Victor Davis Hanson:
The Remains of a California Day: By three, I drove up to the CSU Fresno Henry Madden Library to get a Greek edition of Procopius’s History of the Wars. (Procopius is the ancient sort of the DC insider blogger/pundit: he praised Justinian, sort of, in the History of the Wars, damned him as demonic in the Secret History, and eulogized him in the Buildings — all predicated on the degree to which Procopius felt that the emperor was well/sick, dead/alive, popular/unpopular and the degree to which he was in/out with the court. In the same manner, Procopius was the secretary to Belisarius, his apologist, his primary critic, and perhaps (this is disputed) the same Procopius who, as magistrate, put him on trial for his life. In other words, he was a sort of New York Times or Newsweek columnist...
To which one can only say: "Huh?!"
I know of no New York Times economist who has in one column said that President so-and-so is the best leader the Roman Empire has ever had, and in another has said that so-and-so is a demon who sometimes forgets his head and wanders around the White House at night with the fires of hell spurting from his neck--or of one who has claimed that any President's wife wished that she were differently shaped so that she... um... well, in Edward Gibbon's phrase, would have "more than three altars at which to make offerings to the god of love."
And then VDH gets cranky:
It is touchy to use the library, since its hours are now vastly abbreviated due to furloughs (You, reader, will come to know that word soon enough in the increasingly bankrupt America: it means that we must not tamper with union contracted employees, so we simply ask them not to come to work a day or so a month. The resulting pay cuts are not pay cuts.)...
[Nine paragraphs about how things were much better in the old days--back when a pretty boy cost less than a sword, and Romans respected their elders, etc...]
All of which raises the question: how would we return to sanity in California, a state as naturally beautiful and endowed and developed by our ancestors as it has been sucked dry by our parasitic generation?... [W]e would have to close the borders; adopt English immersion in our schools; give up on the salad bowl and return to the melting pot; assimilate, intermarry, and integrate legal immigrants; curb entitlements and use the money to fix infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, trains, etc.; build 4-5 new damns...
Me? I think people who don't give enough of a damn about their spelling to know how to spell "dam" shouldn't be opining about how to improve California schools--and I just plain think that people shouldn't be accepting endorsements from people who don't give enough of a damn about their spelling to know how to spell "dam." But maybe that's just me:
VDH goes on:
...to store water in wet years; update the canal system; return to old policies barring public employee unions; redo pension contracts; cut about 50,000 from the public employee roles...
Those homonym typos: they will get you every time in this age of spellcheckers. I have to recommend a serious immersion program for all Hoover Institution fellows.
And there is more:
...lower income taxes from 10% to 5% to attract businesses back; cut sales taxes to 7%; curb regulations to allow firms to stay; override court orders now curbing cost-saving options in our prisons by systematic legislation; start creating material wealth from our forests; tap more oil, timber, natural gas, and minerals that we have in abundance; deliver water to the farmland we have; build 3-4 nuclear power plants on the coast; adopt a traditional curriculum in our schools; insist on merit pay for teachers; abolish tenure; encourage not oppose more charter schools, vouchers, and home schooling; give tax breaks to private trade and business schools; reinstitute admission requirements and selectivity at the state university system; take unregistered cars off the road; make UC professors teach a class or two more each year; abolish all racial quotas and preferences in reality rather than in name; build a new all weather east-west state freeway over the Sierra; and on and on. In other words, we would have to seance someone born around 1900 and just ask them to float back for a day, walk around, and give us some advice...
All of which is a lead-in to an actual endorsement of a candidate. First, the throat-clearing:
...PS. I don’t vote Democratic any more much, if at all, but haven’t gotten around to changing my registration to Independent...
That's what we want: political engagement and civic participation!
But this June I will at least once more vote in the Democratic primary, largely for Mickey Kaus...
Why? Nepotism!
...whose online campaign seems to be reminding us just how absurd Barbara Boxer has become. He has good sense about unions and amnesty and state spending (my late mother, an appellate judge, used to speak highly of state Supreme Court Justice Kaus, a Democratic moderate, who, I think, was his father)...
But even though he will vote for Mickey Kaus in the primary of the political party that he thinks should lose, he does not dare express a preference for a candidate of the political party that he thinks should win. That would be dangerous: he might get one of them mad at him if he chose one who did not win, and anyway changing your registration so that you can actually participate meaningfully in self-government would be work:
In general, I have listened to all three senatorial Republican candidates and they are all good...
Why will he vote for the Republican? Because he hates Barbara Boxer. Why? He can't quite get it out--some of it is that she was mean to Ward Connerly and unladylike:
...Note — Barbara Boxer is a particularly unfortunate sort of politician, combining arrogance (remember her much publicized slapdown of a general and African-American businessman) with a loud sort of ignorance...
But mostly, it seems, because she has a vagina:
...(A diversity note: Three of the most powerful women in the world that have a lot to do with running the U.S. are multimillionaire, doctrinaire liberals, who at one time lived within about 50 miles of each other in San Francisco — Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer.)
Let me say that I have heard DiFi called many things in her political career. But until now "doctrinaire liberal" has not been one of them.
And how does Mickey Kaus react to this unexpected endorsement?
Mickey Kaus: Victor Davis Hanson Endorsement.... He takes a while to get there! But it's an enjoyable trip.... Hanson's comprehensive platform for California is pretty good too. I agree with about 2/3 of it...
In my inbox:
The aforementioned VDH piece... is a picture-perfect piece of the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement. Poor VDH, tending the crops and restoring the Old House out there in the central valley, is sadly watching the priceless legacy of Old White Guy California being ruined by criminal Mexican thugs, illiterate young people (probably Obama supporters), environmentalists, and public employee unions. It's very close in spirit to the classic 1970s tome, The Camp of the Saints...
