VDH Watch 12: Vic gives us the Party line on Katrina

I suppose it's redundant when talking about our prince of hackery to say that he's giving the Party line. That's what he was up to last week, describing the Katrina disaster and the loss of New Orleans in light of the wisdom of Thucydides and the lessons of the Second World War: Human tempests befell us after Katrina by Victor Davis Hanson Honolulu Advertiser 09/08/05.

Before I dip into this little pool of hackery, though, I want to mention a couple of other recent pieces on our man Vic. In Marlboro Man Gets Smoked 09/07/05, James Wolcott harshes on Vic some more:

Victor Davis Hanson is the Marlboro Man of war apologists, a sun-bronzed rider of the purple sage whose stentorian words and battlefield vision have made many a chickenhawk less ashamed of himself as he shuffles around in his fuzzy slippers. The aria Hanson sings in article after article pays Wagnerian tribute to the Western Way of War, or why democracies are so admirably advanced when it comes to committing mass slaughter.

Wolcott links to this takedown of VDH: Bard of the Booboisie: What Victor Davis Hanson Does to History by Werther Counterpunch 09/07/05.


The opening paragraph gives a pretty good idea of his general conclusions on Vic's work:

Let us stipulate straightaway: Victor Davis Hanson is the worst historian since Parson Weems. To picture anything remotely as bad as his pseudo-historical novels and propaganda tracts, one would have to imagine an account of the fiscal policies of the Bush administration authored by Paris Hilton.

But Werther's article isn't just entertaining polemics. He gives a good analysis of Vic's approach to his famous historical analogies which he endlessly invokes in service of Dear Leader Bush and all his mighty works.

Back to the Party line on Katrina. Werther has encountered the same problem as I have in the VDH Watch. As he puts it, "Like a Hellcat aviator at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, one hardly knows where to fire first, so target-rich is the Hanson opus." In fact, every VDH column is target-rich!

So here is my interpretive summary of Vic's positions in his column on Katrina:

* Black people are violent and unruly. (We get references to Baghdad and Rwanda in the third paragraph.)

* Black people revert to "instinctual savagery" within minutes when given the least chance.

* Everyone knew this would happen so it's the fault of the people in New Orleans because they lived there.

* Huey Long screwed up the state of Louisiana back in the 1930s. (Always ready with an historical reference, that Vic.)

* The mayor of New Orleans is an incompetent black man.

* The governor of Louisiana is a whiny woman.

* White Republican mayors are always better at handling these things.

* White folks in Mississippi handled it much better.

* There were "many in a densely populated, unassimilated [?!?] and poor urban African-American population" in New Orleans who "chose" to stay; okay some were "left behind" (but that's probably not anybody's fault, except maybe the black mayor and the whiny chick governor).

* How could anybody expect the government to help these densely populated blacks anyway? Oh, and hey, let's not forget, there were black people running around stealing stuff and raping and trying to kill cops. (Black people, you know, don't "assimilate" well with us nice white folks.)

* Jesse Jackson! Civil rights types! You can't believe anything people like that say. (They don't "assimilate" well, you see.)

* Democrats are evil and hate Dear Leader Bush

* There were plenty of National Guard around - pay no attention to those reports about how many Louisiana and Mississippi Guard troops were in Iraq. And besides, who could have known that such bad weather would be coming?

* Robert Kennedy Jr.! Sidney Blumenthal! Michael Moore! Cindy Sheehan! Evil liberals! And pay no attention to that bleeding heart talk about global warming.

* Some evil Arab foreigner that probably none of his readers have ever heard of says it's Allah's revenge. Evil Muslims!

* Europeans shouldn't criticize the United States, because that's one of the lessons of the Second World War.

* And, heck, how could anyone expect the Bush administration to do anything about this disaster anyway? I mean, Thucydides would have known better!

Steve Gilliard has been following the racial aspects of the Republicans' treatment of Katrina at his blog for the last couple of weeks. A recent example: Cards on the table 09/10/05.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

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