Things I missed this week

Apparently, Victor Davis Hanson went cuckoo for cocoa puffs the other day. Why did I not hear about this?

Behold:

One does not have to embrace Buchananism, to see that a growing challenge in this century will be the smiley international corporation, not in the sense of a handle-bar moustache and black-hat villain stealing third-world resources, but with the face of Birkenstocks, polo shirts, and an I-pod, run by the man who believes in no affiliation other than as an alumnus donor to his business school, has no moral principle, has no knowledge or sense of history, much less the tragedy of history, no real anger, no real enthusiasm other than for a new angle globalized to the nth degree—and who is pledged to nothing other than the notion of profit and the dangers to globalized profit that are posed by those who stand for ideas and values which get in the way of Kumbaya hedge funds and tranbordered consortia.

. . . . Every MBA program should have one, just one introductory class in Western Civ to introduce to these historically illiterate that the basis for their present globalized system was the West, so that they might not so often preen that it was cobbled together from the Middle East, the Orient [sic], Africa, in some sort of alaphabet soup concoction.

Which is to say, I suppose, that Hanson loves globalization so long as it’s not so . . . global. Anyhow, the whole thing reads like the rhetorical love child of Allan Bloom and Alfred Jay Nock, or a deeply conservative and nationalist reading of Adorno. Hanson wouldn’t have a problem with the executive class, it seems, so long as they read some of Virgil’s minor works, viewed Islam as some kind of existential threat, and tithed a little more loyalty to the nation state. Of course the MBA-as-bad-citizen critique doesn’t extend to their eagerness to receive the benefits of the Bush tax cuts, nor does Hanson bother to wonder why these hedge fund hippies choose disproportionately to lard the bank accounts of the Republican Party.