The Classicist: Dealing with Chaos

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Fanson Show, The Classicist.
We are recording on Monday, July 26th in the year 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the director of the Center for Civil Society at AmericanPhilanthropic.com.

I'm the host of the show, but the man who the show is named after is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis Hansen is a best-selling author. His last two books, one was The Case for Trump, and the other was The Second World Wars, both big bestsellers.

The forthcoming book is destined to be the same. That's The Dying Citizen.
How are you going to find out about that book? Go to victorhansen.com, private papers, Victor's website.

And on the classicist, we tend to talk about things California and the original material that Victor writes for his website. But you'll find a link for The Dying Citizen there.

Click on it, order the book. It's out in the first week of October, but make sure you get it that week.
Victor, today, we're going to talk about California.

We'll talk about the forthcoming recall election. We'll talk about some of your American greatness essays.

And then if we have time, you've got a sweet piece you've written about your owl friends on your family farm. But let's get to that right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show, the classicist. Victor, let's jump into local politics.
And California is a pretty big locality.

This is of great importance, not only to you as a resident, to the rest of the citizens, but I think to the nation too. We have a recall coming up in a few weeks, but there's a new poll out.

from KRON, and it's about your favorite governor, Gavin Newsom. Here's what it says.

An exclusive inside California Politics Emerson College poll found that Californians are split when it comes to Governor Gavin Newsom's performance as the recall election nears.

It's a poll of a thousand registered voters. Margin of error is about 3%,

which shows while Californians support keeping Governor Newsom in office despite the recall campaign against him, more than half think it's time for some new leadership in 2022.

The actual numbers on the recall seems 43% of those polled want him recalled. 48%

would vote to keep Newsom. So he's under 50% now.

And the poll also says that time for someone new, 58%.

Victor, it's coming up close. I think if people are betting, they still might bet that Newsom is going to pull this out, which means two votes, which means he prevails on the recall.

And if he he doesn't prevail on the recall, there's a second vote. And the person who prevailed on that would become the new governor.

Vichter, what's your political gut tell you about this upcoming vote? It's closer than it should be.

And I say should be because we're in a state that currently has not a single statewide Republican office holder or supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.

I think we only have 11 or 12 of the 53 congressional seats. And of course, we have Gavin Newsom.
So this is

the bluest of the blue states. And the way this is set up, Jack, is it's a weird thing.

You go to the polls, and we don't really use that term anymore, your mail-in harvested ballot, and you're asked two questions. Do you or not recall Gavin Newsom? And it used to be only about 38%.

Now it's up to 43 and 44 and climbing, especially as his braggadaccio about how well he handled the COVID crisis seems belied by

these hotspots. And then, second, who would you vote for? Now, the second question won't apply if there's not a majority of 51%, 50.1%

to get rid of him. But if that happens, he had a second chance because there's about, I don't know, 45 candidates and the vast majority of them are Republicans.
And they're kind of well known.

John Cox ran again. We all love Larry Elder.

He just got back on the ballot that folkoner guy was san diego's mayor there's caitlin jenner no need to apply we got an assemblyman kai so they're kind of guaranteed to split the vote i think larry elder has about 16 percent but the democrats are completely obscure and that's not a majority the second question so if you say

i want to recall Gavin Newsom, and I think you can vote for him again, and they'll split the vote. So he could be recalled and re-elected.
No, I don't think

you're going to. Yeah, I don't think he's allowed on the second unit.

Well, if that's not true, then it's still going to be bad because they're going to split, all these people are going to split the vote. But the nice thing about the second question is

you don't need a majority.

So a person could win. That's what I wanted to say.
You could win with 16 or 17 percent in theory. And that may happen.

But the reason people are angry about him is that we've had a catastrophic, perfect storm of events.

We're in a drought, and he has not built a reservoir, even though money was appropriated to build two of them on a bond. He has not fixed the aqueduct.

He did not fix the delta bypass with the peripheral canal. He did not give us any more water storage.

In fact, we all remember our dams almost collapsing three years ago from this wet year as all the water went out to the ocean. And then we've had these terrible forest fires.

Last year, we're right now as we speak, the Sierra is under a fire assault again, and 60 million trees died in the drought. He would not allow them to be taken out.

So he was blamed for creating what was, in effect, green napalm. And then in addition to that, you can't drive anywhere in California and estimate when you're going to arrive.

It's all under construction. It's not under new construction in the sense that they're not making new freeways that haven't changed since 1960.

They're just fixing decrepit and dangerous lanes of a freeway so it slows down traffic. It's very dangerous.
And it's all in a backdrop of a $10 billion debacle of high-speed rail.

It looks like, as I said, a graffiti version of Stonehenge, where you see the unused and half-built bridges. And so all of these are also juxtaposed with the highest gas taxes in the United States.

I think we're third in sales tax. We now have the highest income tax rate, 13.3.

And

don't have the highest property tax rates but we have the highest assessments so people are paying an exorbitant amount of property tax and when they look at all this they say wow

the whole state infrastructure shot well we used to have great schools no we're rated about 40th in the country on the basis of the tax score hmm well

illegal immigration is just problem well no it's 27 percent of the california population was not born in the united states and that can have effects on the highway when people are not used to our traffic system.

And it's not good anyway, the infrastructure. And then they say, why is one-third of all welfare recipients suddenly in California?

Or why is 22% of the population of the wealthiest state by GDP in the country below the poverty line? And why are half the nations homeless? in California.

What happened to San Francisco, Venice Beach, places like Stockton? So it's all a complete failure.

And then when they look to him for leadership, they see a spoiled, entitled Bay Area politician, no different than Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, multi-millionaire, always talking about diversity, always talking about the other, while their entire lives are one of white privilege and exclusivity, prep schools, etc.

And when you finally add into this dismal mix the fact that while he pontificated about the lockdown and quarantine, he was caught at the wealthiest, most expensive restaurant crowd in the country at the French laundry.

And so there's a chance that even in this state, he could lose if people go to the polls and get angry.

A lot of the Hispanic population, which is 45% of the general population, about 40, 35% of the electorate, quietly, privately don't like him.

He shut down private businesses and entrepreneurial first-generation shopkeepers. And he did it in a very arrogant way.
And we have the highest kilowatt cost, except for Hawaii in the nation.

We have the highest fuel cost. It's almost $5 a gallon when you get out of the Central Valley.
And we have the highest housing costs. And they're saying it's not a good deal.
And he did it.

He didn't do it. He's just a representation or an icon or an emblem of the system that he supports that did it.
But I hope he takes the blame.

Well, Victor, one other thing about California briefly, there was a Supreme Court decision called Americans for Prosperity v.

Banta, and it was a very important First Amendment ruling and also about our rights to association, which are also part of the First Amendment.

And a quick background is that the state of California passed the law about 10 years or so ago, started to enact it.

What they were trying to get at, the Attorney General's office, was trying to get the names of donors because it wanted to police, assuming that

there would be violations of expenditures under tax laws, under 501c3, tax exemptions, we need to have these names in advance so we can better police.

This worked its way up to, of course, the notorious 9th District Court, which sided with the Attorney General, a string of attorney generals, including our current vice president. But the U.S.

Supreme Court ruled in June,

excuse me, July, early July, on a 6-3 decision. It was a very big victory for, again, for the First Amendment, but it was also another black eye for California's progressive politics.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, remember how this new progressive,

it's not that new, but this new progressive fusion of the media, the administrative state, the bureaucratic state, and the left-wing takeover the Democratic Party work,

they do not have 51%

support on any of their major issues.

And they rule the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, professional sports, entertainment, academia, K through 12, the foundations, on the principle of terror.

And that is they go after people, they cancel them, they ostracize them, they show up outside their homes, and most people, being human, would rather not put up for that and so they acquiesce.

