Victor Davis Hanson v. Leonard Read

Witness the paragraph on the Churchill case:

We argue endlessly over the academic freedom of a Ward Churchill -- plagiarist and faker -- as he becomes famous for calling the 3,000 murdered on September 11, 2001,"little Eichmanns." Few in the debate pause, if just for a moment, to think of the thousands of now anonymous Americans blown apart over Berlin or on Okinawa to ensure we can freely embarrass ourselves over this charlatan.

For example, Hanson never says, or hints, whether he supports or opposes Churchill's academic freedom, whether he supports the Academic Bill of Rights, whether he believes tenure should be preserved and how far its protections should extend, whether academic freedom, broadly interpreted, is essential to the health of a good education. Most historians, of course, are equally silent on these issues but as a scholar who has chosen to throw himself into the public arena so forcefully, Hanson owes his readers some answers.

Hanson’s essay becomes more specific when he addresses the failure of historians to teach more about the founders and the great political issues of the past. I agree.

But then he moves onto shakier ground. In trying to make a distinction between the" critical" and"trivial," he betrays his ultimate reverence for the history of the American state, as personified by politicians he admires, over the history of how ordinary individuals ultimately provided the basis for American prosperity:

The history of the pencil, girdle or cartoon offers us less wisdom about events, past and present, than does knowledge of U.S. Grant, the causes of the Great Depression or the miracle of Normandy Beach. A society that cannot distinguish between the critical and the trivial of history predictably will also believe a Scott Peterson merits as much attention as the simultaneous siege of Fallujah, or that a presidential press conference should be pre-empted for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump.