We Work With Our Hands

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We are recording in late August, but you're listening to this particular podcast, most likely on September 6th.

That's when it is originally airing.

And we are in the midst of a series of podcasts

being done while Victor is teaching at Hillsdale College, which on September 6th, that's what he's doing.

He's up there for two weeks.

Oh, Victor, yeah, he's the namesake and the star of the show, Victor Davis-Hanson.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky, Distinguished Fellow in History at the aforementioned Hillsdale College.

Victor

writes a lot of original material.

Of course, he writes a ton of stuff,

American Greatness, Greatness, New Criterion, many other places, but a lot of original material for his website, victorhanson.com.

I'm going to get the plug-in right now.

Go to it.

Subscribe.

Five bucks for the first time, $50 for a year.

You're missing tens of thousands of words a month of Victor's wisdom if you don't do that.

Okay, plug done.

These podcasts we are recording in late August.

I'm doing six of them, and they're based on questions that you listeners have kindly submitted, knowing that we were going to be doing this.

And we've got a few questions about people who work with their hands, something Victor has talked and written about

many times in the past.

But we're going to hear his wisdom once again, and we're going to get to these questions right after these important messages.

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We're We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, my friend.

Yeah,

we've just recorded a podcast

which talked about farming.

And we're going to, one of these questions coming up is about farming.

It's amazing.

I see we're talking and I'm looking at the kind of questions I was going to ask in forthcoming podcasts.

And you've talked about, you know,

collecting the almonds from almond trees and having to mallet, rubber mallet trees.

I'm thinking, my God, what kind of backbreaking work goes into?

And by the way, you can kill a rattlesnake with a mallet because it was in the foothills.

And every time we were there, there would be a little hole.

About every, every time we went to work, there'd be about the seventh hole.

There would be the seventh tree, there'd be a little hole with a snake with his head out and bam.

Was it just because rubber mallet?

Was it because it was the foothills, or do they have some

association with almond trees?

Well, you know, it's shady and it's up, it's dry, especially in August when you harvest.

So

this was a weird orchard on the foothills, but there's not,

our great-grandparents where I live got rid of the California Pacific rattlesnakes.

And I think it was about 1910.

They had these rattlesnake and cotton jackrabbit hunts where they'd hold hands and they'd walk across the field.

for miles and then they would drive the jackrabbits and the rattlesnakes and kill them all.

And so when I grew up,

not that rattlesnakes were not native to the San Joaquin Valley.

They were weak.

I thought they were only a foothill and mountain species, but that was only because they had been driven from one of their natural habitats.

That was a natural habitat for them too,

the foothills in the Sierra below 5,000, 6,000 feet.

But wow.

I saw one rattlesnake in my entire life out here in Fresno County.

By the river, you see them once in a while, but I saw one, and it was only on the Kings River.

And I think when I've been up in the mountains, I see a lot of them.

And so they got rid of them all in a very ecologically, we should condemn them.

We were talking about the abuses of history.

So we're going to use our own moral code to say those awful people in 1910 were paranoid about those venomous snakes and they had no business doing that.

And they've ruined the echo world or the echo sphere because there's no more poor little Pacific rattlesnakes in

and mean to the jackrabbits,

but not where I live.

Yeah, but we have beautiful little um garter and especially uh gopher snakes.

I love those snakes, we see them everywhere.

You're kind of neat.

The snakes are a part of the life of a farm and

keeping getting rid of rodents, right?

They're not venomous, right?

Okay, well, let me let me uh engage in this uh people who work with their hands questions, Victor.

And the first is

about farming.

And

you'll get the gist of the question.

It wasn't written with the greatest precision, but it's from Blunderbuss, which

I have a feeling is a nickname because I never heard of St.

Blunderbuss.

How can we increase the number of family farmers?

and middle-class farmers who would be without huge funding or vertical

integration which are available to corporate agriculture.

That gets me a little, it's a little

fuzzy on

the tenses, et cetera.

But

in general, I guess

there's two questions there.

Is there a need for

more farmers

of a non-corporate

type?

