The Culturalist: With Modesty and Humility

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is The Culturalist, the show in which we look at all the events and people from the past and even present that influence the way we live.

And Victor has been on a long book tour recently, and so pretty exhausted from interviews, but mostly on the book, although it involves lots of current events.

But what I thought we would do today for the show is look at some current events first and then maybe a historical character and then a quote from the past and have Victor talk to us a little bit about something else besides the current news.

But we'll do the news first after this message.

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Welcome back.

And this is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Welcome, Victor.

How are you doing today?

Very well.

And I'm here with Sammy Wink interviewing me.

And we're ready to go.

Sammy Wink always forgets to say her own name, but yes, it's true.

This is Sammy Wink.

And we're here to talk a little bit about news today.

And then I thought maybe a historical figure, I have some questions about William Tecumseh Sherman, so we'll get to him.

And then a quote from the Odyssey that I find I've always found absolutely fascinating.

And I would like to hear you talk on that.

But if we could get to the news, there's so much news out there.

I'm willing to let you address anything you would like, actually.

But these are some of the things that I've noticed.

The parents angry in Virginia at the rape of a young female student in the female bathroom by a transgendered female in that bathroom.

San Francisco crime scene, as people in broad daylight are still taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods from storekeepers.

And if the San Franciscans are going to put up with that much longer, I find Lori Lightfoot, a fascinating character as mayor, as she tries to threaten the police, the very institution that might keep somebody safe, although not very many people, it seems like, in Chicago.

And then also the marksman in Norway that took out five, he killed five people with a bow and arrow is another fascinating event.

And then finally, there's things about California besides San Francisco that are pressing.

I think I just recently went past the Pacheco Pass and the San Luis Reservoir, and it looks like a mud puddle.

And I have to say, I'm really shocked.

I've lived in California and I've driven that 152 many, many, many times, and that reservoir has never, ever been that low.

So if we could talk on water maybe toward the end, that'd be great.

And we also have the Panamanian 60,000 or the Panamanian government warning us that 60,000 new illegal immigrants are going to be crossing to the United States fairly soon.

And them and many more, of course.

But so let's go ahead and what would you like to talk about first, Victor?

Well, let's try to put all of those topics, Sammy, that you put in reference, you referenced into some kind of holistic category or exegesis.

And what you're talking about, I think, is systems collapse.

That's a fancy sociological word for

when the Mycenaeans or

the Aztecs or the Western Roman Empire just simply stopped working.

Usually historians say it got too complex or knowledge was not passed down from generation to generation

or the number of people who had wealth and power and technocratic ability was so small that it could be decapitated.

But whatever we're talking about, we're looking right now at San Francisco closing down Walgreens because

teenagers are going in there and looting them.

And the city and the community will not stop them.

I mean, they can say they want to stop them or it's terrible, but they won't stop them.

And the local DA will not charge them if they did stop them.

And the police are underfunded.

And so this is the city that these people like, and yet they're not going to be able to easily fulfill subscription prescriptions.

And if it continues to get worse, they won't have any drugstores at all.

As we're talking about that, I flew down to Los Angeles not long ago, and you can look out to the horizon, and containership upon containership is stretched out to

the sunset.

And what I'm getting at there is that

either they don't have the labor or they don't have the technology, like more sophisticated Chinese ports, to unload them quickly enough.

But if you have a pie-in-the-sky philosophy that you pay people not to work and they will lose money by working and you slowly erode the work ethic, then you're not going to have three shifts 24-7.

And you're not going to have things for Christmas.

You're not going to, if you go to Walmart today in Central California, the shelves have large gaps in them.

You're not going to get these things.

If you believe in the New Green Deal

and you can, with a magic wand, say, you know what, I don't like carbon emissions, and so I'm going to go with solar and wind and forget hydroelectric.

That's not natural and forget nuclear power.

And let's go after the horizontal driller and the fracker, as Joe Biden did, cancel ANOR, cancel new leases on federal property, and warn them that you're doomed in 10 years, and you're going to have higher capital gains, and higher inheritance taxes, and higher income taxes.

and more regulations.

And they're not going to produce the necessary two and a half to three million barrels for a society coming out of quarantine.

So, what I'm getting at is that all these theories that

you hear about when you're on the Stanford or the Berkeley or the Yale or the Princeton campus by a bunch of hot house plants, when you put them in the real world, as Joe Biden apparently is doing,

and you discourage production and labor and energy development, then you have $5 a gallon gas.

The other night I went to, I think it was three service stations to find diesel fuel.

And when I finally found it, it was almost $5 a gallon.

And there's a $100 limit, which means, you know, for a pickup, 20 gallons is not a lot.

And yet, you talk to people who are filling up and they say they fill up three or four times a week.

They find they have $20, they pay.

