Posted on 01/05/2011 9:56:39 PM PST by Ooh-Ah
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s quietly chilling article, “Two Californias,” in National Review Online, ought to be read by every American who is concerned about where this country is headed. California is leading the way, but what is happening in California is happening elsewhere— and is a slow poison that is being largely ignored.
Professor Hanson grew up on a farm in California’s predominantly agricultural Central Valley. Now, as he tours that area, many years later, he finds a world as foreign to the world he knew as it is from the rest of California today— and very different from the rest of America, either past or present.
In Hanson’s own words: “Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards.”
This is a Third World culture, transplanted from Mexico, and living largely outside the scope of American law, state or federal.
Ironically, this is happening in a state notorious for its pervasive and intrusive regulation of the minute details of people’s lives, homes, and businesses. But not out in the Third World enclaves in the Central Valley, where garbage is strewn with impunity and unlicensed swarms of peddlers come and go, selling for cash and with no sales tax.
While waiting in line at two supermarkets, Victor Davis Hanson realized in both places that he was the only one in line who was not paying with the plastic cards issued by welfare authorities to replace the old food stamps. He noted that these people living on the taxpayers were driving late-model cars and had iPhones, BlackBerries and other parts of what he calls “the technological veneer of the middle class.”
Sadly— and, in the long run, tragically— this is not unique to California, or to illegal immigrants from Mexico, or even to the United States.
It is a pattern to which the Western world has been slowly but steadily succumbing.
In France, for example, there are enclaves of Third World Muslims, living by their own rules and festering with resentments of the society that is content to let them vegetate on handouts from the welfare state.
The black ghettos of America, and especially their housing projects, are other enclaves of people largely abandoned to their own lawless and violent lives, their children warehoused in schools where they are allowed to run wild, with education being more or less optional.
What is going on? These and other groups, here and abroad, are treated as mascots of the self-congratulatory elites.
These elites are able to indulge themselves in non-judgmental permissiveness toward those selected as mascots, while cracking down with heavy-handed, nanny-state control on others.
The effect of all this on the mascots themselves is not a big concern of the elites. Mascots symbolize something for others. The actual fate of the mascots themselves seldom matters much to their supposed benefactors.
So long as the elites have control of the public purse, they can subsidize self-destructive behavior on the part of the mascots. And so long as the elites can send their own children to private schools, they needn’t worry about what happens to the children of the mascots in the public schools.
Other people who cannot afford to send their children to private schools can simply be called “racists” for objecting to what the indulgence of the mascots is doing to the public schools or what the violence of the mascots is doing to other children trapped in the same schools with them.
A hundred years ago, groups who are now indulged as mascots were targets and scapegoats of Progressive era elites, treated like dirt and targeted for eradication in the name of “eugenics.”
There are no permanent mascots. As fashions change, the mascots of today can become the scapegoats and targets of tomorrow. But who thinks ahead any more?
The MSM has not talked about the mexican takeover and the degredation of counties.... I hope they begin soon.
I don’t think anyone can put the chaos of Southern California into perspective in quite the same way as VDH. Chilling essay.
Good article.
A laser-beam and something people need to watch.
This is why I will be leaving California this year. AND taking my 6-figure income with me (I work for a worldwide company and am a business traveler so it doesn’t matter much where I physically reside).
As more and more businesses and productive people vote with their feet, California will sink further into the morass of its own making.
Dumber than dirt.
The MSM? They are the problem. TV is the problem. They support Obama and the left - FULLY. Including Fox. Rove is on there bashing Palin. I dumped Tv over a year ago. Total propaganda. The MSM hates America and conservatives. Islamic petro dollrs is one reason. It is ALL about money and always is.
The Left has abiding contempt for the people it supposedly cares about. Out of sight and out of mind.
Keep that in the mind the next time you hear Democrats screech about how heartless and indifferent Republicans are to the poor.
I experience this regularly.
ping
excellent point...
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Thomas Sowell is walking into dangerous territory here, and I admire his courage. He describes how liberalism is authoritarian while at the same time encouraging lawlessness. Sam Francis, no less controversial, had a term for that: “anarcho-tyranny.”
I live in a fairly nice middle class neighborhood in Valencia, Ca., I have a few neighbors on the block who don’t speak much English who have painted their houses some God awful colors, one being avocado green with light green trim, the other some kind of bright orange. It really makes our street ugly.
One of the houses has a TV that’s been sitting in the driveway for over a year now, and I bet there’s at least 5 families living there. They only have one car, the rest ride bikes.
Well, this is another masterpiece from Sowell.
“Mascots”... perfect.
I am from a little place called Martinez, CA and I went home about 5 years ago and said the same thing. The places we used to go to have fun was run by mexicans speaking in spanish. It was not the place I left long ago. Very sad to see what politicians have done to this great Republic all to keep their jobs. The politicians have destroyed this country and that is a fact.
Between the two great black conservative philosophizers I will take Thomas Sowell over Walt Williams every time. In fact Sowell substituted on the Limbaugh show a few times a decade ago. Not recently though
Enough can not be said about the American Media. Simply put they must be outed as the international communists they are.
“The MSM has not talked about the mexican takeover and the degredation of counties.... I hope they begin soon.”
They won’t, but YouTube will. Remember the poor unfortunate taking a picture of the Obamas at the soup witchen while she was on line...with her Blackberry?
“...and I bet there’s at least 5 families living there...”
Here in South Texas we call that type of house a “HIVE.” If you notice, they seem to have a huge amount of friends who come and go 24/7, night and day. Hmmmmmmmm, I wonder what’s that all about? Criminal activity huh?
I’ve seen it happen many, many times: First one family will either rent/lease/or buy a house and move in. Within a week or two, another will move in. After awhile, more and more will move in. Then, they bring the full culture of Mexico to the neighborhood complete with commodes sitting on the front porch, cars in the front yard, trash all around the house and yard, and pit bulls to protect their “stash.” Better yet, you get free entertainment provided in the way of Tejano blasted from the speakers of their car stereo systems along with pampers being thrown out the car windows onto your street and yard.
It’s the typical “rotten apple in the barrel” syndrome. The sad fact is once the rot begins, the neighborhood (and all it’s value) is destroyed forever.
Unless you live in a community “savaged” by these type of people, you could not even begin to imagine the social destruction they inflict.
They have absolutely no intention in assimilating into our society and expect us to conform to theirs instead.
The sad fact is that this will never change...only get worse with our nation that does not care to keep our heritage and culture as AMERICANS.
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