by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
I<\/span>\u00a0live in a central California farmhouse built by my great-great-grandmother in the 1870s. But if the clapboard house looks more or less unchanged from its earliest photographs taken in the 1920s, the world down the road is unrecognizable.<\/p>\n In 1890, my grandfather was born here. Eighty years later he still related to us his grandmother’s wild stories of post-Civil War Missouri. She along with her son, my great-grandfather, had come west from there on the new railroad. When they arrived, they built a shack not far from my front door.<\/p>\n Disease, drought and gunfights over water were the existential challenges that lapped around the early farm. For 50 years until the advent of running water, electricity and gas engines, the household’s members worried whether or not they would eat.<\/p>\n My grandfather added a modern kitchen in the 1940s. And he faced more complex challenges than the elemental hunger and illness of his predecessors, such as trying to sell raisins for $30 a ton during the Depression.<\/p>\n The house and farm were saved in the 1970s by my parents’ jobs in town. Before they died, they worried for us, the more affluent and leisured, about globalization that crashed fruit prices and about rising taxes, along with more government paperwork and requirements.<\/p>\n For us, the more privileged fifth generation who added another bathroom and enlarged the yard, the challenges were more postmodern \u2014 massive illegal immigration, the spread of rural meth labs, or the end altogether of family farms like ours.<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut through all these cycles of American history, the populists in the house \u2014 whether reciting William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech or mounting Edwin Markham’s poem 1899 “Man With a Hoe” on the staircase, where it still hangs \u2014 were at least able to make sense of the world along recognizable fault lines.<\/p>\n Democrats mostly were union people, desperate farmers or the less affluent who wanted greater government help for their weak farm prices, minimum wages and bleak retirements. I see them still in faded brown pictures, leaning in their overalls against Model-Ts in our driveway.<\/p>\n More affluent Republicans in town believed the less government and taxes, the better. Democrats were thought of as naifs for promoting democratic idealism abroad; conservatives were hardheaded realists who counseled us to keep our distance from a scary world.<\/p>\n Enemies overseas wore jackboots and advanced awful ideologies \u2014 fascism, Nazism, and communism \u2014 that were European-inspired and thus at least somewhat familiar.<\/p>\n All those conventional divides, big and small, I remember being rehashed in our dining room in the 1960s as generations of dead ancestors stared down in sympathetic silence from their sepia portraits.<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut my children, the sixth-generation inheritors of the house, are facing a surreal world. The new leaders of the left, not much different in their lifestyles from those on the elite right, are now almost all multimillionaires. Their populism focuses on everything from gay marriage and unrestricted abortion to stopping Arctic oil exploration.<\/p>\n Jihadists don’t wear uniforms. Even hostile countries that subsidize such terrorists deny doing so. Nazis and Stalinists never toppled an American office building; Islamists with far fewer resources have. And in a world of miniaturized weapons and easy global travel, they have a better chance of repeating their carnage than any of our earlier, more recognizable enemies.<\/p>\n It was once easy to rail at the interest charged by the local land bank or the freight rates of the railroad. But how do you compete against high-quality Chilean grapes in the local mega-store? Is the Wal-Mart, now only two miles distant, pernicious for destroying local hardware stores, or beneficial for providing low-cost goods for the legions of poor who prefer it \u2014 or neither?<\/p>\n But the greatest difference is that those first four generations who lived and died in this house shared a certain tragic vision of man’s limitations. Perhaps they lost too many crops before harvest. Or they grew to assume that optimistic weather reports and upbeat cooperative newsletters were hardly to be trusted as “intelligence.” They considered the choices in their many wars only between bad or worse, and that the Americans who fought them did not have to be perfect to still be good.<\/p>\n Now this relic of a house has a TV dish on the roof and automatic garage doors. Yet otherwise it must look about the same as when someone, whom I seem to know but never saw, built it right after the Civil War. But while we can still recognize it as the familiar solid house of old, I wonder whether it would say the same of us now inside.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services I\u00a0live in a central California farmhouse built by my great-great-grandmother in the 1870s. But if the clapboard house looks more or less unchanged from its earliest photographs taken in the 1920s, the world down the road is unrecognizable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[776],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-139","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":506,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/when-land-is-history\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":0},"title":"When Land Is History","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 25, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media This winter I watched a new owner of the farm parcel next to mine bring in enormous Caterpillar equipment and land-levelers. He ripped out every living tree and bush. He changed the very contours of the land, flattening even the once rolling hills. Within\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "History"","block_context":{"text":"History","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/history\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-childs-garden-of-animals-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":1},"title":"A Child\u2019s Garden of Animals","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"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 \u201cHoop Snake\u201d I don\u2019t know when and how Joe Caron (I have slightly altered the name) moved to\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 20 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 20 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-childs-garden-of-animals-2\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":9269,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/21st-century-california-reverts-back-to-the-wild-west\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":2},"title":"21st Century California Reverts Back to the Wild West","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Works and Days by PJ Media I grew up listening to stories of turn-of-the-century rural Central California from my grandfather Rees Alonzo Davis (1890-1976). He was the third generation of the Davis family to have lived in my present house\u2014great nephew of Daniel Rhoades, who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5368,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/paying-the-piper\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":3},"title":"Paying the Piper","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 13, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Craig Bernthal Private Papers Temperance is not high in the current list of American virtues. We are the 9th most obese people on earth, according to the World Health Organization, with 74% of American\u2019s over 15 identified as overweight.On the expressway, hulking pickups and humvees blast by sports cars.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Craig Bernthal"","block_context":{"text":"Craig Bernthal","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/craig-bernthal\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2953,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ancient-wisdom-depression-recession-downturn-whatever\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":4},"title":"Ancient Wisdom: Depression, Recession, Downturn…Whatever","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 19, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media My grandfather once said something to me around 1970 that I have never forgotten. He was born in my house in 1890 (or rather, I in his) \u2014 twenty years after his grandmother built the present home. He farmed continuously without a day lost\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2009"","block_context":{"text":"February 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/february-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13613,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-childs-garden-of-animals-3\/","url_meta":{"origin":4039,"position":5},"title":"A Child\u2019s Garden of Animals","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 25, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers Part Two: The Fear of and Reverence for the \u201cHoop Snake\u201d For the next week after that warning about hoop snakes on the prowl as veritable animal unicyclists, I looked hourly for hoop snakes\u2014shovel in hand\u2014but never found a single one or even their\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 19 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 19 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-childs-garden-of-animals-3\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/HoopSnake.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4039"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4040,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4039\/revisions\/4040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}