So they need the names, the addresses, the information about anybody who gives to any project or candidate or cause other than their approved list because basically they're Stalinists and that's how they operate.

And one thing that Donald Trump did that he doesn't give credit for is that

in terms of the federal courts at least, these things are either found in the federal courts and they come up eventually on appeal to them, that he's really changed the makeup of the federal court.

So for the first time in a generation, there is a chance, and we're starting to see it in the Ninth Circuit, there's a chance that the average citizen will get a fair hearing in a federal appeals court.

Victor, let's talk now about your American Greatness pieces. You have two essays.
Actually, you write two pieces a week, but we've jumbled our schedule a little bit, you and I, of late.

So I'd like to talk about the last two essays you've written. The earlier one is called The American Descent into Madness.

The subheadline is America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did it happen?

Let me just quickly read here, Victor, one of the initial paragraphs in which you wrote. Again, this is on American greatness.

I want to encourage our listeners to go to the website and read the essays. You wrote, Victor, in the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America.

Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals.
One, the events are unsustainable.

They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless.

Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them. Victor, would you expand upon this exceptional piece you've written?

Expand upon the reason why America is going through a descent into madness.

Well, I'd like to hear from our listeners next time. Maybe they can write in

what's going on. Is this a pre-planned, deliberate effort to ruin the economy? Or is it just flights of insanity? But it's not logical.

Why would you take, for example, the fossil fuel industry, but especially clean burning natural gas and oil, and cut the production by 20% of oil, take one example, when we know that that gives us high-paying jobs, it lowers the price of transportation.

fuel for the middle and lower classes, it gives us impunity from the Middle East, and we don't have to go into that God-forsaken place anymore, quote-unquote, no blood for oil, as the left used to say.

Why would you endanger it? It's an earner, a foreign exchange when we export some of it.

It's a win-win-win-win.

And yet we're destroying it.

Why would you take a border that was closed to illegal immigration, that had a wall that was paid for and was going to be paid for in the next budget, and would allow you to pick and choose.

If you want to say say, we want most people coming from Mexico, you would say, okay, we're going to have people come legally from Mexico. I have no problem with that.

But why would you destroy that system and let in an anticipated 2 million people

in the next 12 months at a time of a pandemic when you're going around door to door forcing people or asking them or coercing them or begging them or besieging them to get a vaccination when these newcomers will not be tested?

And surely they're not vaccinated why would you do that and why

why would you take a multiracial democracy that just four years ago three years ago saw the lowest unemployment of non-white minorities in its history below 5.5 5 percent of african american lower for latino employment and we were really working again on assimilation integration intermarriage why would you destroy that and suddenly unleash this critical race theory, defund the police that leads to an epidemic of crime, racial animosity, tribalism?

Why would you restore that? You say, oh, yes, they want power. Yeah, that's true, but it's chaos.

And when you look at homelessness, there's places that I remember in my youth, they don't exist any longer. Venice Beach doesn't exist.

You cannot go to Venice Beach and walk as you used without the smell of excretement

or watching people shoot up drugs or being assaulted. You can't go in parts of San Francisco.

There's whole streets in Fresno of all places that have been taken over by people who are exempt from the law. So, what I'm getting at is that this doesn't make any sense.

And why, when you have a year and a half of a pent-up population who hasn't gone to the movies, who hasn't gone out to eat, who hasn't been on a plane, who hasn't had a cross-country car ride, or hasn't been out with friends, and now suddenly the lockdowns are, until the recent variant, at least they were evaporating, and you have this huge pin-up demand from everything from new trucks and new cars and dryers and washers and going out to eat.

Why would you then pay people another $300 supplement? to stay home.

And in some cases, people can get almost $50,000 in some states with federal subsidies for not participating and i can tell you it hits home to every one of us this new inflationary spiral if i go in and i want to buy something in home depot the prices for lumber and building materials are obscene if i'm getting an estimate from a roofer the price is obscene if i'm getting an estimate from granite to be poured on my driveway the price is obscene and if the painter says, Victor, I will paint your house in May, then he calls up, I can't do it.