I can't imagine doing that other than having a small farm because it's some kind of idyllic dream,

but as a business, getting into farming as a business that's not corporate.

Yeah.

How do you do that?

Should you do it?

Is it a crazy dream?

Go ahead.

In 1996

and 98, I wrote two books on this subject.

One was called Fields Without Dreams.

Jane Smiley, who wrote a thousand acres, wrote the introduction to the second book, and I'm sure she regrets it now, called Letters from an American Farmer.

I discuss this topic.

And to boil down those two books,

there's a dichotomy.

When you go to the store anywhere in the United States and you see fresh

apples and plums and peaches and grapes and carrots and celery, and it's clean, it's nutritious, and it's cheap.

At least it was until Joe Biden became president.

There's a reason for that.

And when you go to a farmer's market and it doesn't look as pristine

and it's a little ripe and it tastes better, it's probably more nutritious and it's more expensive, there's a reason for that.

And when you go,

let's say you get on, I don't know, Avenue 7,

Manning Avenue, anything that goes Shields Avenue across California, and you get past 30 miles east of the Sierra and you get closer to the coast ranges, and you don't see anybody living out there.

And yet, when you go down the 99, you see

Visalia,

and you see Kingsburg, and you see Selma, and you see Fowler, and Fresno, and Madera, and Merced, and Modesto.

And

that was where the railroad was, that was where there was water.

So, there were historical reasons for that.

It was basically the aquifer and the riparian

ecosystem from the Sierra Nevada.

Okay, what I'm saying is this is that there's a dichotomy that corporate agriculture cannot be faulted about providing us food.

Nobody does it better because they're vertically integrated.

That is, they own the food producing lands, which they don't make a lot of money per acre on, usually.

They own the trucking, they own the packing, the processing, and the brokerage.

And the farmer is at the bottom of that chain.

He only produces and he is dependent on a packer, on a trucker, on a broker, on a supermarket.

He has no control over that price.

So every dollar that you pay for agricultural produce, he gets about two or three cents.

And he argues that, but if you look at those communities that I just listed, they were rich cultural institutions.

You go down there, they had beautiful post offices, they had beautiful train stations.

You go to the city hall, they're beautiful examples of architecture.

They all had parks in the middle, just like in the Midwest or the East Coast, Jack.

They have World War II memorials, they have a cannon here, they have a statue there, and they have these beautiful little downtowns.

And that was a cultural experience.

And those families then raised

boys and girls for America.

And they came, and they were because they emphasized the practical that these boys and girls were not abstract thinkers.

They had to test their theories, their mind works, so to speak, by physical labor.

And that's what the farmer does.

If you say, oh, I have a new variety of plums and I think it's going to be so great.

Okay, then plan it, borrow the money, do the labor and see what happens when it's no damn good.

You'll go broke.

So you're very reluctant to take chances that are unfounded.

So So it was that corrective of abstract theorizing was wonderful.

And they don't worry about diversity, equity, inclusion, because you're all in the same lot.

So when I grew up here, if I'm looking around now in a 360,

when I saw the Kasigians, or I saw the Israeli,

the Israelians, or I saw a Mr.

Mendoza, or I saw Tarzan Cota, or I saw

various other ethnic groups, so-called non-white.

Nobody cared.

What did you talk about?

Oh man,

I have a Jubilee and it's out.

Do you know how to fix the

brushes on the generator?

Can you do it for me?

Or you know what?

I just cracked my listers.

Can I borrow one?

Or my vineyard wagon's bearings are out on the front wheel.

Can I borrow your tire?

That kind of stuff.

They didn't care.

It was a natural multiculturalism, natural diversity.

It wasn't enforced by a bunch of rarefied white people that are worried about their

privilege and they feel that they have to force upon us their noblesse oblige on race.

So it was a wonderful incubator of that culture, and it's gone.

It's gone because they did everything perfectly.

They created the good citizen, the good community.

They were the bedrock of the United States.

They produced good, nutritious varieties, Alberta peaches, Santa Rosa plums, Thompson seedless girdle grapes, just delicious.

But

if you are a highly suburbanized and urban population

and you need that type of food delivered to your door thousands of miles from where it's, then you need somebody that has the ability to do that.

