Late last year, I took the Vice President's Classicist, Victor Davis Hanson, since honored with the National Medal Of the Humanities along with such worthies as Louis Auchincloss, to task for an echt-Neocon National Review Online piece expressing the view that ,in my words
"the National Intelligence Estimate shows that Iran's inability to realize its nuclear ambitions is but one of the many fruits of our wise invasion of Mesopotamia. As presumably is Libya's failure to send a manned mission to Mars. The scholarly world awaits Hanson's magisterial essay demonstrating that Xerxes turned tail on learning of Athens threat to weaponize Democritus' atomic theory."
I am now reduced to cognitive dissonance by belatedly reading his far more balanced, indeed Classical take on matters Oriental --
July 21, 2007
Bad Persians
Myth and reality in wars between East and West
by Victor Davis Hanson
Times Literary Supplement
The principal cause of my chagrin is his reminder that the Ionian seat of pre-Socratic thought , including the the physics of Anaxamiter and Democritus languished under Persian satrapy even as the Parthenon was being erected. So I sincerely hope ( one can dream ) that they read this issue of the TLS at the White House, because it is way above NR's current pay grade.
We should be so lucky as to have Bush Jr. read Xenophon.
Posted by: wkwillis | April 07, 2008 at 10:16 PM