Victor Davis Hanson // The Ingram Angle
A Child’s World of Animals
Image by Peterson B Moose, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Part II. The Dark Grove
In the 1880s when the eastern San Joaquin Valley began to be populated with vineyardists and orchard men, there was a shortage of construction-grade wood. Farmers needed lumber that would not rot as fence posts, vineyard stakes, and barn trusses. The Sierra redwood (the majestic Sequoiadendron giganteum), thank God, earlier on was found to split apart and thus never harvested.
So the next best answer was apparently to import the Australian “blue gum” (eucalyptus globulus) that rose to 250 feet, required little water, and whose oils prevented rot. Naïve farmers planted 2- to 5-acre plots everywhere.
Continue reading “A Child’s World of Animals”The Traditionalist – The Halls of Congress and Cultural Decadence
Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler // Private Papers
Will the 2020 Madness Last?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
The COVID-19 pandemic is ending with mass vaccinations. So is the national quarantine. The riots, arson, and looting of the 2020 summer are sputtering out—leaving violent crime in their wake.
The acrimony over the 2020 election fades. Trump Derangement Syndrome became abstract when Donald Trump left office and was ostracized from social media.
In other words, the American people are slowly regaining their senses after the epidemic of mass hysteria and insanity that gripped the nation in 2020.
But Americans will wonder whether what Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the hard Left wrought last year will last when the nation is no longer gripped by 2020 madness.
Teachers and academics are notorious for furious opposition to administrative bloat. For the last 50 years, administrations have proliferated, while the ratio of non-teachers to teachers has skyrocketed—to the chagrin of teacher unions.
Victor Davis Hanson on America’s Roundtable
A Child’s World of Animals.
Image by Peter K Burian, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Part I. Enchanted Dangers
To a boy six or seven, great-horned owls proved terrifying. You would walk through the Santa Rosa plum orchard at dawn. Then suddenly this huge, hidden monster would spring out from a tree trunk and sweep through the row, about three feet off the ground, right on by you.
His six-foot wingspan quietly swished the tall orchard grass. We never knew whether our Rodan would pick all 50 pounds of us up (In our defense, we were raised on that terrifying scene of the Wicked Witch of the West’s fleet of flying monkeys, snatching the heroes in the Wizard of Oz). And who knows, or so we wondered, if once he grabbed us by the scruff of the neck, he would then drop us from his nest in the cottonwood tree—in the manner a red-tailed hawk would sometimes swoop down and lift up a poor tiny turtle that came down the irrigation ditch into the pond, and then drop him from on high to shatter his shell. So, certainly, we did not want our 50-pound, six-year-old shells smashed by this three-pound bird of prey.
Continue reading “A Child’s World of Animals. ”The Traditionalist: Why Does the Left Hate Israel?
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Feet-of-Clay Icons
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common?
A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols.
Victor Davis Hanson Talks with Mike Gallagher
Historian’s Corner: The Firebombing of Japan
Victor Davis Hanson // Private Papers
Part Three. The Nihilist Logic of Death
Once the sick dogs of war are unleashed, legalized murder has a Satanic logic of its own. In the US case, the agenda from December 8 onward was how to end the war as quickly as possible that it did not start and had tried to avoid through appeasement and isolationism.
In terms of Japan and its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (a more brutal but eerie forerunner of the Chinese Belt-and-Road initiative), its war machine was an engine of murder—and fueled from the Japanese mainland. And it was the mainland, that is Tokyo, that the US military from the outset of the war had wished to target, on the theory that decapitating the head of the octopus would render inert its murderous tentacles.
Continue reading “Historian’s Corner: The Firebombing of Japan”