I cannot get people to work. They want cash.
And they only want to work on the books for three or four hours. And that's replicated nationwide everywhere.
Why would you do that?

It's not in your interest to do that. And so I don't know what's behind it.
Is it just collective insanity? Is it we want to bring, we're going to pull down the temple upon us? Is it all an accident?

I have my suspicions, but I haven't seen anything like it. Barack Obama didn't do this

and Bill Clinton didn't do this. Jimmy Carter did some of it, but he was inept.
But this is nihilistic, destructive. This is anarchy.
So some Marxists. I mean, let's starve our populations.

That's nihilistic. But it was a tool, a tool of the political class who seemed to enjoy that.
Victor, it's a great piece. And you've mentioned wanting to get our listeners' thoughts on it.

Let me suggest that if you do want to do such folks, of course, read the piece at American Greatness on Victor's website, victorhanson.com.

You can also find a link to the piece, and there's a comment section there.

And feel free to leave comments, and maybe we'll look at them during the week and revisit this on the next episode of the classicist.

So, Victor, we have another essay you've written for American Greatness, and this is the most recent one. It's called China's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Fear.

You wrote the subhead here is the current Chinese co-prosperity fear is as dangerous, but also as vulnerable as its failed Japanese predecessor.

I'm not sure everyone who's a listener may indeed be all that clear about,

I like to think they would be, but about the Japanese co-prosperity fear predates the Second World War.

Victor, would you give us a little history lesson on that, how China is trying to mimic that, and why China may fall short on its efforts along those same lines.

Well, the general consensus is one of despair right now because people look at two sets of data.

They look at ours and they look at the number of engineers in school or they look at the test scores on average of K through 12 students or they look at debt or annual deficits and then they juxtapose that with China and they say the Chinese trajectory is inevitable.

And when we have various observers, I think everybody respects someone like, say, for example, David Goldman.

Spingler. Yeah.
Yeah, Spingler.

I mean, he's, I've been the object of his criticism, and sometimes it's been well-deserved from him because I just don't, I mean, very few people have his experience of finance and technology in Asia.

But when he is warning us and warning us in a very patriotic fashion, that when you look at fourth and fifth generation high-tech and you look at manufacturing of chips and where China's head it's very depressing and so why we're basically chasing our critical racial theory tails they're on the move and they have said in no uncertain terms that they feel that there's a co-prosperity sphere basically analogous to the Japanese in 1939 through 41 and that means that eventually Taiwan is going to go the way of Hong Kong they believe and that Japan and South Korea will be subservient to China and Australia and the only thing that's stopping that is either the conventional or nuclear forces and deterrence of the United States.

All of that is pessimistic. And I get pessimistic.
But there's some things to keep in perspective.

This is very similar to the 30s, the late 30s, when in terms of torpedoes or fighter aircraft or destroyers, two-engine bombers, that Japan, Germany, even Italy in some rare categories was superior to us, us being the Western democracy.

And we were coming out of the Depression. We had the New Deal.
We were a sort of neo-socialist. 25% of our industrial capacity was unused.
How could we ever fight those

brilliantly evil people that were so modern, modern architecture, modern buildings, rebuilt their economies, escaped the Great Depression in a way that we didn't, and yet within five years we utterly destroyed them because they were intrinsically weak.

They had commissar system. They were slaves to ideology rather than empiricism.
And they overreached. Okay, we know what China is doing with their belt and road.
That's their co-prosperity sphere.

And we know that they have contempt for us. They know that they interpret our magnanimity as weakness to be manipulated rather than reciprocated with similar forbearance.
Okay, but remember this.

I know that people have radical different ways of defining GDP, but by traditional GDP metrics, 330 million Americans outproduce 1.5 billion Chinese, and the ratio is about, their economy is about 65% the size of ours.