They don't use their credit card because they get a small cash discount, three or four cents.

That's a whole new world.

This world didn't exist a year ago.

And

if you go to San Francisco, you're just not going to park on the street, maybe LA either, because you know, if you're broken into and you call the police, they're going to say, did you lose $900

or less?

If it's less, we can't do anything.

And even if you did more, if nothing's going to happen.

And so you're not going to go out at night.

And you'll be lucky to get a prescription filled in your neighborhood if that store has been a target of looters.

And this is all going to be masked and veneered over by lies.

Lies, lies, lies.

No one is going to tell you the truth that this is an artificially created crisis, that we do have a lot of labor and we have a lot of talented people and we have a lot of technocracy that could get these ships unloaded or could produce the necessary fossil fuels, that we could afford transportation or we can have supplies.

by Christmas and that we don't have to get in a situation again where we're dependent on the ship from China predicating whether we're going to have foodstuffs or whether we're going to have consumer goods.

We have a huge workforce.

We have a talented workforce.

But if you're going to translate academic theories into reality and you're going to destroy the meritocracy and the work ethic, and you're going to destroy

this brilliant group of fracker entrepreneurial vertical drillers, and you're going to go after the private sector, then you're going to get a Venezuela, and that's where we're headed.

And so I think everybody understands now if you're in California, you go to San Francisco, look at your feet when you walk off the sidewalk, see if it's got human escreetment.

Make sure you park your car where somebody won't break in, which means almost always in a guarded lot and hope that the guy's honest and actually patrols it.

Count an extra hour or two because the infrastructure is decrepit and not because of just population, but because we're interested in other things, whether that's transgendered schools or renaming renaming schools or requiring ethnic studies or outlawing lawnmowers and leap rollers.

We're not interested in getting a good freeway system.

So I can tell you, as someone who's lived in the state my whole life, that when I went over as a graduate student to Stanford, and that was 45 years ago, it was a much easier drive than it is now.

Even with a primitive old car,

the highway was safer, the people were friendlier, there was less crime, and that was in the so-called bleak 70s.

So we're regressing, and I want our listeners to remember that progress is not linear, it's cyclical.

There's nothing guarantees that when we wake up tomorrow, the society is going to have

safe food and antibiotics and clean water.

It's going to be, it could be, you know, a Hobbesian war of everybody against everybody if this administration continues on its present trajectory.

You know, I wanted to ask you, though, particularly about the California water crisis, because it seems to me that there must be somebody running the water,

the Department of Water, or whatever it's called in California.

And it would seem to me they would look at that puddle that's called the San Luis Reservoir, and they would go straight to the assembly and make a plea that

they need to do something different.

We're not a 20

million population anymore in California.

We're 40 million.

And that

reservoir serves San Jose.

I don't know if it goes up into the Bay Area, but lots of communities that are just not going to have water in the next few months, I guess.

I mean, I don't see how that's not how it works, right?

A department head says, woo, we've got a serious problem.

They go to the assembly, they talk to them, and they get things changed.

But it just seems like everybody's just kind of letting it go bureaucratic you know kafka-esque um

uh bureaucratic malaise and inertia that i i don't quite understand it i mean i i guess maybe it all comes down to the governor i don't know no it comes down to a mindset a progressive mindset because we haven't built a reservoir since 1983 outside of the los angeles municipal district I think the new Molonas Dam was the last one.

So what that means is that our brilliant grandparents who created the Sinto Valley Project, the California Water Project,

tapped dams, Folsom, Orville Dam, Shasta.

They combined it with the Sierra, King, San Joaquin, Sacramento runoff.

And they said, you know, two-thirds of the people want to live with one-third of the precipitation, and one-third of the precipitation

is not going to supply them.

So, we're going to go up to where two-thirds of the precipitation is, and one-third of the people live, and transfer the water.

And they gave us a blueprint.

And then because we were so affluent and leisured and brilliant around 1984, five, we said, you know what?

Screw them.

We're not going to build.

It's artificial.

It's going to kill some little lizard with three toes.

And we're not going to build any more dams.

And we only have 20 million people, so we can get by.

And they did.

And then 40 million people, and they've still got that mindset that it's kind of artificial.

And remember, the people who are doing this are in the Bay Area that are not building reservoirs.

And they get hetchy water.

And that is pretty, of all of these water projects, it's the oldest and the most reliable.

And then they get aqueduct water.

So they've got about another year.

They have no groundwater to supply the Bay Area or Silicon Valley.

They don't even know where the water comes.

But believe me, Crystal Springs Reservoir, it doesn't look like San Luis.

reservoir.

It's full.

And that's the supply that is augmented by the California or supplied by the California aqueduct.

But what I'm getting at is this, Sammy.