And that means they have a refrigerated truck and they have particular chemicals and they have particular protocols and they have particular varieties of fruit that looks good, but you drop a modern peach or a plum and it'll bounce on the floor.

It's hard, right?

And they don't taste any good.

You take a regular peach that you buy and date in Ohio and

you try to eat it like an Alberta peach.

You take an Alberta peach and you try to send it to Ohio.

It's going to be mush when it gets there.

So they were local producers and you ate seasonal fruit.

So if you were in Ohio or Michigan, you ate.

plums or peaches or whatever would grow and but you didn't get you know chilian grapes in February.

But so corporate agriculture gave you all these choices and all these new varieties of fruits and vegetables.

And it was wonderful and it was cheap and they were safe and they were nutritious.

But they didn't feel that they, that agriculture was agrarianism or it had social or cultural responsibilities or liabilities.

And small farming did, and small farming can't compete with that.

So if you're in Europe, The Europeans have decided, and I'm not a big fan of Europe's socio-economic paradigms, but they have decided if you go to rural France and picturesque the English countryside, or you go into the wonderful places of the Peloponnese and Greece, or Italy up in Tuscany, they say, you know, this is worth saving.

So we're going to subsidize these people.

We're going to have price supports and this and that.

It's very, it can be very expensive.

Food's much more expensive in Europe, but it is tend to be more local.

And then you go out in the country and you see these beautiful small little

And, you know,

and that's not what we do, it's not what America does.

And

I have mixed emotions about it.

But what I'm not going to do, and I decided when I wrote those books 20, you know, 25 years, I was not going to romanticize agriculture or agrarianism to the extent that I was going to lie about corporate agriculture and say it's inefficient or it's dangerous or it's toxic.

And I can tell you that I farmed here

as a fifth generation.

And

this farm was cluttered.

I mean, I had antiques and I had old fence posts and I had piles of this and piles of that because every generation never knew when they'd have to cannibalize an old piece of equipment.

And we had alleyways that were picturesque and we had trees lined.

There were tree-lined little, you could, it was almost like the English countryside.

And we had an artesian pond and it was beautiful.

But my God, when you tried to farm and you had a five-acre parcel here and a three-acre over there and a 15-acre over there, it was not efficient.

So, when all of our neighborhood went corporate and corporate agriculture came in, what they did with me, they said, We will rent this place.

And you should see it now.

They just leveled it and they tore out all that, and they tore out all the irrigation systems and they planted this beautiful

grid with geo, you know,

satellite

efficiency and precision and GPS.

And my God, every tree is perfectly aligned, and it looks like a

park.

It's beautiful.

Is it strictly almonds or is there any?

Yes, it's monocrop.

You don't do that on 45.

You do not.

We would have

10 different varieties in some 40-acre parcels.

And, you know, we had it geared toward fresh fruit for Santa Cruz, fresh fruit for Palo Alto, fresh fruit for for San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Carmel.

And then we would, we would, it was a lot of work.

I did that for 20 years.

Yeah, when was the last time you were

actually, I hate to put it this way, like, but actually farming.

When were you still?

Well, I, I, I may still be in NSA.

Well, I was full-time.

Right.

I left graduate school and came home in 1980.

And then I did that for five years.

And then in 84, I started teaching part-time Latin for a year.

And then I tried to suggest I could start a classics department at cloud.

I was the only classics professor.

That's another story altogether, but I met a really brilliant guy, Bruce Thornton, and he and I partnered and we created a classics department.

So then I was full-time, but

I kept

farming with my family, my two brothers and cousin.

And I did that for another five years.

So that 10 years.

And then I got kind of ill because I was farming full time.

And I mean by full time, driving up to Fresno at eight o'clock to teach a Latin class,

driving back home to check on, you know, a picking crew, eating lunch, driving back up to Fresno to teach a Greek literature class, and humanities, driving back home.

And sometimes three times.

And when I say up and back, I don't mean five minutes, I mean 28 miles.

So So I was, and I had old cars, so I would be breaking down and I would pick up parts in Fresno.

I did all that.

