Academic

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON GREECE: RAGING AGAINST ?THEM.? Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious?

By Glenn Reynolds

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON GREECE: RAGING AGAINST “THEM.”

Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at ?them?. Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned?but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.

The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation?s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded ?they? (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.

Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it ?green?, and have the highest paid public employee and the most generous welfare system?and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling and an embarrassment. My environs is known as ?Zimbabwe? or ?Appalachia? for its new third-world look that followed from about the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the nation. Again, thanks to the deep South our schools are not quite last in reading and math. So of course, like the Greeks, we are mad at somebody other than ourselves. Californians are desperate for a ?them? fix. But who is them? ?Them? either left, is leaving, or has been shut down.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 02, 2011 (boomark / email).