Tuesday June 21, 2011

BLACK PRESIDENT DONE STOLE MAH CHAINSAW. All Victor Davis Hanson's National Review posts are pretty much the same stew ladled from different parts of the pot -- e.g., Anthony Weiner blah blah John Edwards blah blah RobertByrdJosefStalinSaddamHussein blah narcissists Versailles Washington. Or: Boeing blah blah Petraeus-Bush blah Van Jones blah Geithner Defense of Marriage.

He goes a little further in this essay, about some recent robberies in his neck of the woods. One guy snatched Hanson's chainsaw. ("Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting.") Another pulled copper wire out of his pump. And a house down the way was relieved of its major appliances. Hanson is in California farm country, and I must say his sad tale made me happier than usual to be living in Harlem, where such offenses are not so bunched up.

Hanson has been inspired by these misfortunes to generalize:

I think the public would react in two different ways to the above occurrences — and such a dichotomy explains a lot why the nation has never been more divided.

(I never did figure out what the second way to which he alluded was; maybe one of you can explain it to me.) A majority of his fellow citizens, Hanson says, will know that the robbers wanted money for "drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an iPhone or DVD" rather than food. Which may well be, though as he later complains of California's rotten economy, I'm not sure how he knows this -- oh, wait, Mexifornia blah blah gangbanger blah blah La Raza; I see what he's getting at.

After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, and the government itself sympathize with, even romanticize those forced to take a chainsaw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

The remedy to address theft would be not more government help — public assistance, social welfare, counseling — but far less, given that human nature rises to the occasion when forced to work and sinks when leisured and exempt. I don’t believe my thieves have worked much; instead, they figured a day’s theft beats tile setting or concrete work beginning at 5 AM.

Here we see the casual connection between these three robberies and Hollywood, which spurred them on, his link suggests, with Bonnie and Clyde. (I'd be stunned if the crooks knew anything about this 44-year-old movie; I guess Hanson felt a reference to rap music would give the game away.)

Also, illegal immigrants are using up Hanson's emergency room services.

The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

Yes, the producer and the parasite -- the basis of all the Going Galt stuff though, as Hanson is here in full victim mode, we are not getting the traditional threats that he will actually leave, alas.

The same is true of unions, pensions, and compensation…

…if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps?…

This liberal notion of being careful of what you wish for extends to energy…

If you're an aficionado of this sort of thing, you can see what's coming next:

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.

blah blah cap and trade blah blah Guantanamo blah blah solar panels. You'd hardly know that the Democratic governor of Hanson's home state is actually battling the Democrats in his legislature to scale the budget back, using the traditional tool of the veto rather than putting on a tricorner and raging in the town square. But Jerry Brown is prosaically trying to fix California's budget, whereas Hanson is -- I would say poetically, were it not an insult to poetry; might I say doggerelly? -- trying to exponentiate race and class resentments which may be useful in future elections.

We've lately seen others among the brethren use minority crime stories to rile their readers against the black President, but Hanson goes to much greater lengths than they have to conceal his purpose. Is it possible that he's embarrassed?

UPDATE. Commenter MikeJ breaks down VicDave "300" Jo's POV: "He's just upset that we don't allow the hoplite farmer class to keep slaves around to guard the chainsaw from the persians."