And then in the 90s,

I positioned out of that.

So I was a member of the farming partnership, but I was more like a,

I don't know, advisor or I did stuff.

My father, I helped him.

He was involved in it too, but I wasn't out on a tractor.

And then on we, it was all located at my house.

So we had a big packing house, 30 or 40 people here at my house.

And so I had all the workers here.

And then at night, I would go out and help clean up.

But I had a twin brother who was an entire workaholic.

I mean, if you think I'm a workaholic,

he was getting up at five in the morning and he was on a tractor all day long.

And then he was managing it.

So that took a lot off the responsibility when I kind of faded out of the picture.

And then after it was all broken up, we had, I mean, we have five people and you only have 180 acres and then you have five spouses.

You've got 10 different agendas.

When prices in 2000 became rock bottom, they weren't even, I mean, we had been getting, I don't know, $14 for Black Butte plums to take one advantage.

By 2005, they were $4.

We had been getting $14.20 a ton for raisins and by 2003, they were $600, $700, $800.

hundred dollars

you couldn't make it so right that was the big

and then unfortunately the people in my family that either had to sell or want to sell sold out at a very low price for the most part and the land that i see now that area around me

it's 30 or 40 000 an acre now and it's kind of sad because i walk every night with my five dog four dogs and we go around the perimeter of my 40 acres but we go around the perimeter also of my great-great-grandmother, great-great, my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my parents' land, and it's all owned by other people.

And I don't blame anybody for selling out.

I don't know how anybody survived.

They didn't.

And, you know, I had a brother who had a master's degree in biology, so he was highly educated.

And I had another brother with a master's degree, and

it was very hard for them to make a living.

I was lucky that

I had a a job in town,

but I did that for, I guess you'd say, 10 or 12 years full time while I was teaching part of that time.

And then I kind of was advisory and puttered on weekends and did stuff when there was nobody around.

Or what I mean by that is if somebody call up and say, I've got to go fix the tractors or there's a broken concrete pipeline, Victor, can you, and I would go out in the weekends and do stuff like that.

And then the last, when it was all broken up, then everybody went their own way and I had 40 acres and I just couldn't do it and teach and travel and write.

So I rented it out

and I finally decided that

there was no money in any of it.

The vines were

just losing money.

So I just said to the renter, that's it.

I'm done.

And I didn't know what to do.

And then a very wonderful guy came by and said, he's a big corporate farmer, but he was wonderful, Furman Compost.

And he said, Victor, I'm going to be leasing a lot of land in your area.

I want to integrate your 41 acres with all of this other land and make it almonds.

And I'll line up all the plots and it'll be very good for me.

And he turned it into a beautiful farm.

I mean, it's a state-of-the-art almond farm now.

And he leases it from me.

Right.

And I really admire him.

And he's another American success story.

Oh, yeah.

Family, you know, Tony.

I know Tony.

I've been to the, I found, I've, you know, a guy from the Bronx going to the almond processing plant.

It's a, wow.

Yeah, that's his uncle.

I mean, that's the thing that people don't understand about Central California.

If you look

at the compost family, the original two brothers, and then second generation, they were from Basco.

You look at the Parnegans and Fowler Packing and what they've done with mandarins.

It's just, it's just incredible.

So you have,

when I mean incredible, these are family corporations, but the state-of-the-art technology,

they compete globally and they produce a very nutritious product that's safe and they can do it at a price that's cheaper than people in Spain or Greece.

And

they're really admirable.

Admirable, big time.

Hey, Victor, before we get on to the other

part of the question, people working with the hands, if you quickly, I'm just curious again, I mentioned Boy from the Bronx, even though I think I've told you in the past, I used to work on a fruit and vegetable delivery truck through, you know, so

I always had an affinity for fruit crate labels and where Andy Boy broccoli was being.

But as you were growing,

yeah,

when you were growing up,

were these associations that have nothing to do with where I grew up, 4-H

and the Grange, were these part of your life as a kid growing up?

And how much were they part of the community of the Central Power?

We had the Farm bureau which everybody belonged to and then there were the granges were starting to they're they were there and they started to fade when i was there but they had the future farmers of america with the blue jackets and my brother was a future farmer he had to buy a steer and raise it and uh

Yeah, there were all of these.

