Pig Herder

Vic Hanson's recent piece (3/24/05 NRO) on the 7 faces of Ward Churchill, which I mentioned here, got pretty wide play in the blogosphere - not unusual for a Hanson column. I think Wretchard's riff deserves a mention - read it here at Belmont Club. A sample:

In VDH's hypothesis, Churchill was the perfect grifter who understood without a trace of self-deception the entire value system upon which the modern academy was founded and exploited it ruthlessly for his own gain. In a setting where the operative virtues were anti-Americanism, an affection for posturing and the glamor of exoticism, he adopted them all and crowned it with a maraschino cherry: he was as original as a Hollywood plot based on market research and focus groups.

There exists by implication a real Ward Churchill potentially far more interesting than the academics he conned. He would be a man of considerable intelligence, not in a bookish way, but in a street-smart sense, who instantly figured out how the game was played and played it to perfection. He would be bold; and it would hold him in good stead in the sheepfold. He would be tenacious as only adventurers can be. And once he had made the transition to the synthetic creature described by Hanson he would never have looked back; any more than Hernando Cortes after he burned his ships behind him on his march toward the treasure of the Aztecs.