Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Victor Hanson [cool books to read .txt] 📗

life drawn from a rich past in India, then the juggernaut of Blockbuster, Festival 10 Theaters, Pizza Hut, Costco, Borders Books, Amazon.com, MTV, Michael Jordan, Selena videos, Judge Judy, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and all that it represents would be maddening, even satanic in the way it destroys localism - and perhaps assaults nature itself. But if one were to come from dire poverty, oppression and racism in Mexico, then this same apparatus, by its very obliviousness to all distinct culture of the past, can turn a suspect outsider into a welcome insider within a few years. My best memories of the Bill Clinton sexual scandals were the amused smiles of illegal aliens at our nearby gas station as they snickered over tales of his phallic use of a cigar; they felt this was quite a country when their own sexual mores were superior to those of the President of the United States.

We should be clear about the limits of the assimilating culture, however. The illegal alien may marry a fourth-generation Anglo (as in the case of my sister-m-law), he may wear a Chicago Bulls cap and gyrate to punk rock, but that superficial immersion in American culture is no substitute for real civic education about American history, culture and values. But at least the leveling effect of popular culture does buy us a little time. It gives America a few years of respite before we must deal with the catastrophe that we are not educating millions, not teaching them a common and elevated culture, and not addressing the dilemma of open borders. But then we are not quite killing each other either, as happens daily in almost every multiracial society on the planet.

In the meantime, millions of Mixotec, Oaxacans and Indians from Jalisco and the Yucatan are very quickly becoming superficially similar to millions of white, Asian and African-American youth - a host generation that itself is increasingly illiterate, unskilled and ignorant of so much about the institutions and the very nature of its own country. If we in the 1940s and 1950s were once like Greece, with the local city-states' rich pride, culture, rigidity and baffling protocols for privileged citizens and those deemed inferior as me tics and helots, we are surely now more like imperial Romans of Petronius's age, when all flocked to share without discrimination in the riches and occasional debauchery of a new global order.

In our eleventh hour of California's immigration woes, what gives us hope that we may all yet live as one harmonious people? It surely is not the federal government, which has lost control of its borders and placed immigration policy at the service of special interests, both here and abroad. It cannot be our California educational system, which has produced classrooms plagued by partisans and at the mercy of the teacher unions and the race industry, both so often hostile to a common culture. Another generation must pass before we can assess all the damage done by years of state-mandated bilingual education.

There is not a great deal of hope for assimilationist policies to be found in the professional Mexican-American leadership that thrives in government, journalism and the universities. Such elites more often seek preferences based not on their own claimed injuries, but on past bias against their fathers and hostility presently expressed toward illegals. Nor are there many state leaders who speak honestly about race, culture, immigration and the need for assimilation - not when California may soon find itself with half its population claiming Mexican heritage.

In our devil's bargain with the American-inspired globalism, we have exchanged standards and taste for raw inclusiveness - the age-old complaint, from Aristophanes to de Tocqueville, against democratic civilization. Yet racism, separatism and natural apartheid are not the dividends of the new music, videos and clothes. So until our attitudes about immigration, schooling and a common culture improve, for now the youth culture is proving to be virtually our only salvation - and so in a strange way we are lucky to have it.

EPILOGUE

Forks in the Road

THE POOR OF THE WORLD are voting with their feet. Europe is awash with immigrants from northern Africa and the Middle East who now make up vast enclaves in England, Scandinavia and France. African blacks flock into a once racist South Africa still replete with tough and hateful Afrikaners. Refugees from a torrid Arabian landscape wait on lists to get into frosty Toronto. Hundreds of thousands of times more workers leave Palestine to find work in a despised Israel than Israelis - or Palestinians - venture into Syria or Lebanon. The freedom and material dynamism of the West are drawing millions to its shores - in the manner that Athens once attracted metics from Asia, and Rome drew Africans, Jews and Armenians. And just as in that distant past, today's new arrivals are unsure to what degree they wish to shed their old culture, language and customs. Most are confused over why they have abandoned countries they are unhappy with and yet find themselves uneasy with those they have chosen to embrace.

If Califormans complain that the children of aliens claim they are Mexicans, not Americans, and cheer visiting Mexican soccer players while booing their American athletes, they should remember that Algerians do the same thing to their hosts in France, as Pakistanis often do in Great Britain, and as Turks in Germany. The freedom and affluence of the West affect both the poor Third World immigrant and the well-heeled Western host in a variety of strange ways. Americans and Europeans can develop a cynicism, boredom and smugness about their own soft society that suggests to perceptive aliens either a sense of outright self-loathing or at least an uneasy acceptance that patriotism, pride in one's culture and national solidarity have no place in a postmodern, postheroic West.

The immigrant, baffled by the strange new world with its unlimited freedom of expression, gender equality and competitive economy, is not baffled by this remorse on the part of his host. In