There was the Raisin Bargaining, it's still their association.

I was a member of that.

I was a member of the Sunmade Raisin Cooperative.

In fact, they owed me $89,000.

My brothers and I, when they went, we capitalized that we never got, most of it we never got.

And so I knew all of those.

I was a member of the,

I had Farm Bureau health insurance for my family.

I was a member of Farm Bureau.

I used to be a subscriber to Truton,

Fruit Tree Grower and Great Grower Magazine.

And I used to read those.

non-stop.

It was very funny because I'd be in my office and somebody would come in and I would be, you know, I had to, when you have a small classics department of four or five people, you have a, you can't offer the rich level of coursework you'd like.

So you do independent studies.

A lot of work.

So I would be offering an independent study in Lysias's

on the cripple or maybe Xenophon's Poroi or Satiricon by Petronius.

And at the same time, I'd be reading Grape Grower Magazine or Western Tree Fruit Grower.

And I would be looking at pack tanks and all the different types of machinery.

And then people would come in and they couldn't figure out whether I was an ag professor.

And then I would go over to the ag department, and there were some good guys there, but they weren't actual farmers.

You know what I mean?

They were kind of like,

so it was a very strange,

schizophrenic.

It still is because although I'm not actively farming, I live on a farm and I'm with farmers all day in the vicinity.

And then I go

to

Hoover each week.

And it's just such a, I've been doing this, it's a cultural

Mars.

Yeah.

I have.

It's just, I've been doing that since I was a student at 18 at UC Santa Cruz, a student at Stanford, commuting back and forth.

And sometimes it's just mind-boggling the cultural differences in three or four hours that you experience.

And

the wealth of talent in the San Joaquin Valley.

And I was just talking to a guy the other day, Simon Siota, and my gosh, I said, you know anything about,

I'm putting a conduit.

Yes, I can do this, Victor.

And I'm going to do, I'm going to get a, I'll do the cement.

And I think my pump is starting, ah, don't worry about that.

I have a guy to do that.

And then I said, is there anything you can't do?

And I mean, that's, and

it's just all of these people with these enormous numbers of skills.

And

I see him on the phone.

He's speaking in his native Indian, you know, as a Sikh immigrant.

And then all of a sudden he's speaking fluent Spanish and then he speaks English better than I do.

And you have all the highly educated, it's just amazing to see the number of people that we kind of forget in the other California that are just,

gosh.

And then when I drive into Palo Alto and I see these trucks, you know, refrigerated trucks and stuff, they're coming over Pacheco Pass and everything and coming up 101 on the Salinas Valley and they're just bringing in tons, millions of pounds of fruit and vegetables to the entire Silicon Valley, nine million Bay Area people.

And then I go out in the evening some days and I see all bringing all the other stuff out, you know, and I keep thinking, okay, we're using your cell phones and your Google searches, but you guys, and that's really nice and that helps us farm, but you wouldn't eat if these people didn't truck this stuff in.

It struck me many years ago, Victor, and

we kind of move on to this next question, but how intelligent and how, as you say, you're consumed with

your trade at the time.

You knew what you were doing.

And remember when, I think it was during the

88

Democratic primary, may have been Michael Dukakis or somebody going, telling the farmers in Iowa who were having real troubles with corn prices at the time well why don't you grow belgian endive i remember that

i remember that that was almost as good as mike bloomberg remember drop a seed

kind of go on autopilot and it sprouts

these guys aren't very smart they just kind of drop a seed and bang yeah

oh i'll grow the belgian endive thank you for the suggestion

anyway you know you just kind of uh you know just kind of an idea in your head and you say i'm going to have kind of a worldwide information about stocks and you call it bloomberg Bloomberg and you just sit back and you make your worth 60 billion.

That was easy, wasn't it?

Right.

All right.

People who work with their hands, we're going to get to an important question about this right after these messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This show is being recorded late August and is going to be up on September 6th on the World Wide Webs on September 6th, the great Victor Davis Hansen, who I've had the great pleasure to be talking with today twice a week.

