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| This
Week in Private Papers |
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Front
Page Faux Populism by Victor Davis Hanson Allies, Friends, Neutrals, or Enemies? by Victor Davis Hanson Ayatollah
of Anti-Americanism |
| Culture Gibson's "Passion" by Honora Howell Chapman Troy's
Literary Offenses Power
to do Good Wars
New and Old "The
ancient Greeks: Were they like us at all?" |
| Education This page is under construction |
| Collection
of Curiosities Homepage |
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July
14, 2004 It is going to be hard to convince the American people that two East Coast, liberal lawyers, one Senator married to a billionaire, the other worth $75 million, are men of the people. No wonder they and their supporters have introduced some very strange arguments. The first is that John Edwards really has not embraced the privileged life of a multimillionaire who got rich suing obstetricians because he was born poor. But there are two problems with this. First, being the son of a postal employee and a mill worker doesn't necessarily make one impoverished in America. Some of my best friends are postal hourly-wage employees—including my wife and daughter. |
July
10, 2004 For all the mayhem in the Sunni Triangle, and for all our mishaps at trying to reconstruct a pathological society reeling from 30 years of mass murder, we are beginning now to see the emergence of new civilized beginning in Iraq. Sadly our allies are mostly neutral, if not hostile to this radically new world, mostly out of spite, narrow self-interest, and deductive anger and envy of the United States. In the process, they have done the near impossible: lost the good will of the American people, a development that will have radical repercussions in the years ahead. |
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July
10, 2004 The Anti-Chomsky Reader, ed.
by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Encounter Books) More "Ayatollah" |
July
9, 2004 Nor was the destroyer of Iraqi dissidents hitched — Saudi-style — to a Humvee and dragged to pieces through the streets of Baghdad. The pillager of Kuwait did not lose a limb on the precepts of a sharia-inspired fatwa. A young Saddam-like Baathist assassin did not break in and shoot the desecrator of the Mesopotamian marshlands in the back of the head. And a West Bank-like mob did not lynch the torturer of dissidents in the public square. Even al Jazeera, an enthusiast of the usual barbarity, was wondering what the heck was going on in its own neck of the medieval woods. |
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July
6, 2004 Almost
daily we are assured that another attack on the homeland,
commensurate with 9/11, is inevitable. What a scary
mood of fatalism we are in! Where will it happen?
The Olympics? The party conventions this summer? A
week before the election? Chicago? L.A.? |
| July 11, 2004
Response to Readership What nationality were the Trojans and language did they speak? Hanson: From archaeological and philological evidence, Trojans were probably some sort of early Semitic people and their language akin to Hittite; but as a creative device “they” of course speak Greek in the Iliad to communicate in those wonderful dialogues and recriminations before the opposing warriors square off >>> |
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Recent Works by Victor Davis Hanson Review of Rural Greece under the Democracy, by Nicholas F. Jones, in Times Literary Supplement, June 25, 2004 "The Power to Do Good" : a review of Niall Ferguson's "Colossus" in the New York Post, April 25, 2004 Review of John Gaddis's Surprise, Security, and the American Experience Introduction to the Modern Library's Plutarch's The Life of Alexander the Great |
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| July 11, 2004 Response to Readership Victor will post a response to readers' questions daily. If you have questions that Victor can answer, email them to author@victorhanson.com. |
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| Current
Affairs and Classics What nationality were the Trojans and language did they speak? Hanson: From archaeological and philological evidence, Trojans
were probably some sort of early Semitic people and their language
akin to Hittite; but as a creative device “they” of
course speak Greek in the Iliad to communicate in those wonderful
dialogues and recriminations before the opposing warriors square
off. There is a large bibliography both on the “real”
language of Troy and on Homer’s use of Greek to portray speaking
Trojans. Hanson: Bernard Knox is one of the great classicists of our times. Most of our current ideas about Sophocles and his characters—especially the Ajax, Antigone, and Philoctetes—in some ways derive from his criticism. He is one of those now mostly lost who did almost everything—military experience, ran the Hellenic Center in Washington, professor, poet, translator, critic—and is emblematic of the age of serious classics before the wave of postmodernism washed all that away. There is now not one serious critic of the classics in any major university who could write and interpret as he did. |
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