With his latest philippic, “Western Cultural Suicide,” neocon Victor Davis Hanson has once again demonstrated his superior skill and agility as one of America’s greatest writers of farce and sustained levity, the equal of S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, or Pat Robertson. Take this choice paragraph:

But the reason that millions cross the Mediterranean to Europe or the Rio Grande to the United States is for something more that transcends the periphery and involves fundamental values — consensual government, free-market capitalism, the freedom of the individual, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, rights of dissent, and a society governed by rationalism divorced from religious stricture. Somehow that obvious message has now been abandoned, as Western hosts lost confidence in the very society that gives us the wealth and leisure to ignore or caricature its foundations. The result is that millions of immigrants flock to the West, enjoy its material security, and yet feel little need to bond with their adopted culture, given that their hosts themselves are ambiguous about what others desperately seek out.

Seriously, does Hanson really expect intelligent adults to believe this puerile nonsense? His capsulized portrait of the “fundamental values” of the United States is a grisly joke, a caricature of what American civil society is actually like in 2013. The U. S. stands for none of these things (and never has) except in the furtive imagination of the seriously deranged (such as hubristic neocons like himself or “court historian” hacks who author state-mandated text books for public schools). In fact, attentive readers in on the jest well know that each one of those hoary attributes or sacrosanct “fundamental values” has been viciously attacked or derided by National Review neo-fascist scribblers over the course of its 58 year publication history. But conservative agitprop has never been about truth, only defense of the realm and its iron grip upon the necks of the befuddled masses.

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