He's teaching up at Hillsdale, which is, I think this is the 19th or 20th year that Victor is doing that.

So Victor,

while we were preparing for these podcasts, many people sent in questions.

And here's one from Christopher Ott.

a little preamble.

I've owned a small business specializing in specialty automotive repairs and parts manufacturing.

My generation, Generation X, grew up with an emphasis from society on college and not trades.

I did not attend, excuse me, I did attend college, but working with the hands and the mind was far more appealing.

Instead, I opened a business and have run it continuously for 34 years.

In that period, I've seen a massive reduction in all trade skills, and it's troubling.

Mechanics, plumbers, electricians, AC techs, etc.

In our area of the world, these trades are mostly being filled by first-generation immigrants.

In addition, it seems that the average citizen has lost their ability to do basic hands-on repairs of any type.

Very few of the people I know could replace a light switch or unclog a drain.

This seems a massive strategic issue for the United States.

What would his, that's you, Victor.

What would Victor's thoughts be of this?

And Victor, we have uh we have about eight minutes left

i agree entirely um

i mean what saved me as a person if i am saved were the eight or nine ten years

when i came back with a phd at 25 on the farm and then growing up earlier and by that i mean

I had to go lay cement with my parents or my grandparents.

So I know how to lay cement.

I know every aspect of it.

And I know how to hammer and to build a building.

I had to do that.

I put in a sewer system with four-inch PVC,

et cetera, et cetera.

I fix all of my irrigation on my sprinkler system.

I know how to prune trees.

I know how I put in about three woofs, composition roofs.

I shouldn't be turned loose on wiring because

amateurs are dangerous because they try to do more than they know, but I've done that.

I go into the house three or four times a year to fix the plumbing.

I think about three or four months ago, the main water one inch, it's only one inch.

It's an ancient water supply of the house in the middle, blew up at night.

And my wife and I were out in mud for two or three hours where we tried to dig down four feet, find the line, and then get a coupling on galvanized pipe.

And we did that.

My garage is full of every type of

extra part I can think of in case something happens out here.

I have a one acre yard.

It's just,

so I did all that.

And that was in addition to, I think I could still drive most tractors.

I have kind of rusty, I don't know the new computer drive, but I drove almost every tractor.

Massey, Ford, Oliver, David Brown, you name it, I could drive it pretty well.

I was pretty good at it, not as good as my brother.

I drove every spray rig.

I know how to do that.

I could fix things.

So I, and my father insisted on that.

And he, one last thing, because I know we're out of time now, I think it's very valuable.

And I try to teach my children that.

And they are very mechanical.

At times, I kind of overdid it because I didn't learn classical languages in high school.

And I was an undergraduate and kind of caught up.

And so I was a philologist.

By that, I mean, I went to a program where it was not archaeology or history, but pure Latin and Greek.

And, you know, I didn't go to prep school.

So I wanted to masculose.

So that meant hours

of study.

And then I went to the American School of Classical Studies.

But long and short of it, at certain times, I kind of crashed and burned.

I got E.

coli in Greece, very serious from eating strawberries that had been

fertilized with night soil.

And then I

got a severe staghorn calculus when I got

so I got very ill, almost died, had to be flown home and be operated.

But when I came, my father said something to me, I'll never forget.

He said, You don't get sick, your body allows these things to do it to you because you're not balanced, Victor.

Your brothers are balanced.

All you're doing is reading, reading, reading, reading, and you just, you don't see yourself.

You sit there and read that damn Greek or Latin, and you just do it.

You need to get out.

So you've got a serious kidney problem, and I'm going to cure you.

So for that summer, he made me wear shorts, tan, no, no shirt.

And I was, you know, I had all these surgical scars, really big operation.

I was still weak from the equipment.

And I tagged along with him.

And I was 25 and we did farm work.

He said, when it's all over, and I never forgot that.

So

when I

had a bad case of mono in my 30s, kind of the same thing, exhaustion, and then you try to get over it.

And so when I got this COVID, long COVID, I kept doing it.

I kept going to, I went to to Israel with a group.

I went back east.

