marlboro Man Gets Smoked Victor Davis Hanson is the marlboro cigarettes Man of war apologists, a sun-bronzed rider of the purple sage whose stentorian words and battlefield vision have made many a chickenhawk less ashamed of himself as he shuffles around in his fuzzy slippers. The aria Hanson sings in article after article pays Wagnerian tribute to the Western Way of War, or why democracies are so admirably advanced when it comes to committing mass slaughter. Even the Iraq debacle can not keep him from his appointed rounds from op-ed page to NRO column to Commentary essay to Weekly Standard book review, peddling military aggression for any panacea that ails the godly U S of A. Finally, one man has had enough. A man who knows his military stuff. Whoever he is writes under the pseudonym Werther, and he torpedoes Hanson's pretentions at Counterpunch that will bring a smile to anyone who has endured Hanson's endless calls to arms. The title of the essay--"Victor David Hanson, Bard of the Booboisie"--pays homage to H.L. Mencken, and the essay itself does the master proud. "Mr. Hanson, Cal State Fresno's contribution to human letters, is the favorite historian of the administration, the Naval War College, and other groves of disinterested research. His academic niche is to drag the Peloponnesian War into every contemporary foreign policy controversy and thereby justify whatever course of action our magistrates have taken. One suspects that if the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were suddenly seized by the notion to invade Patagonia, Mr. Hanson would be quoting Pericles in support. "Once we strip away all the classical Greek fustian, it becomes clear that the name of his game is to take every erroneous conventional wisdom, cliche, faulty generalization, and common-man imbecility, and elevate them to a catechism. In this process, he showcases a technique beloved of pseudo-conservatives stuck at the Sean Hannity level of debate: he swallows whatever quasi-historical balderdash serves the interest of those in power, announces it with an air of surprised discovery, and then congratulates himself on his boldness in telling truth to power. "This is a surprising and rather hypocritical pose by someone who reportedly sups at the table of Vice President Cheney. For Mr. Hanson is one of a long and undistinguished line of personalities stretching back into the abysm of time: the tribal bard, the court historian, the academic recipient of the Lenin Prize. Compared to him, politically connected scribes such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., resemble Dietrich Bonhoeffer." Werther proceeds to dissect the errors and blind spots of a recent Hanson essay about how weaselly liberalism is trying to undermine the heroic history of US involvement in WWII. And what is the ideological purpose of Hanson's ham-handed argumentatives? "Turning from Mr. Hanson's preposterous history to his political agenda, it appears that his labored apologia to United States government policy 60 years ago serves as a defense of United States government policy now, anno 2005. Don't let those ungrateful foreigners criticize us, he seems to say, after all, didn't we win World War II? Aren't all our wars just? What are all those Krauts and Frogs bitching about? How convenient when the invasion of Iraq (which Mr. Hanson fervently supports) has manifestly faltered and requires rhetorical support from an alleged man of learning, a species otherwise nowhere in evidence in the administration's camp. How convenient, given that the Bush administration sought to rain on Russia's 9 May 2005 victory parade and excoriate Yalta, in a manner not seen in official circles since the gin-fueled diatribes of Senator Joseph McCarthy." As Werther observes, the terrible thing about Victor Davis Hanson and his lyrical serenades to war is that there's no escaping them. "The concrete-like slab of The Washington Post Sunday edition thunked on our doorstep only a few hours ago, and with it the latest effluent from the Sage of Fresno himself as a featured op-ed: 'Why We Need to Stay in Iraq.' Note the sheer chickenhawk effrontery of that 'we,' and the almost ghoulish tastelessness of whooping it up for endless foreign deployments as the dead of New Orleans remain uncounted."