We

are completely energy independent and gas and oil, whether you, you know, you import it and you sell it, but whatever how metrics on that we are.

And we produce five times as much natural gas, I think three times as much oil for a population. that is about one-fifth the size of China.

If you look at ratings of education, the top 20 universities in the world, usually, whether it's from Japan or Britain or from the EU, I know everybody's a little bit chauvinistic, but you will see Americans, usually it's Caltech, MIT,

Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the major state multi-campus systems, UC system, Berkeley, et cetera, Texas, et cetera, Michigan, et cetera. Sometimes they have Duke.

and others there, not to mention the undergraduate system. There is not a single Chinese university in those ratings.

And then when you look at food production, there's a lot of different metrics there, export value, tonnage, particular crops, but we're roughly analogous.

That means that a country that has to feed 330 million people produces as much food as a country that has to support 1.5 billion mouths. I could go on, but you see what I'm getting?

Nuclear weapons, we're all worried about China's 100 hardened silos. I am.

They're building 100 silos that can house intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of 9,000 miles with multiple warheads. Okay.

Right now, as I speak, we have 20 times the nuclear arsenal that China does.

If you look at strategic neighborhoods, there's nobody in Latin America, South America, Central America, North America that is a hostile enemy with capable military.

that is either nuclear, strategic, or tactical. No, they don't exist.
Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, nothing. You look at China's neighborhood.

They've got nuclear India right next door, almost the same population.

They've got the wild-cord crazy Vladimir Putin, who has a historical enmity with China, nuclear, and has the world's most, the largest, I should say, I won't say sophisticated, but the largest nuclear arsenal.

Then you look at the wild card Pakistan, who's not necessarily happy with the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. Then they've got a nutty client like North Korea.

They've got a whole hotbed of unrest in Afghanistan. Then they have strong U.S.
allies, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, any of those four.

If we said tomorrow, you're in existential danger and the United States may not be able to protect you with its nuclear umbrella, they could become nuclear in 12 months.

They have the technology, they probably have the plutonium or they could acquire it. And I think in the case of Japan, they could make about 4,000 nukes in 12 months.

So this is what China is faced with. And I know that they're catching up and they're catching up at a rapid rate, but let's not become hysterical.

What we need to do is stop the wokeness, stop the internal cannibalization of our society and say, you know what, we've got a formidable rival.

It's just as formidable as we dealt with in World War II. And we must start improving our universities.
They've got to be depoliticized. They have to be meritocratic.

We have to start emphasizing far more electrical engineer, mathematicians, physics majors, and far less DASH studies, environmental, black, Chicano, gender, leisure studies, peace studies.

All those therapeutic majors are not going to do it for us. And we need a lot more vocational training.
So we've got to get our act together before it's too late.

But right now, we still have a very good chance of surviving this Chinese grab for world hegemony. Victor, I don't want to absolve any of our listeners from becoming readers of this particular piece.

Let me just read the very end of it, and then we'll move on to another piece you've written. You wrote, in truth, China is far weaker than the United States.

It should be politely reminded of that fact as the United States carefully recalibrates deterrence based on its superior military and economic strength, iron resolve, and confidence in its institutions.

All that will require a return of financial solvency, a renewed national unity, and appreciation of American singularity, a commitment to stop pontificating to the world while reducing the clout of the U.S.

military and an end to the politicization of the U.S. officer corps.
The current Chinese co-prosperity fear is as dangerous, but also as vulnerable as its failed Japanese predecessor.

Folks, you'll find the piece on AmericanGreatness.com. You'll also find a link to it off of victorhandsome.com.

And again, if you want to leave a comment, victorhandsome.com website is one, the place where you can do that. Speaking of comments, Victor, we have time for one more thing to discuss.

And I am on your website. You have a section here where you write occasional pieces.
You call it a child's garden of animals.

And I'm going to give away some of the praise for it before we actually talk about it.

Victor, here's Rick Sousa writes, I can't even begin to tell you how much I enjoy your stories of family, nature, and emotion that you share with us. Thank you.