So three years ago, we had a deluge, one of the wettest years in California history.

According to the California Water Project, had we finished the project,

we would have had about 10 to 15 million acre feet.

The water would have come down to the tertiary reservoirs, Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes, Sites Reservoir.

And then right now, we would have water in San Luis, even though we were in the second year of a drought.

But when you don't build reservoirs for ideological reasons and you let the water go out the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers into the delta on the theory that the little three inch delta smelled is starving of oxygen and you need to oxygenate the delta when I think the 35 municipal waste plants that contribute to the high nitrogen continent and you don't build a peripheral canal so you don't have efficient transference of water around the delta, then you have no margin of error.

So now we're in a situation, if it doesn't rain or snow in California, we're gonna have people with no water this year.

And I mean, the wells are going dry where we are here in Selma, California.

And it's every man for himself.

The person who has capital takes his straw and he goes down 300 feet.

Water table is about 90 where I'm speaking.

The other person who doesn't have enough goes 200.

The rich man goes down 600.

And that's what's happening.

And we're creating a pre-civilizational survival of the fittest ethos.

And it's all done by what?

Therapeutic, nice people who were trained in the university.

We have people who have said, you know what, we didn't have to cut those 60 million trees.

The drought killed them.

That was a natural phenomenon.

They're nice molts for bugs.

We don't need a timber industry anymore.

We can import logs from somebody stupid enough to get dirty and make a living cutting them.

But, you know, we're techies, we're we're metrosexuals, et cetera, et cetera, pajama boys.

We don't get our hands dirty.

So, no more timber industry, no more thinning out dead forest.

And then these fires ravage California.

They put more carbon emissions into the air in a month than we get an entire year from cars.

They don't care because they have the money and the influence to navigate around

the consequences of their own crackpot ideas.

I'm kind of in a bad mood.

So

I'm watching this state and trying to drive through it this week and trying to get fuel in it and trying to go up to Stanford University and navigate through that place.

And it's not easy to do and see how we've destroyed commerce and private business, et cetera.

And then,

you know, UC Berkeley is going to require everybody to have a flu shot, even though it only has 50% efficacy on a good year.

So you can see it was not about, it's about this left-wing project taking control and transforming a very efficient system into some type of a quality of result, equity, inclusion, I don't know, diversity.

Yeah, between the fire, the water, and equity, inclusion, and diversity, this state really seems to be going downhill.

Although every once in a while you go out the door and you see a beautiful day and you understand why they're so blind i think well it's one of the most beautiful places in the world texas is doesn't compare with it but texas took hell and made paradise and we took paradise and turned it into hell so i've been to dallas i've been to austin i've been to san antonio and they have problems but they do not have san francisco la problems and their freeways do work and the people do have confidence about the future and they don't want to be california that's the most beautiful state in the country You know, growing up here, it was just, it was just phenomenal.

Everything worked.

Everybody got along.

It was a wonderful state.

And then we wrecked it.

And we wrecked it because we listened to so-called experts and so-called technocrats.

All right.

Okay.

I'm sorry to end on that note because that's a little bit depressing, but maybe we can turn to the historical figure for this week, William Tecumseh Sherman, who is perhaps a little bit more inspiring, although he's a very strange

man to learn about.

And so what I always think of him for is that

he was a manic depressive and he was an academic and then he got thrown into the Civil War.

And everybody knows that the march through Georgia, you know, made his name really, or I know you've argued that Shiloh as well.

But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about either about where his name was made

and then what his gifts were.

And then

my big curiosity is,

and maybe I'm the only one that thinks that, is it seems weird to me that Ulysses S.

Grant became president and yet Sherman did not become a president.

And so I find that a curious thing because Sherman seems like he did a lot to win and Grant did a lot that was

won eventually, but it was kind of disastrous in the particular battles for him.

He lost lots and lots of men.

And yet at the end of it all, Grant was elected to the presidency and yet Sherman was not.

So I've always wondered about that.

Sherman knew that he was psychologically unfit to be president.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what he thought he was.

I don't think he's quite an academic.

He was ahead of what became LSU.

and he was a pragmatic administrator that took that on.

You know, the thing I remember about those guys is I think Sherman was 41 and Grant was 39 or 40 when only two years separate him at the academy, but I'm getting at they were very young men when the Civil War started, and they were very similar in that

they had certain attributes that were underappreciated in peace and certain attributes that were very rare in war.

So before the war started,

they were failures.

And

Grant, I'm not saying he's bipolar, but he had moods of despair.

He was very quiet, withdrawn, very capable, but he had 16 or 17 different jobs in Galena, Illinois.

And Sherman was even a greater failure.

And he started out quite brilliantly as a banker after he left.

the Army for a while in San Francisco and then the bank collapsed due to no fault of his own and then he he honored the debts of people who had lost their fortune based on his investment strategy.

