It was a terrific experience interviewing the great Victor Davis Hanson yesterday and he was typically insightful and provocative in analyzing our enemies of today through the lens of history. For those who missed it, you have one more chance to hear it on the Northern Alliance Radio Network Replay - tonight starting at 9 PM (central) on AM1280 the Patriot and on the station's web stream.
It is interesting to note that VDH is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University. The same institution of higher learning responsible for producing VH1 smirk meister and LA Times columnist Joel Stein.
As you may recall, Stein was responsible for producing the now infamous column where he attempted to bring VH1 level sarcastic petulance to the subject of whether or not the people on the home front should support our soldiers in fighting in Iraq. With hilarious intended consequences:
I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.
The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.
I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades. Seriously, the traffic is insufferable.
Ha! The sarcastic, above-it-all tone of this column makes me wonder if Stein was using it to audition for a new VH1 series, I Love the Liberals. You could get Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and for laughs, throw in that that guy who looks like Martin Zellar (or maybe Martin Zellar himself). It could be a big hit, at least in certain sniffing sectors of the urban core.
It is bittersweet to speculate on how it might have all worked out differently, if only Joel Stein as a pimply, pompous undergrad could have taken a class taught by Professor Victor Davis Hanson. For then he might have learned something about war and sacrifice and the honor earned by the men who serve and fight for us, whether we approve of them or not.
But, luckily for Stein (and for us products of public schools), it's never to late to learn. And VDH's new book is a good place to start. Relevant excerpts on supporting the troops from A War Like No Other:
For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were. What seems to capture the historian's attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon thousands, the subject of this book, who must fight it.
Thucydides sometimes opines that a particular campaign was wise or foolish, but he nearly always adds enough detail and editorializing to convey to us that the soldiers who believed in the cause for which they were dying deserved commemoration in term that matched their sacrifice.
Whereas historians search for messages about the "lessons" of Thucydides embedded within his text, the general reader has no problem in sensing immediately what his history is about precisely from those memorable passages that will never go away, reminding us of the passions and furor that are unleashed on otherwise normal men when they go to war.
Such recognition is not necessarily cause for pacifism, rather, to Thucydides it calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little know places ...
But between emotion and logic resides the fate of thousands of mostly unknown ... who will surely then and now be asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone.
And, of course, the same can be said for America's experience in the Iraq war.
A little less time with VH1 and little more with VDH might help Joel Stein and the rest of the non-troop supporting Left understand this.
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