On Victor Davis Hanson

I keep reading people quoting the latest column by Victor Davis Hanson, saying that they are stunned by how much of the neocon koolaid he’s drunk. I’m not amazed at all. Here’s all I needed to know about VDH, from his book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom:

Greek literature to an American student of the present age can be unpleasant. No wonder we now prefer to instead to craft mechanisms to convince us that the hurtful past is not really what it was. Consider, for example, what the Greeks would say of this advertisement from the Fall 1995 Oxford University Press “Special Sale Catalogue,” promoting a new edition of the The New Testament and Psalms:

…a new version of the Bible that speaks more directly than ever before to today’s social concerns, especially the move towards universal inclusivity. The noted scholars who produced this work address issues such as race, gender, and ethnicity, more explicitly than ever before. In this version, biblical language concerning people with physical afflictions has been revised to avoid personifying individuals by their disabilities; language referring to men and women has been corrected to reflect this inclusiveness precisely; dark and light imagery has been revised to avoid equating “dark” as a term for persons of color with “dark” as a metaphor for evil; references to Judaism have been corrected to avoid imprecise allusions in relation to Christ’s crucifixion; God’s language has been improved to reflect a more universal concept of God and Jesus Christ.

Words of two millennia are to be “corrected,” “revised,” and “improved.” Apparently the sensitive academic is equipped to do what God could not. This reinvention of the past comes with the now customary Orwelling twist: weakening vocabulary, bowdlerizing the text, and seeking distortion are to be reinvented as speaking “more directly,” addressing issues “more explicitly,” and avoid “imprecise allusions.” Any reader of the New Testament knows that for good or evil there are really few “imprecise allusions” in relation to Christ’s crucifixion. Readers grasp who did it and why.

I can’t help but think: code words. I’m not sure of this, of course: after reading about half of this book, I wasn’t sure what the primary agenda of Who Killed Homer? was, let alone any secondary, covert one. But little fillips like these showed up often enough to make me go Hmmmm. And I wasn’t at all surprised to read op-eds from him that put him ever so slightly on the right.