And he tried to be almost anything.

And then the war came along.

And all of the grandees who had played by the rules and had made political connections,

and we know their names, Burnside and Pope, McClellan,

et cetera, et cetera, they turned out to be mediocrities.

And then by 1862 at Shiloh,

Grant had been very successful at Fort Henry and Donaldson.

He was in command.

He almost lost it because he was surprised.

But people like Sherman, who had been declared crazy because he said something that was quite prescient, that we're probably going to lose 300,000, 400,000 people winning this war.

And it's going to take four or five years.

And people just were aghast that he said that.

He'd been very heroic at the first Battle of Bull Run.

But he got a second chance at Shiloh

as a brigadier general or second lieutenant general, and he held firm on the right wing and he did not collapse.

And he had his horse shot out.

He was wounded in the hand.

He got shot in his shoulder strap.

And when he woke up, he was declared a hero.

And Grant was declared the goat because Grant had been surprised.

And Grant supposedly had been drinking up on the Tennessee.

River and Grant had ordered Lew Walls to go supposedly in the wrong direction, vice versa.

They argued about it.

And then Sherman did a brilliant thing.

He said, you know, Grant gave me the opportunity to be here at Shiloh when they were saying I was crazy.

So now they're saving his crazy and I'm going to stand by him.

I'm the national hero and I understand that he has administrative abilities that I don't have.

I'm a maverick and I'm predictable.

So

he

stood by him when the country attacked them and then Grant and Sherman became the new twin generals.

And before long, Sherman was in charge, Grant was in charge of all armies of the Union, and in particular in the East Coast.

De facto, you know, the head of the Army of the Potomac, although Meade probably had operational control.

And Sherman was given the Army of the West.

And it turned out that although they had very different ideas about war, they were complementary.

In other words,

Grant was a Klauswitzian,

and he felt that the enormous manpower and economic advantages of the North would wear down Robert E.

Lee.

But what he didn't understand is that when crazy Robert E.

Lee did not cross into Maryland or Pennsylvania, as he did say at Gettysburg, but he was on the defensive, he was even smarter than he was

than on the offensive.

And when he was out in front of Richmond in that terrible summer of 1864, the war between the capitals, Grant lost 100,000 casualties at, you know,

nightmarish places,

cold harbor and places.

And he never did take Richmond.

And meanwhile, this visionary Sherman says, you know, I'm not a Klauswitzian,

that you destroy an army not in the field, but in the culture that produces the army.

You cut the roots out of a tree and then the fruit falls.

You don't pick all the fruit.

And so he took off in Tennessee.

He went to Atlanta and he knew, and he was a political general in the sense that he thought no one is giving Lincoln the

victories.

Grant can't do it.

It's going to win the election because if he doesn't, we're going to have McClellan and the Copperheads win and

we're going to have a negotiated peace and that's the end of the United States.

So I got to get down to Atlanta and take that crown jewel of the South.

And he did.

September 2nd, he wrote a nice telegram, Atlanta is ours and fairly won.

And that was the end of McClellan.

And Lincoln would be, and then everybody said, Well, you did your great duty, Sherman, and now we've got rail connections and we'll have you come back.

But be careful, you're in the middle of the South.

And he basically said, Be careful.

This is where I want to be.

I'm right in the underbelly of the enemy.

And I've got 60,000 men, and they're from Minnesota, and Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Ohio, and they're farmers.

They're not industrial people.

They're not urban people.

They know how to camp out.

And it's nice fall weather and the crops are in in the south and I'm going to create a 50-mile swath all the way to Savannah, Georgia.

Well, he didn't tell anybody where he was going to go.

So he takes off with his army and psychologically, he starts to destroy the fabric of the south.

He starts to destroy railroads and armories and Confederate buildings and he and he burns down plantations and he frees slaves, but

he doesn't kill people.

He doesn't destroy the infrastructure of the middle class to the extent there is any middle class in the South.

He doesn't go after poor.

He says that 97%, 95% of these people didn't own slaves.

So they have to be persuaded that their leadership is bankrupt, the cavalier class.

And then when he gets to Savannah in December, they think, wow.

They see him, you know, Lincoln comes off in his ship and meets him.

Grant does now, you're done.

No, I'm not done.

I'm going through the Carolina.

No, you can't go through the Carolinas.

It's winter.

It's muddy.

It's overgrown.

And he says, I'll Corduroy Road.

So he takes this wonderful army and he plows up right behind.

When he comes out in the spring, he's right behind Robert E.

Lee.

And Robert E.

Lee surrenders.

And then

Sherman gives Grant most of the credit.

And the two of them were the perfect bookends.

And it turned out that the South, who kept bragging that they had these brilliant West Point graduates that they, you know, sort of hijacked from West Point.

