By Andrew Curry
SELMA, CALIF.--Victor Davis Hanson grape farm here is 3 miles straight down Mountain View Road from the Sun-Maid raisin plant his vineyards supply. Orderly rows of Thompson grapevines, dry and bare in the chill of California winter, surround a modest, two-story gray farmhouse. Inside, black-and-white family photos stretch back five generations, evidence of a family clinging to this land since the railroad brought them from Missouri in 1872.
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There is no room for nuance here. With just 135 acres of vineyards, equivocation has immediate and very real consequences. Vines are tended properly, or grapes don't grow; fields are irrigated, or orchards die; the decades-old tractor in the shed runs, or the farm fails.
uch clarity may be common in California's fertile Central Valley, but it's rare in the groves of academe--one reason the 49-year-old classicist says he feels more at home here. But in recent months Hanson has become a familiar name across the country in Washington, talking with the vice president and his advisers about the lessons history offers modern-day decision makers. His message, brought home in dozens of columns and articles since September 11, is that America shouldn't be afraid to use its power in defense of what he calls western values, and that throughout history such action has been both justified and eventually vindicated. "There are some pretty brutal lessons of history, and they would tend to confirm rather than reject what Cheney and Bush believe," he says. "There are people all throughout history that remind me of what they're trying to do right now. They take comfort in that."
Lone star. In the days after September 11, Hanson took what was then a lonely position among intellectuals. In the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review he consistently urged action, citing his belief in America's overwhelming military--and moral--strength. "Fundamentalists despise the United States for its culture and envy it for its power," he wrote in his first column for National Review. "These terrorists hate us for who we are, not what we have done."
As the commentators who shaped conventional wisdom made predictions of disastrous consequences and inescapable quagmire in Afghanistan, his twice-weekly column soon became the National Review Web site's most popular feature. Hanson voice--always forceful and clear, sometimes spilling over into strident--struck an immediate chord with conservative pundits and bloggers. "He specializes in saying basic things about the values of our civilization that are considered passe in certain quarters," says National Review editor Rich Lowry.
Hanson ideas have never been fashionable. Born and raised in Selma, he went in 1971 to the University of California-Santa Cruz, then one of the nation's most radical campuses. He felt alienated by the ubiquitous drug use and political protests that dominated campus life. Greek and Latin were a refuge. "It was a chance to take classes that had some resonance with absolute values: good and bad, right and wrong," he says. Later, as a Stanford doctoral student, such ideas made him unpopular among his professors. "He didn't play any of the games you're supposed to play as a grad student," says classmate John Heath, now a professor at Santa Clara University. After grad school, Hanson went back to the family farm for five years. Falling grape prices pushed him to take a job at California State University-Fresno in 1985.
His choices gave him an almost unassailable credibility, something he readily exploits. His favorite charge against his critics is hypocrisy. "Homer's Achilles says, `I hate in my heart like the doorways of death the man who says one thing and does another,' " he says. "If somebody's criticizing the war, do they drive an SUV? If they talk about strangulation of world resources, do they have redwood decks? I've never liked upper-middle-class suburbanites who . . . voiced political sentiments at odds with the life they lived."
Fighting words. It's a charge Hanson has also leveled at his colleagues, to spectacular effect. In 1998, he and Heath coauthored Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. The book was a scathing indictment of classicists, accusing them of failing to act "as explicators and stewards of Greek wisdom," and it propelled them into the national debate over higher education. The charges--"self-evident, mean rhetorical flimflam," University of Iowa professor Peter Green calls them--still rile many, who dismissed them at the time as a bitter rant by two scholars from unimportant California schools. "We're not used to that kind of criticism, or any criticism," says Yale classicist Donald Kagan. "What was surprising to people was that anyone in the academic community should take the view Hanson takes, or any view at all."
Hanson 12 books span a wide range of topics, from Greek social and military history to life as a farmer. Throughout, he displays a distrust of those who haven't looked disaster in the face. "Most intellectuals have no real threat to their existence. . . . I don't have any confidence they can determine good from evil," he says. "They're really out of touch with the way a man like [Osama] bin Laden thinks." His criticisms aren't reserved for the left. Like his parents and grandparents before him, Hanson is a Democrat, a stance against corporate welfare and destructive agribusiness in his corner of California.
As the threat of war with Iraq looms, Hanson is again in the thick of it. A collection of his columns, An Autumn of War, earned him an invitation to dinner with Dick Cheney in October, and more recently he has met with the vice president's advisers to talk about the historical precedents for war. "Being at odds with the intellectual establishment isn't necessarily a bad thing," he says. The administration "has a certain read on the situation, a visceral, intuitive reaction. People throughout history have had the same instincts."
The examined life
BORN: Sept. 5, 1953
FAMILY: Married with three teenage children
EDUCATION: Ph.D. in classics, Stanford; B.A., UC-Santa Cruz
WORK: Professor of classics and history at California State University- Fresno since 1985