The Flea bites VDH

Nick Packwood has a go at Victor Davis Hanson (who seems to be getting the hagiographic treatment from a lot of bloggers):

I am increasingly irritated by the cult of Victor Davis Hanson. Take this assertion from his latest article, for example. [. . .]

This is not only wrong it is so obviously wrong that I find it difficult to believe the blogosphere does not fact check the good professor's ass instead of throwing laurels at his feet. I have read several of VDH's books and am an admirer of his writing style in addition to broadly sharing his views about the need for toughness in the face of barbarism. But his rhetoric, in hot pursuit of an over-arching narrative, often runs ahead of the facts.

For me the last straw was VDH's recent criticism of Jared Diamond. I am much less likely to share Diamond's prescriptions on the environment than Hanson's on foreign policy. I also think Diamond's theories are usefully made subject to the sort of nitpickery that should give us pause about any grand narrative, historical, biological, political or otherwise. But it is a bit rich coming from the historian best known for "the Western way of war", perhaps the greatest wet fart of all encompassing, ill supported bloviation in today's popular history.

I've read, and enjoyed, a couple of Hanson's books, but I have to admit that I'm also finding VDH's one-note symphony tiring . . . he seems to be recycling exactly the same ideas over and over in his recent essays and columns. Even if I agree with him, I find myself tuning out only a few paragraphs into an article — because I already know what he's going to say. It's going to be the same thing he said in the last half-dozen articles I read. Ho-hum.