And then finally, this little voice said, listen to your grandfather and father and go back to their farm and stay there.

And it's not the physical work there.

It's going to kill you.

It's this damn constant reading, stress.

And so I've been healing.

So what I'm getting at is that I think it's really important for all of us.

to have some kind of physicality in our lives, both because the body matches the mind, but it also gives us an empathy to people

who

work with their hands and who provide us with stuff.

So I'll just finish with this final anecdote.

So I've mentioned this constant remodeling project, and it started in January and it's so labor short, it's still going on, but I always think about these guys that are out here working.

What if they got COVID?

Well, two of them did.

So I just think, and I said to my wife the other day, Jesus had COVID and he's a painter and he's inhaling all that stuff.

And if he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid.

And so I've been texting him and I'm thinking, God, these guys,

I mean,

I'm lucky because I can do, if I don't feel well right now, it doesn't matter.

I can do this.

But what if I had to make my living inhaling paint right now?

You see what I mean?

Yeah.

So if you do stuff like that, you then you get empathy for the people who do it all the time.

And I think that's really important because as I said at the beginning of one of our earlier podcasts today,

our first,

it's not the painter, it's not the plumber, it's not the electrician, it's not

the sewer installer who's failing America.

They do a better job than they ever did.

It's not the guy in the plant that's putting together your truck.

It's the people in the deskbound,

despound, intellectual, techie, whatever they are, social media class.

Those people have let us down.

It's not the middle class, muscular class.

They're better than ever.

The military people, they're out and God knows where.

Or the pilots, they are not letting us down.

Or the airline pilots are not letting us down.

It's people like the Pete Budigigs of the world that are letting us down.

Those types of people are the Gavin Newsom class is letting us down.

They are failing at what they do, but not

the middle classes.

Yeah.

You know, John Ratzenberger, who is Cliff Clavin on cheer is the mailman i met him he's a wonderful guy oh i love john he's he lives in in milford i haven't seen him in a couple of years but he had a show on uh made in america that used to be on i forget it's the tlc or one of the cable channels and john's of course great advocate uh for uh learning the trades and not only because they're If you were a wealthier in America, you're a rich man.

If you become a plumber, you're going to own the town eventually.

But he had some studies.

It was very dispiriting on, you know, the average age of a trade worker was really high.

This is the point of the question, you know, about this being a strategic problem for America.

And one of the studies, like, you know, most Americans don't know how to change a tire on a car.

He's right.

How about unclog a train?

So it's, it is troubling, and it's a drum beat worth, you know, our continuing to beat on this and other podcasts.

And I do have to say this, Victor, what the first, the very first podcast you and I ever did a a long time ago when it was a national review.

You

were great, but at the end, you told me

you had passed out earlier that day.

You were repairing plumbing under the house.

You had a fever and yet you were in the saddle.

So

you have the ability and you continue to do things and

yet perform intellectually.

It's kind of

hot water that day because it galvanized.

When your pump goes off and it goes back on and goes back off, it tends to purge itself.

And for the main sink in the house, it just sent all of this ancient rust.

So I was under there trying to take all the hot water.

And when you go deal with three-quarter-inch corroded galvanized pipe and you take off one coupling, it breaks.

It just.

I don't even want to get into that.

So I'm sorry.

I'm having flashbacks.

Well, anyway, to the folks who have asked us

these questions and others who've submitted questions, we'd really appreciate it.

We have a few more of these listener question podcasts to record, and we will be doing that.

Victor, thanks for your wisdom.

I want to remind people to subscribe to Victor's website, VictorHanson.com.

For me, Jack Fowler,

subscribe to the free weekly email newsletter I write, Civil Thoughts.

You can do that at civilthoughts.com.

And

thanks to those who on Apple Podcasts leave us five-star ratings.

And that would be about 99% of the people who do leave ratings.

So

appreciate your confidence and your own appreciation of Victor's wisdom that we share now, I think, five times a week, twice with me, twice with the great Sammy Wink, and Victor himself interviewing people now.

So it's all terrific.

Thanks very much.

Thank you, Victor.

And we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Yes.

Thank you, everybody.

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