Hans Zeiger puts down the pen:
For awhile I have contemplated writing this column but haven’t had the full sensibility to do it yet. I began submitting columns online at age 17, back in the year 2002. I began the process with the hubris of a budding pundit and kept the habit until now, with a declining sense of the value of this kind of writing. Now I am 21 and about 21 percent half-educated.
I now know at least this: I don’t know enough to be weekly offering my opinions as though possessed of some eminence. There is a thousand times more sense in one of Seneca’s ancient moral sketches or Joseph Addison’s essays 300 years ago than in the freshest columns I could put forth on any topic. Wisdom is better nurtured in the memorization of Solomon’s Proverbs than the attempt to produce new proverbs for the age of YouTube and iPod. The Bible is better for the soul than the morning newspaper.
Hans Zeiger isn’t the first young pundit to realize that he is merely regurgitating conservative talking points and doesn’t really know what the Hell he’s writing about. Kyle Williams came to the same conclusion last year and to his credit, also decided to stop committing punditry while clueless.
Here’s hoping that the Littlest Chickenhawk soon sees a similar light. It would be unfair to suggest that Me So Michelle would do well to do likewise, in her case, we’ll merely encourage her to RTFRHD* prior to writing a history book.
* this is an acronym similar to RTFM, only it refers to the Relevant Historical Documents. I was amused to read the following in Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times”, published in 1983: “After the initial operations were completed, there was a theoretical intention to move against India and Australia. But there was no plan at all to invade America, knock her out of the war or destroy her cpacity to wage it….
“Colonel Iwakuro, a logistics expert, told one of the regular ‘liason conferences’, where the top military and government met, that the differentials in American and Japanese production were as follows: steel twenty to one, oil one hundred to one, coal ten to one, aircraft five to one, shipping two to one, labour force five to one, overall ten to one….
“The Emperor had been told that the war could not be won as early as February 1942.”