They didn't.

They had about three smart people that were, they had Robert E.

Lee, and they had Longstreet, and they had Stonewall Jackson.

Wall Street was wounded for a long time.

Jackson was killed.

And Robert E.

Lee was not an offensive commander that was very adroit.

And it turned out that

in the case of the Union, once you got rid of, you went through these mediocrities, these political generals, and you got rid of Hooker and Pope and Burnside and McClellan.

And you got down to about three or four people, i.e., Sherman and Grant and Sheridan and Thomas.

Then you had the four best commanders in the entire war.

And you had all that material.

But it took him a long time, 350,000 dead to get there.

So he was, and then he didn't want to be president.

He didn't like politics.

He didn't need to be president because his brother, John Sherman, was the author of, you know, the very famous Sherman Antitrust Act,

senior city senator, and protected him.

And he was married to a woman who was his actual step.

He was orphaned, and she, their family, adopted the E-Wing family, and she was well-connected and wealthy.

And so, in his way of thinking, he wanted to be a commentator, and he wanted to be

a public figure to remind people

what had caused the war and how it was dealt with.

He saw through the whole southern chauvinism about

we're a superior agrarian class or

we're much braver than you are.

And how he solved that was he said, you're not braver than people from Minnesota and Michigan.

It's hell and cold up there and they camp out and they never seen a black man in their life and yet they're willing to come down here and free them.

And they don't believe in slavery.

They believe in doing their own work and there's a middle class.

And when I unleash these guys on you,

and he really kind of focused on Wade Hampton and that Calvary, huge plantation aristocracies, which he just despised.

After the war, though, people liked him because

he wasn't a vengeful person.

He was,

I think he was probably the most brilliant American general we've ever had.

If you look and read his memoirs very carefully, they're not as well written as Grant's.

Grant was a Caesarean stylist, just brilliant.

But, God, the insights in them are incredible.

And he has a series of letters with John Bell Hood that are really a tutorial about war is about when he was outside of Atlanta.

I like that, though.

He was a visionary and not a politician.

I think a visionary would have a hard time being a politician now that you talk about it.

He didn't want to be a politician.

He hated them.

Yeah.

So I wanted then if we could move on.

Oh, I want to remind your listeners that your website at victorhanson.com and that you do the traditionalist and the classicist for the Victor Davis Hansen podcast show

with Jack Fowler.

And you're also available on social media at Facebook at V D Hansen's Cup and then on Twitter at V D Hansen and

Parlor at Victor Davis Hansen.

So that's where you can find Victor.

And then your new book is The Dying Citizen.

And I know you've been talking a lot about it.

So we'll move on to another book, which is

Homer's Odyssey.

And I wanted to read a quote for you from the book or read part of it.

And I have it in prose.

I wish I had it in the poetic verse, but it's a moment in book five where Odysseus has

been let go by Calypso, who does it reluctantly as Zeus tells her she has to to let him go.

And he's out on a raft that he's fashioned himself.

And the details of how he fashions the raft is fairly interesting as well in the Odyssey.

But Eno, who is the daughter of Cadmus and a favored of

the gods now, as the book says.

And I like too that they call her Eno the fair ankled, which is an interesting epitaph.

But here, she's told him, get off your raft.

It's, you know, it's taken a beating out here on the water and, you know, swim for the shoreline over there.

And Odysseus thinks this, right?

And I'm going to start reading from the Odyssey here.

It says, then the much enduring

goodly Odysseus pondered.

And deeply moved, he spoke to

his own mighty spirit.

Woe is me let it not be that someone of the immortals is again weaving a snare for me that she bids me leave leave my raft no

but truly i will not yet obey for afar off my mine eyes beheld the land where she said i was to escape but this i will do

And I think it's the best.

As long as the timbers hold firm in their fastenings, so long will I remain here and endure to suffer affliction.

But when the wave shall have shattered the raft to pieces, I will swim, seeing that there is not better to devise.

And that's the end of the quote.

And what I always found fascinating here is that

not just here, but in many of the passages up to this point, he's rethinking what the gods tell him to do.

And I think that's one of the significant things about the character of Odysseus, if I'm not wrong.

I know he's clever, as they say, in the Odyssey.

And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what Homer is, what the

motif is there to have

Odysseus rethinking what the gods have told him.

Well, remember, the Odyssey is the second in the two extant epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It's about the

flashback that Odysseus Odysseus relates, how he wandered from Troy in the 10th year after the victory and how he got home.

But

it's composed around 700, 680 BC, we think, composed orally.

And this coincides with the rise of the Greek city-state.

And it's not the Dark Ages, it's not the Mycenaean period.

And this is a new type of man, a citizen.

