and charter schools but
Victor Davis Hanson Was San Francisco the crown jewel, the logical result of the progressive project, our inheritance from the politicking of Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein? Where now are all the multimillionaire leftists who were never subject to the realities of their own disastrous ideology? Do any of
Victor Davis Hanson While Britain was fighting for its empire in out-of-the-way places like Afghanistan (1839–42; 1878–80; 1919), the inner core of London was Dickensian—crime ridden and impoverished. I thought of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield juxtaposed to the horrendous end to the First Afghan War (1842), in which an entire army and retinue