HANSON is another one of those Classics professors-mavericks, seemingly mysterious-----NIETZSCHE, STRAUSS, and (PAGLIA on a lesser echelon)------who are NOT THAT MYSTERIOUS after all: They just want to be Ancient (Grecians, as Shrub would say).
He was named CHEENEE's guru during the war-mongering phase of the Iraq Attack. He is who coined the word "Mexifornia," which racists have lovingly adopted. He writes about war as being necessary for the health of a nation. Here, an "Angry Reader" confronts him, sort of, just to let HANSON swing at all-things-Dem.
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http://www.victorhanson.com/ Angry Reader
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Editor's Note: In this section we entertain letters from the critics. Some readers are angry, some are not so angry, and others merely frustrated.
July 12, 2006
Explain this if you can: Long ago you wrote of corporate greed in Fields Without Dreams. But now you signed onto the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton team, so what happened to you? Were you just brainwashed by Iraq?
Hanson: How does supporting the removal of a madman contradict writing about the lamentable end of an agrarian way of life? So wait a minute — I criticized agricultural subsidies for corporate farmers in 1995 in that Fields Without Dreams, and eleven years later have written columns to that exact same effect-so where is the contradiction? And there was plenty of criticism of trendy PC assumptions then in both Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything, as I write all the time now.
Perhaps your point is that I wrote about the end of the family farming from the point of view of the little guy and now you think I support the privileged? Hardly. The true conservatives of this country are those in small towns and rural areas who get up every morning and go to work in a system by which they will never be enriched, but believe deeply in, and are appreciative for, since it guarantees their freedom and opportunity.
And another thing: as you might have mentioned about earlier farm books: I made the connection between trendy left-wing politics (the boutique organic food genre) and affluence — and that paradox is even more true today than 10 years ago. Most who work for the New York Times, or intone on NPR, or teach at Princeton, or are the kingpins of the Democratic Party — a John Kerry, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy — or offer strident leftist rhetoric — a George Soros or Arianna Huffington — live lives indistinguishably from the so-called right-wing capitalists that they dub greedy pigs at the trough.
I'd prefer an upfront affluent tire-store owner, or car salesman, who has no apologies for his zeal at making money to a John Kerry who marries into it, enjoys the appurtenances that come with having billions, and then voices all this pseudo-populism about a world that is completely foreign to him. Wind-surfing, lavish hunting get-up, tanning-booth/Botox youthfulness, skiing — all that phony photo-op imagery helped to sink his campaign, since the Democrats always lose when they suffer the additional wage of hypocrisy: talking up the common man and living the uncommon life.
FDR or JFK might have been able to pull it off — but not a toothy ambulance chaser like John Edwards or a dissolute Teddy Kennedy. Tell me that a Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, or Barbara Boxer lives a life that in any way resembles her rhetoric about the underclass. All three are more at home in Napa than Fresno, which is fine — except we still get the silly rhetoric about the pernicious privilege of elites, who by the way surely manage their portfolios, and do their legal deals.
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