Words Matter

Victor Davis Hanson The infant vineyard was beautiful by July. The next June, in only its second leaf, the canopies on the trellises were stunning. The third year we harvested our first crops. Then the table grape market crashed in the Paul Volker years of him breaking high inflation that led to the Reagan recession […]

Victor Davis Hanson In high school, I did the usual physical summer farm jobs for a variety of employers—worked as a swamper piling 40-pound boxes of plums and nectarines in the field on trailers or helped tie up young vines, day in and day out. Or I worked at packing houses loading and unloading semis-

Víctor Davis Hanson  Professors say they work hard. Some surely do. So do lawyers and media people. I can remember driving 30 miles home from CSU, Fresno after teaching four semester classes, all with separate preps. And that was after spending another four hours in independent studies and office hours, only to enter the house,

Víctor Davis Hanson As an academic, I remember the “Words Matter” controversies of the 1990s when euphemisms soon became Orwellian speech and ushered in the age of microaggressions and safe spaces, as “African American” became “black” that in turn became “Black.” Words, then, we were told affect realities. And they do. Certainly, the stereotypes of

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 Why did Joe Biden take out various top-secret papers on various topics including Ukraine, Iran, and the United Kingdom? The toadyish media has offered three explanations: one, Biden was “swamped” in 2017 and harried in his exit from the Vice Presidency and thus naturally got “sloppy”; two, he was writing his memoirs