James Cherry writes, Doc, I do enjoy reading your columns. You seem like one of the neighbors we'd all like to have.
Thanks. One more.
Lee Beecher, who I think is related to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Victor's narratives, sagacity, and passion remind me of Uncle Tom's cabin

by by his shirt tail, relative, wonderful. Victor, you've written about owls here.
This is a two-part series. I think it's very touching, it's very moving, beautifully written.

I'd like you to just address what you have written, but also what motivates you to want to recount these amber

stories, particularly from your youth. Well, I think everybody, when they get in their late 60s, I'm 67, starts to,

and that's a pathology of coming up to 70, I suppose, that you look as much back as you used to look only forward, the majority of your life. Let's face it, it was over.

And you start to see that,

I think if you're empirical, that a lot of the success that you've had came from other people. Maybe a lot of the failures were your own.

But I can't think of anything where I failed that I could blame on other people. I just couldn't do it.
Not because I'm virtuous, but because they had no role in my failure.

I've had a wonderful childhood, but I can look at my successes to the degree I've had any and say, you know what?

Every time I had to make a decision, ethical, financial, moral, economic, whatever, I can remember a voice talking to me and training me.

And I can remember going to a party with my mother and saying, when she dropped us off for a high school party and we ran out. And she picked us up in freshman year in high school.

Now, did you boys thank the hostess? Yeah, mom. We said to Jane, Janie, thanks.
She's not the hostess. She doesn't own the home.
She didn't pay for the food.

You go right back in there and you find Mr. and Mrs.
Smith. And then you look them in the eye and you shake their hands and you think you're honored to be invited for the hospitality of their home.

And that was the kind of stuff. And I got that not just from my parents, but from my grandparents and uncles and aunts.
So I feel like as you get older, you try to fathom what it was.

In the case of all these animals, it was a very natural world.

But I think I'm trying to suggest to people that to the degree that we can have the natural world in our life, especially at a young age, it will have lasting positive effects.

And there's a tragedy there. In the case of these barn owls, we had this barn that was built in 1870.
It's 150 years old and it has heart redwyn on it and they have splits in it.

And they had splits in it when I was a little boy, when it was only 60 years ago, and it was only, you know, 90 years old. But it was ancient then.

It was built by my great-great-grandmother's children, my great-great my great-great-grandparents

and my great-great-grandmother. And they'd built it with eucalyptus poles.
There was no wood. I had no money.
And

when I was a boy, all of the rodents, squirrels, gophers, etc.,

were,

I guess, patrolled, cleansed, killed, sanitized by barn owls. And they would be either inside this this old barn or they would hang.
And it was like a bat. It was very strange.

These monkey-faced, weird-looking creatures are almost surreal.

They would put their talons in the cracks, the dry cracks of the barn, and then hang from them or position themselves where you think they're looking at the barn, but it's almost like they have a 360-degree swivel head.

They were viewing everything. And then every once in a while, they couldn't get out.
Their landing gear would get stuck.

And you never saw them because they were nocturnal and then you would go down and and you'd see them and i'd run down to my grandparents and my mother and said look that thing look at it it's an owl he beat himself to death and they did they tried to fly out and they hit themselves and they literally died and my dad or grandfather would go up and pick them off and we'd bury them and my mom would say Well, this is a tragedy.

And I'd say to my grandfather, can't we stop this? And he would say, no, you can't stop it. This is the way the world works.
I don't have the money to put new redwood.

And if I did, it would have cracks in it within five years anyway. And we really like these owls and we never shoot them, but we can't make life perfect for them.

They're in a, you know, kind of a jungle that they live in. But, you know, nasty, rooty, insured.

I learned from them. And then when my own children came up, my daughter once said to me, Dad, look, look, look.
And she had this, she was kind of an empath.

