Freakish Rant of the Day
If you can believe this, Moscow has an alternative newspaper, and they’re featuring an incredibly strange attack on Victor Davis Hanson from a mixed-up “war nerd” who calls professor Hanson a traitor and fantasizes about setting his farm on fire: Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor.
I had figured this summer would be a little easier to handle now that I’ve shucked off a layer of blubber (I slimmed down a bit to try to ease my kidney situation). But no, God just made it a few degrees hotter to make sure I stay as sweaty and miserable as ever, cooking in my own fat. …
We’ve got this Fresno intellectual who likes to strut the same way in the local paper. He’s one of these snotty a——— with three names: Victor Davis Hanson. Oh, sorry: Doctor Victor David Hanson. He’s got a Ph.D. and he teaches at Fresno State.
This fool passes himself off as a military historian, writing columns about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else he feels like babbling about, but he doesn’t have a clue about contemporary warfare. Every war nerd on the net knows more about what’s happening in Iraq than he does. But that doesn’t stop him. He teaches Classics, he’s written a half dozen books on ancient warfare, and he never lets you forget that he’s a professor and you’re not.
In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don’t have Ph.D.’s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: “What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is ‘stupid,’ but she-not he-didn’t finish high school.”
Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it’s my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson’s farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: “Your cicadas will chirp from the ground,” meaning, “We’ll burn your f——— olive orchards if you mouth off again.”
I’m not sure Pravda was worse.