And people are starting to form constitutional states at Thebes, and Argos, and Sparta, and Athens, Corinth, etc.

And they're very religious people.

But the Odyssey,

although he is an aristocrat, he's not a well-born aristocrat in this quite the sense of Agamemnon, most kingly of men, Homer tells us, or Achilles.

And he's not the strongest person, the best warrior like

Ajax or Diomedes or Achilles.

So what makes him survive when Agamemnon comes home and is murdered by Clytemnestra or Achilles is eventually going to be killed by Paris or Ajax is going to commit suicide or they're all going to end up poorly.

This is kind of, I think, the historical echo of the end of the Mycenaean world as it was filtered through 400 years of the dark ages and then finally committed to riding with the with the emergency of the deeps with the of the um

city-state and homer would then would be the last of that oral tradition because he happened to be lucky or unfortunate enough to live when writing came into prominence but nevertheless he represents this idea that now we can do what we want we don't have to be well-born we don't have to be great warriors we don't have to

to have a lot of money.

We're men of the city-state.

We've created a constitutional system.

We've created our own destiny.

And yes, we honor the gods, but we don't think they're necessarily greater than we are.

This is the beginning of rationalism and reason.

The pre-Socratic movement coincides with this.

Lyric poets will follow very quickly.

And so Homer is trying to tell us in this later epic that there's a big world outside the battlefield of Troy and the skills necessary to succeed in it.

are daring, imagination, lying, conniving, persuasion, not just your spear, your right hand and your spear, or not a long, long epithet about who your father was.

So it's very exciting when he takes on conventional wisdom and he's not afraid of the gods

and he makes his own decisions and then he outlines how he's going to live by them if they don't work out well.

So it's a new idea in this very nascent Western tradition that almost from the very beginning though, Western man is going to be a highly individual, highly independent

Steppenwolf, as it is.

He's not going to depend on a traditional gallery of gods to get him home, or he's not going to

have to have a title or a huge muscle.

He's going to outsmart people.

And

he's every man in a way.

Yeah, and isn't he

saying, too, that it seems to me saying that he's going to approach it with his own reason rather than listening to the gods

man's unique skill unique ability even homer seems to have that is that we're rational beings and we can make calls on our own right he also understands moderation he knows how to

uh ignore wrong advice from a deity without offending the deity.

He knows that he's got to get out of Calypso's island or get away from Circe, but not in a way that humiliates them.

Or he knows how to to kill Polyphemus, but not in a way that he won't brag until he does it.

And

so he's using muscle and intellect, and he's got all of these different skills.

And he's the only one that could have done what he did.

And when he gets back to

Ithaca, no other hero on the field of Troy would have disguised himself as a beggar and then try to be

endured that humiliation just to seek his revenge and achieve it.

But

he's not an aristocrat with certain confining perceptions of himself.

He's the first modern character in Western literature, and it's kind of odd that he's at the very beginning of the very system that's introduced to us at the beginning of the West and the Iliad, he kind of confounds.

Yeah, he seems a little bit moody, too.

If you read, not just when he's on Calypso's Island, where he cries at night.

No, wait, he cries during the day and he sleeps with Calypso at night.

But when he gets to the Fikians, he kind of sits out the games and he's, you know, kind of mutters that these guys are, you know, young upstarts who have never been at war and he's got more important things to think about than their silly games.

And yet he participates in them anyway, right?

He gets goaded into it.

But he seems, and that's kind of why, you know i i sort of like the character paralleled with sherman because sherman too seemed like he was um somewhat moody um in his work you know he's a both of these guys are very confident in their own abilities and they're critics of the existing status quo so

i mean achilles

has concubines and he's not really interested in having a nuclear family.

Agamemnon will be killed by his wife, who's an adultess in the way that he's been gone and has concubines.

Menelaus can't handle Helen, but this man has a very loyal wife who's smart as he is.

And part of the story is that he's going to get back to the nuclear family in a way that no other people are doing.

And he understands that the bedrock of civilization are going to be his wife, his household, his father, Laertes, and his son Telemachus.

And he's not going to endanger that.

So

he'll do what he has to do,

whether it's be promiscuous or obey the sexual desires of a goddess or

try to lead some pretty raucous soldiers.

But in the end,

he alone will get home and he will perpetuate

Greek culture, Hellenism, on the island of Ithaca in the way that the others just are not fit for this new world.

And that was what the, you know, 200 years later, 250 years later,

the playwright Sophocles understood that.

So he took a little different, as an aristocrat, he took a little different take.

And so his heroes tend to be people like Philoctetes or Antigone

or Ajax that are men that have a code that can't fit into the new world of Apollos, whereas

Odysseus could, but he loses something in the process.

And that's

Bernard Knox, a great classicist, he really outlined that idea of Sophocle and tragedy as the tragic hero that just won't compromise.

