Seeing As Hanson
A while back I saw Frenchman Bernard Henri Levi (of Who Killed Daniel Pearl? fame) giving a talk in which he said some very interesting things about time. He was relating this back to being what he called an intellectual saying “the intellectual has a different relationship with time.” He added further, “the intellectual finds more dead among the living and more living among the dead” as he pressed into what was basically a description of the past few years of his life covering Africa as a correspondent of sorts for Le Monde.
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I saw a profile of Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, author, and farmer from Fresno. Hanson does a great deal of thinking and writing about all things current but his vantage point spans several thousands of years, procuring interesting observations about where we are now that often escape news coverage.
He makes an observation about how hard it is to change leadership in a democracy during wartime citing the single instance of Mussolini that he can recall1, historically, of it happening. Catastrophe aside, brace yourself for more neo-conservatism and Bush’s drawled repetitions of himself. Sorry to break it this early but the weight of history is against Mr. Kerry, even if you didn’t consider his lackluster appeal2 in present polling numbers.
Hanson runs a hard line; his writing is the stuff people like Dick Cheney lap up in between planning for Fallujah bombing sessions and containing Abu Ghraib but even to a hardened liberal, it is difficult not to concede that when he stretches the precedents back to ancient Greece, he justifies himself well.
In a recently televised interview Hanson described some funny anecdotes of the 24 hour news cycle in which a war is being lost within 24 hours of being won. Our shortened sight is accented even more by medium: television lacks the depth of print media, print media lacks the depth of the book, the book lacks the depth of education, and education without experience is an inflated education.
Although Hanson is educated to the teeth and will quote Thucydides as easily as you quote a pop band, educational hubris is the weakness I see in his analyses. It’s easier to talk about how useless the United Nations is, no matter what vast scope of history you possess, when it exists as a concept rather than the aid workers you see dispensing medication in villages. And although he has studied and written on war for so many years, perhaps he needs to be impressed upon by the eerie looks of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, the best documentary I’ve seen in a long time. McNamara, after seeing World War II, Vietnam, Korea, and the U2 crisis from the vantage point of a policy maker, has lost much of his arrogance and knows intimately the condition that titles the film so well.
I saw a great art exhibit at Biola a while back. The artist had recorded “live” coverage of the Afghanistan invasion from multiple networks and had it blaring, simultaneously, at the viewer. It made me think of how less is more3, how “live” news is really no news, and how out of touch (and noisy) it makes us. I need to reset my time, stretch it to its full elasticity, and begin to see.
1There were a few instances Hanson counted as exceptions but I don't remember them.
2I wrote this before the debates. Kerry is close, but has not overtaken Bush in any poll I'm aware of to date.
3Philip Greenspun was speculating the other day that reading the news was "harmful."
9:48:55 PM 
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