 |
| Bush Lupine and Poppies: San Joaquin River Gorge |
“Even animals get in on the new
victimhood. To build a reservoir in drought-stricken California means
oppressing the valley elderberry longhorn beetle or ignoring the
feelings of the foothill yellow-legged frog.” Victor Davis Hanson
Flaws abound in the world of
Victor Davis Hanson, so many flaws in other nations and other people,
especially liberals. Alas, flaws, known as fallacies of logic, also
abound in his own writing.
Mr. Hanson, like so many
right-wing pundits with their sound bites and bullet points, is a
master of a fallacy of logic known as oversimplification, an
insistence on ignoring inconvenient facts, a flaw of logic common in
the English papers of flunking freshmen.
For example, Mr. Hanson in a
recent article goes so far as to suggest that the Endangered Species Act is part of a new sense of “victim-hood” for animals: He
implies that sensitive liberals feel so guilty about ignoring the
feelings of the foothill yellow-legged frog
and about the oppression
of the valley elderberry longhorn beetle that these misguided
do-gooders insist on protecting the habitat of insignificant critters
even while in the real world of profit and loss farmers desperately
need more reservoirs. His assertion reveals an ignorance of history
and environmental law that I find extremely odd for a representative
of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and for someone who professes
to be an historian.
 |
| Lupine, Goldfields, Popcorn |
If Mr. Hanson were to drive across
the San Joaquin Valley on most days, from Santa Nella to Bakersfield,
he would cross one dead river after another yet also find that most
of the canals still have water (diverted from the rivers and the
delta) in them.
One primary source reveals how much
the Valley has changed in a century and a half. According to John
Muir in a letter written in July, 1868, the San Joaquin Valley was
the floweriest piece of world he had ever walked upon. Those flowers,
as well as the wildlife, comparable even in Muir's time to the
abundance of wildlife on the Serengeti Plains in Africa, were wiped
out by cultivation and urbanization and the damming and diverting of
rivers, which had periodically overflowed to replenish wetlands and
aquifers—wetlands that have diminished to four percent of their
historical levels and aquifers that are now becoming exhausted due to
over-pumping of groundwater, which is causing subsidence of the land.
 |
| Owl's Clover: San Joaquin River Gorge |
Now, even though dozens of dams
already exist on the San Joaquin River, farmers want to build another
huge dam just north of Friant Dam at Temperance Flat, using public funds to wipe public
lands, the San Joaquin River Gorge, off the map (as well as the habitat of endangered and
threatened species) primarily for their own benefit. All the while
this private industry refuses to change unsustainable practices, such
as irrigating cotton, rice, almonds, and fodder crops in a desert.
Mr. Hanson advocates the taking of public resources, which will
result in ecocide once again, for the benefit of the wealthiest top
percent in the Valley.
Even though he is a representative
of the Hoover Institution, instead of promoting private enterprise, Mr.
Hanson is instead promoting a bizarre form of socialism for the
wealthy. How has a classics professor and scholar of ancient warfare
turned into a spokesperson for such hogwash? Mr. Hanson is good at
stringing together the bullet points of the far-right elites. He
excels at liberal-bashing, in other words, not at providing an
accurate historical, economic, or political perspective.
As Mr. Hanson probably knows, a
species becomes “endangered” usually when so much of its
ecosystem has been
destroyed that it is driven to the edge of
extinction. It is not, as Mr. Hanson's flip comment implies, a
frivolous designation. Yet Mr. Hanson, with a cavalier attitude,
promotes the destruction of ecosystems in the Sierra Nevada Mountains
for the benefit of a private, commercial industry. Mr. Hanson would
no doubt consider me a liberal for my views, but I am a conservative
in the sense that I am a conservationist, and I am at a loss to
explain how any conservative does not have species preservation, and
by extension, habitat preservation, at the heart of his
philosophy.
 |
| Owl's Clover |
Instead, it's always “jobs vs.
the environment,” jobs versus one endangered species or other. Mr.
