Profile in Classics: Victor Davis Hanson

hoover.org ^ | 9/13/12 | Emily Esfahani Smith

[a little elbow grease]

(snips) ---- Victor Davis Hanson says he lives in the nineteenth century—a fact that can get him into some trouble. “Let me give you an example,” he says. Hanson was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart one day when he saw a young woman struggling to move a big screen television into her Honda. When he went over to help her, he noticed that she was holding an EBT card, a government-issued debit card for cash and food stamps. Hanson told her, “You shouldn’t be using the food card to buy the big screen TV.” She told him to mind his own business. Despite her anger, Hanson persisted: “If you didn’t do that, you would be more self-reliant.” Reflecting on that experience, he says, “In the nineteenth century, this would never have happened—the government giving you an EBT card to subsidize a lifestyle beyond necessities.”

This culture of dependency, a byproduct of the entitlement state and what Hanson calls our “therapeutic culture,” is simply a display of human nature at its worst.

“The Greeks of the ancient world understood human nature,” Hanson says. “They knew that people want freedom and affluence, but that when you combine the two, you can have decadence.” The ancient Greeks knew that virtue required a strong moral order that protected people from themselves—from their own follies and vices. Hanson specifically cites the importance of a “shame culture” in checking human behavior.

We in the West don’t have that sense of duty and responsibility today, he argues, which has serious implications for our political future. Hanson thinks America is losing its spirit of rugged individualism. The welfare state has driven people from the self-reliance that sharpens democracy to the dependency that blots it out. “We are emasculating our citizens,” he says gloomily.

[miss marmelstein]

“Contrived” is the perfect word for this story but I suppose it could also be true, in some odd way. Also, it is not good to reproach people you don’t know. In this day, she could pull out a knife or gun.

[Fiji Hill]

Although Charles Beard was a progressive, his anti-interventionist views landed him in the dog house with his fellow progressives.

[x]

“In the nineteenth century, this would never have happened—the government giving you an EBT card to subsidize a lifestyle beyond necessities.”

I guess he learned that since the Bush years, or he might have been able to give Bush better advice ...

[Fiji Hill]

FDR did not lower the voting age and neither did RN—they didn’t have the authority. That was done through the passage of a Constitutional amendment.

[a little elbow grease]

"By then, knew I could never be a Democrat though still didn’t trust RINOs, pretty smart for one so young!"

______________________

Yes ...... pretty damn wise for a yute ("My Cousin Vinny").

[a little elbow grease]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8tX2BAD1k

-—— the two yutes

[del griffith]

I think he would be fine, if he truly came across a lady struggling to load a big screen tv, if his purpose was to indeed help with the loading it. I’ve done that myself.

[a little elbow grease]

Because neither President had anything to do with lowering the Federal voting age from 21 to 18 years of age. Neither could the Federal Congress lower the voting age by statute, their only recourse would be to submit a Constitutional Amendment to the several States for approval. Once submitted to the States for approval as the 26th Amendment it took just four months, the fastest approval on record. The ultimate authority, the States, made the decision. dvwjr"

_____________________

You seem to have missed the QUESTION.

It was:

FDR lowered the voting age in WWII to 18 --- because of the concept "old enough to die for your country... old enough to vote.

The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1971.

***********

SO >>>>>>>>> WHEN did the voting age go up from 18 to 21 between WWII and 1971?

**************

[miss marmelstein]

Like your screen name!

[fortes fortuna juvat]

>> “Agrarian wisdom requires self-reliance. If you’re sick, there is no sick leave. If you have the flu, you still have to irrigate. You don’t have a guaranteed income. There is no retirement, no health care. You can’t blame anyone for your failures. If you decide to plant 20 acres of almonds, you have to decide whether to risk the $80,000. If it goes bad because of the weather, you can’t blame the economy. It was your choice.”<<

What you’ve described here accurately portrays the lifestyle of virtually all Amish and Mennonite communities in the area where I live.

[loveliberty2]

"Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. It ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.

[fortes fortuna juvat]

>>EBT cards should be programmed to pay only rice, beans, and Thunderbird.<<

LOL! Now that there is funny. Probably many on the forum don’t understand the Thunderbird reference.

[a little elbow grease]

"human nature has not changed in all these years (centuries even)"

_______________________

(jmo) That isn't quite true.

For instance: Are you saying the nature of adolescents these past twenty or so years hasn't changed substantially? Are you saying the willingness of young people to enter the trades or do "dirty work" has not completely changed of late? (Ask Mike Rowe -- "Dirty Jobs")

I think technology in the very recent past has changed some human nature a great deal ...... very negatively.

[fortes fortuna juvat]

>>My absolute favorite of his poems.<<

Yes, it’s a great poem, but my favorite is ‘The Stranger’.

[fortes fortuna juvat]

>>I think technology in the very recent past has changed some human nature a great deal ...... very negatively.<<

I believe a number of psychological and sociological studies have been published that confirm your point.

[odawg]

The computers would not have allowed the tv to be charged to the EBT card.

The narrative, by necessity, is a short summary of the event.

[itsahoot]

So why when I go to Wal-Mart, things like big screen tvs don’t get applied to an EBT card?

Yep forbidden just like foreign aid can't be spent on weapons.

I have a thousand dollars, should I spend it? On food or a television, oh wait maybe I can buy food with my EBT card and use the thousand for a TV. How cool is that?

[del griffith]

Or a made up narrative.

The narrative could have just as easily been she purchased a large screen tv while apparently on the the public dole by having an EBT card.

[Swordmaker]

SO >>>>>>>>> WHEN did the voting age go up from 18 to 21 between WWII and 1971?

You miss the point. It was NEVER nationally lowered to 18 during WWII. . . so that question is meaningless.

[Louis Foxwell]

4ltr