And that Odysseus tends to be so often in Greek tragedy the villain because he's so manipulative and he's so modern.

Yeah.

And what book, so the listeners can know, did Bernard Knox write on the tragedies, the tragic hero?

Yeah.

Do you remember the name of it?

I'm sorry.

I think it's the heroic temper, but I'll look at that and check it.

I didn't know him well, but I knew him pretty well.

And

I had occasions to talk to him a couple of times about his work.

You remember he was best known for

the oldest, dead, I think, white European males that he wrote about.

That was an essay about how we were, it was in the 90s, about

how we had missed the boat, so to speak, in this politically correct age that he was, you know, he was elderly and all of his work ended up in a time when people were attacking people because of the race and gender rather than their ideas.

He was trying to remind people

about how great this classical legacy was.

But this heroic temper, and I'll check it when we're over, it was an early book in his career.

You know,

it was written, I think, in his late 40s or 50s.

He was a head of the Hellenic Center in Washington for years, but it was a brilliant book about

a lot.

It focused a lot on Sophocles and about

this image of these older Athenian generation that had won at Marathon

and what had happened to them.

And

I would urge readers to look at it.

It was a brilliant, he was a war hero.

He was British SOS, I think.

Yeah,

not SOS, but you know, OS, not American OSS, but he was in the British British overseas

commando units, dropped into Greece.

And he's a very heroic guy,

very modest, too.

So it's a brilliant book.

And

it's all about the Sophoclean temper.

Yeah, I think that those things that you just said about both Odysseus and William Tecumseh Sherman, that they did what they had to do, and they did it with moderation and humility and to get things done, to get to change the way the world is.

And I think that we're seeing that now with these

individuals who are coming up against the deep state or teachers unions, et cetera.

A lot of people are, and I think you put it as

doing what they can according to their station.

And with moderation and humility, I was really impressed with that young man whose daughter had been raped in the bathroom.

When he came on to Fox News, he was in, in fact, very modest and

a lot of humility.

And I think we're starting to see people rise up now to make change in this world.

So, and I wanted to say that because I felt like with the news portion of this podcast,

we ended on a bad note.

note, but I think more often than not, you're ending on a good note these days because we are seeing so many characters that are, according to their station, doing what needs to be done, and they're doing it with moderation and humility.

The great strength of this country has always been

the middling classes and people

who are competent and not bureaucratic and they're not interested in their status or their position or their influence.

Not that humans are not all interested in that, but what I'm getting at is

we have a lot of journalistic accounts of people who saw Grant and Shiloh, and Grant and Sherman at Shiloh, and Sherman on the March to the Sea, and they did not think they were generals.

Their uniforms were dirty.

Even when Grant met Lee at Appomattox, he looked pretty raunchy compared to the splendor of Lee, even though he was a victorious general.

And so when I see our generals and they have these huge

chest medals, and I asked myself when I saw General Milley, well, that one was for what?

The brilliant victory in Libya, or we won Syria, or the devastating defeat that the Taliban suffered in that campaign.

But when you looked at Sherman's, there was nothing there, nothing.

He was just dressed as a private.

And he was, you know, he didn't shave sometimes, but, and he was chewed on these cigars and he just, as did Grant, but he would just get right to the point.

And he had, there was no artifice about him.

Not that you can have a nation of people like that,

but my God, you need some people that go to the school board meeting and are willing to take on these pretentious school board members who think that because

they were elected to the school board, therefore they're regal or monarchs, and they can do what they want without the citizens who elected them having any input.

And this idea that, you know, that

everybody who Sherman came in contact in Washington, especially, I think, Secretary of War Stanton, anybody that was pretentious or said they were educated in a particular way or had a particular degree or were aristocratic in some sense, he was at war with.

And he was just lucky for himself and lucky for the nation that he found a kindred spirit, very different man, but very similar in a way to Grant.

But in a way,

Grant had some moral weaknesses.

He He was too trusting and he was not worldly like Sherman was.

Sherman didn't like reporters.

Sherman didn't

like

business people who followed the armies.

He didn't like defense contractors.

He just didn't trust them.

Whereas Grant was impressed later in life, unfortunately, by people with money and prestige, Julia Grant in particular.

But Sherman was just...

a very strange guy and I think in this age of conformity and homogeneity we've lost something because when I listen to these generals, I don't know what they're talking about.

They use this vocabulary and these numerals and acronyms and abbreviations, and nobody knows what they're talking about.

It's not English.

And I don't know why they talk in such obscurity because they're not necessarily successful.

So I wish that we would go back to that populist tradition.

You look at the great generals of World War II and admirals, and you look where Bradley came from, or Eisenhower, or

you look at

Chester Nimitz.