Hanson, as a spokesperson for the right, continues to present a false dilemma, which is another fallacy of logic. A false dilemma rears its
ugly head when only two choices are presented yet more choices
exist, or when a spectrum of choices exist between two extremes.
False dilemmas are usually couched in “either this or that”
language, but can also be characterized by the omission of possible
choices. Mr. Hanson does not, for instance, entertain the
possibilities of water conservation, underground water storage, or
the cultivation of sustainable crops as ways to protect both endangered species
and jobs. He has to rant about a culture of victim-hood to divert
attention away from a land and water grab by elites who wish to
maintain business as usual.
In holding up Victor Davis Hanson
as one of the leading voices of the right because of his academic
creds, The Fresno Bee and others are doing the public and Mr. Hanson a
disservice by indulging in a fallacy of logic known as “false
authority,” which is the false belief that a person who is an expert in
one field should therefore also be considered an expert in another. Mr. Hanson, in
other words, may be a classics professor and a scholar of ancient
warfare, but that does not make him an expert on modern U.S. domestic
and foreign policy or environmental law. Unfortunately, The Fresno
Bee and others keep publishing the right-wing tirades of a person who
is merely posing as an expert in order to bash liberals and “soft”
Americans.
 |
| Bush Lupine by Trail: San Joaquin River Gorge |
In the above-mentioned article, Mr. Hanson
suggests that modern Americans don't understand that life is unfair
and tragedy falls on good people for no reason. If Mr. Hanson were in
touch with the lives of average Americans, he would realize that he
does not need to remind the vast majority of us about the lack of
fairness or the prevalence of tragedy. Worse, Mr. Hanson fails to
recognize that empathy often rises out of tragedy. Empathy can lead
to an attempt to lessen the pain of others, to keep bad from getting
worse, which is a type of heroism and nobility of spirit. Instead he
uses any excuse to bash modern Americans (read “liberals”) for
coddling the weak and for providing a voice to defend what has no
voice.
Mr. Hanson has advocated for the
show of military force often over the years, deriding liberals for
revealing weakness, in other words, for finding alternatives to
war—by using the negotiating process for solving problems, for
instance. It often seems that Mr. Hanson will not find peace until
the United States achieves full-spectrum dominance of the world.
Perhaps Mr. Hanson is a hawk 24/7 for another reason: War is a great
source of profit. The military received nearly 600 billion dollars
from taxpayers in 2015, fifty-four percent of all federal
discretionary spending, as opposed to the six percent for education;
the three percent for energy and the environment; the three percent
for social security, unemployment and labor; the two percent for
transportation, and on and on. Military spending is an effective way
to channel money from the middle class to the elites. Sound familiar?
 |
| Poppies and Lupine: San Joaquin River Gorge |
I doubt that Mr. Hanson would
continue to serve as a mouthpiece for the the right-wing elites if he didn't champion
their causes, one of which, of course, is accumulating even more
wealth.
Those elites are already
outrageously wealthy. Twenty people now own as much wealth as half of all Americans, according to The Nation. And these elites are not in
any hurry to trickle their money down to the rest of us. According to
the author of the article in The Nation, Joshua Holland, “The U.S.
is caught in a vicious cycle, with rising political inequality
driving an ever-rising concentration of wealth at the top.” Even
with this great income disparity, Mr. Hanson wants the public to stop
whining and pay for deadbeat dams and unjustified wars that
benefit those at the top. It is up to the reader to decide whether
Mr. Hanson is disingenuous or just plain deluded.
I remember Mr. Hanson beating the
drums for the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that
continue to create chaos in the middle east, wars that have arguably led to
even greater terrorism throughout the world, wars that demand more
U.S. military intervention in a progressively more unstable region,
wars that are responsible for unnecessary tragedy here and abroad,
wars that benefit the wealthiest Americans. The untold misery caused
by these wars is in itself a good reason for true liberals and
conservatives alike to remain wary of the flaws of logic common
in Mr. Hanson's editorials as well as in the bullet points of
right-wing pundits in general.
No comments:
Post a Comment