Antidote for the Unserious: Victor Davis Hanson

Sometimes we scan the news and commentary of the day, and just throw up our hands (but hopefully not our lunch), wondering what happened to all the serious people in America. That is, until we read the latest from Victor Davis Hanson, a world-class historian from the farming area of California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Dr. Hanson is the slap upside-the-head to all those who think history began on the day they were born. He’s the antidote to the entire smart-ass but transparently shallow elitists who occupy the talking head positions of the media. He is as able as any writer/thinker working today to place human events in broader historical contexts, and to provide the intellectual firepower behind heartland America’s instinctive repulsion at the culture of lies that is constantly being promulgated the godless liberal establishment.

Dr. Hanson's latest takes aim at, among other things, the climate alarmist nonsense. There is no question that future Dr. Hansons will look back at the global warming hoax era and wonder how so many people were so snookered so easily and for so long. We still have elements of allegedly educated people who earnestly believe they understand the rigorous scientific discipline involved in transitioning from global warming to global climate change to global climate chaos. But there is no rigorous scientific discipline to understand; there never was. The climate alarmist agenda always was and still is nothing more than a means to an end: the use of matter-based scare tactics to trample on and ultimately destroy the idea of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

Plenty of people will recoil at the phrasing of that last statement. There is so much desire to assume honesty and integrity and decency among the scientific community. And the truth is, the vast majority of people in the scientific community ARE honest and decent. But far too many did not and do not discern the motives and beliefs of those who are really driving the agenda, and the rest get swept along by the usual peer pressure and desire to win grants and possibly get a shot at their 15 minutes of fame.

Al Gore was at the bottom of a personal and emotional pit after losing the 2000 election (who can blame him?) but found global warming fear-mongering as his path back to relevance and riches. But Al Gore is not a scientist; he’s not even particularly bright; and his flunking out of divinity school suggests there may be a fair amount of confusion or at least uncertainty about what he thinks is deserving of faith. But how in the world could someone with such personal and emotional baggage, someone so transparently unqualified to develop, understand and critique ‘hockey stick’ charts, be considered an oracle of wisdom who can pronounce that all scientific debate is over, and control of the planet’s activity should be handed over to him and his sycophants?

We have our theories as to how this happened, but will leave that discussion to another day. For now, we can at least be grateful that serious people are still around to call BS every once in awhile. Victor Davis Hanson is one of the few. An antidote to a culture of shallowness.

Paul Gable

January 6, 2011