They all came from the Midwest, and they were all people that were not necessarily wealthy.

Patton was an aristocrat.

He's different.

But

that was the place that created all our great inventors, our great presidents.

you know, the Lincolns and people like that.

And so somehow we've forgotten that.

And

if anything comes out of this conundrum we're in, I think it's going to be a reappreciation that

what's going to keep this country going are people willing to go to a board meeting and tell some EDD that they're not necessarily impressed or someone to, you know,

tell Pete Buttigig that he should either resign or get back to work.

What is it?

You know, he took off two and a half months for so his husband could they could have had two children.

Okay, I understand that, but there's waitresses with five kids that can't do that

and his job is to give up four years of his life to make sure the transportation industry and the transport of essential goods get there on time and he can't take time off like that in a way that other people cannot and they're going to suffer because he did

And I'm not saying he had the ability anyway to solve the problem.

I don't think he did.

So it might have been better he wasn't on a job, but it was a completely empty suit.

He was a mayor of a small town whose claim to fame was he went over to Afghanistan, he was a veteran, and then he was glib on the debate stage for about two months.

But take that away from him, and there's it's hard to see why he was prepared to be in charge of all transportation in the United States.

We definitely need some new men or women in this world that are willing to stand up for things that are obvious and true and real and not all ideology.

Victor, we need to bring this to a close here.

Did you have any final words to say to your listeners today?

I would say something about, I wrote The Dying Citizen.

I didn't think it would have applicability

to the current events as the way it did.

But if you're worried about the border and 2 million people scheduled across, or you're worried about the non-enforcement of the law, or you're worried about this effort to destroy the Electoral college or the filibuster or you're worried uh about critical race theory and the non-enforcement of statutes i i discuss all of that in a in a historical cultural context and then the book was done right when we had uh the first month or two of the biden administration so i have a very long epilogue trying to show how current events

are reflected in the long historical explanations of why citizenship was necessary and why it's being destroyed and why that destruction leads to what we're seeing today.

But I had no idea that when the book actually came out,

I thought that it might, there might be a secession.

It would cease for a while.

That's what I'm trying to say.

I didn't think it would increase.

Nobody in their right mind thought the Americans wouldn't have stuff on their shelves or

after we had fracking revolution that we'd have $5 a gallon gas.

So that was, I think it's going to be a timely book.

And then when we we talk about all these things, the deep state, the administrative state, that book came out on October 5th, and it was number three on Amazon.

And the next day, it was frozen.

In other words, it just said out of stock, soon in stock.

And it stayed that way for 12 days.

I mean, there were no reviews, basically.

There was a little bit dribbled out, but the publisher showed me the figures and they had sent 30,000 copies to Amazon and the eventuality that it would sell well.

So that first week when I was in New York and you know doing nine, 10, 11 media events a day from six in the morning until nine at night, you couldn't buy a book.

And the odd thing was that although it was rated, I think, three at the end of the first day, Amazon and other booksellers, they don't calibrate a sale until it's shipped.

You can see why if somebody buys it and orders it, and then three days later it says, cancel that order, that's not a book sale.

so it doesn't really count until the book is shipped.

Well, if you're out of stock, you're not shipping, so even though the book was being ordered by a lot of people,

it had no rating, it was just inert.

I know that the New York Times

bestseller list, it's on there, but if you look at Amazon, you'd go on to a Fox Prime Time show, and it would go from you know, from two or three down to 20, even though the more media and more books that were being sold, the less the perception, which raises finally whether I'm a paranoid schizophrenic or something and think that

this was by pre-design or it's just the chain of supply

or incompetence.

But I will tell you that there was a lot of interest in the book, that the book publisher, Basic Books, anticipated that.

And that although Amazon sells a great majority of books, they had thousands of copies in their possession.

And on the second day the book was released they just told all potential buyers that it was out of stock or soon to be in stock and today as i speaking it's it was one day in stock and now it's out of stock again

and the

number of books that have been shipped is a small fraction of the number of books that have been bought and this did not happen to the other 20 books in the top 20.

And this is a long exegesis by saying to, but to anybody who wants to read a book, I think it'll make sense of the senselessness of today.

And

don't be discouraged that you can't get it on Amazon.

They have it there, but they probably won't ship it to you very prime.

You can get it at Barnes and Noble.

You can go to a bookstore, I hope.

I think Target and Walmart are sold out, but who knows what Amazon chooses to do.

Maybe after all of the initial media and all the attention that a new book gets is over with, they'll finally just shrug and say, okay, you can buy it now.

And the minimum will be gone.

I I hope not, but maybe that maybe that's their attitude.

I don't think you're, did you say paranoid schizophrenic?

I don't think you're paranoid schizophrenic, but Amazon is probably messing with you.

So we'll just leave it at that.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.