The War Nerd beat me to Victor Davis Hanson, so I will spare you any summary of the work of America's most nauseating public intellectual. But I had to take issue with the above editorial. There is a consistent 180 degree difference in what Hanson is trying to say with the literary/historical allusions he employs to say it.
1) Title of article: Every Man a King. It's the borrowed slogan of America's most famous socialist tyrant. Who notably espoused an economic philosophy that runs directly counter to Hanson's neoliberal bent. Huey Long's vision never came to pass, but apparently the slogan can still be sloppily appropriated.
2) And then the cryptic assertion that thanks to widespread telecommunications technology, we now have access to L'Inferno. Are people using their phones to get familiar with medieval epic poetry? Or is access to this material only possible because of some new techno-breakthrough? Or maybe Hanson is suggesting that in spite of Lyndon Johnson's program of Civil Rights legislation, we can now take remote teleconference tours of our incipient eternal damnation?
3) Finally, Hanson pins his dismissal of the "archaic" notion of measuring wealth numerically by claiming that we live in a "brave new world." You see this Aldous Huxley reference all over the place. Usually the writer is only trying to vaguely suggest that things are different than the way they used to be. But the title was meant to be ironic, because the novel is about a hellish dystopia. The "brave new world" got to be that way because of the misuse of technology. The irony of which is lost on Hanson, who wants to celebrate how gadgetry can rid the world of social ills.
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