And she was always almost making herself sick, worried about other people and she would tell me look there's one up there and there was again and i

i started to think i've been here 67 years basically in the same place and i think i've seen six or seven of these and then i have motion detector lights uh inside the barn and every once in a while at night i'll go out and i'll see it flip on and you can see from the droppings that I clean up that it's not just bird excretement, but it has little pieces of bone that the regurgitation of owls.

So I was writing this thing on the occasion. I went out and we have kind of a studio there, an automatic one for occasional, you know, TV if I have to do something.
And I walked out.

I just felt eerie.

I can't,

I never walk out the side door, but this time I did walk out and I felt kind of weird and I looked up and the light was on and above it was a barn owl.

And he was attached to the sides almost as if he had perpendicular legs you know what i mean going one way he was upright and i thought oh my god he's stuck and this is all going to happen and then he took off perfect takeoff swish

and so every once in a while all of these things connect this world of animals and you think of all the people's faces and voices that talked about these things so i'm trying to do that maybe once every two weeks recall this natural world that i'm the only one still alive from that generation that grew up either in the 19th century or the early 20th century.

To their beautiful stories, kind of remind me in a different way, remind me of the wonderful Thornton Burgess kids animal stories.

One last thing, you did have a chance to repair the barn yourself and to cover over the cracks.

You chose not to do that. Yeah, well, given that it's 150 years old and every generation has done their part to do their repairs here and there.

And it's built with eucalyptus poles, at least it originally was. It started finally in its 145th year to sway.
And by that, I mean, I got really scared. It started to tip.

And I thought, oh, my God, this thing has been so old. We don't have hay in it.
We don't have horses anymore. We don't have live animals.
Would it really be that big of a loss just to get rid of it?

I mean, come on. It's cost me a lot of money to whitewash it.
It collects junk.

This is the evil little devil on one shoulder. And then on the other shoulder, the little angel said, now, wait a minute, it's not yours.
You're just a renter.

This belongs to the farm and it's in your family. So you better spend the money.
So I got a very good friend of mine who's now passed away. I'll just call him by his first name, Sawul.

And he got a crew and he did a wonderful job. They took cable, they pulled, they jacked it up, and then they reframed it and made it perfectly straight.

And then they put plywood throughout the entire interior, put more joists, and they kept some of the eucalyptus poles as a testament to how it was built. And he did a wonderful job.

And then he said to me, you know, very thick Mexican accent, because he was from Oaxaca, he said, now we have the crown jewel. We're going to put brand new redwood.
I got a ding.

And he showed me, because we were, some of the siding was just decrepit. He replaced it.
It looked beautiful. It was almost as good as the original.

The original was hard redwood with no knots, but this was very good redwood. And it was before the recent lumber.
And it was kind of affordable. And he had a special deal from a guy he knew.

And he said, we can put the whole thing on it and we won't have to whitewash it. We'll varnish it.
It'll look like a beautiful barn.

And more poor little owls, if we have one, they won't be able to grab on there. So we've taken away their launching pad.
And then we've got the flicker redwood woodpeckers.

And then we've altered the color of this ancient barn.

and I said so can't do it said oh you got to let me finish a job but then as sort of solace I said well don't worry we've got the decrepit shed and we've got decrepit old packing house and we've got the decrepit old shop and we've got the decrepit old other buildings all of which should have been torn down and go to it and that's what he did for a year he rebuilt them all hey Victor I got to get you a statue of St.

Francis to put in put a

new house I'll get it blessed Stephen by by priest. Well, that's all the time we have for the class that's this.

I do want to encourage folks, again, go to Victor's website, victorhanson.com, private papers.

You'll find these kind of stories, plus the Eeyore's Cabinet, plus Optimism Inc., and links to Victor's various radio and TV appearances. There, you can leave comments.

We will read them and maybe on occasion use them for the show. But, folks who are listening on iTunes, please consider leaving a review and five stars while you're at it.

As you say, Victor deserves 10, but five's the limit, so please max out on that. Thanks very much.
Victor, thank you. And we will be back again next week with a new edition of The Classicist.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.