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?
“Very sad to see what politicians have done to this great Republic all to keep their jobs.”
Big business had their hand in this, too; initially a source of cheap labor, they are now prized as consumers instead (remember the description of the newer cars and electronics gadgets while paying for groceries with gubmint aid?).
“They only have one car, the rest ride bikes.”
I guess there was some kind of crackdown here in NJ on unlicensed drivers/unregistered vehicles; many illegals that had been driving now seem to be on bikes. The new normal for the US (remember the pictures of thousands of Asians on bikes going to work? That will be us.)
“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.”
Many landlords here in NJ prefer them to vacancies as Americans continue leaving NJ (a trend that started under our previous governor). This is also the main reason NYC is a “sanctuary city”; if these roaches didn’t move in it would be a ghost town. At least with live bodies there the city will receive all sorts of federal funds to keep its employees & politicians living large...
Great post. Thomas Sowell makes sober reading indeed. VDH has warned so eloquently of what was happening. Several years of columns, speeches, essays detailing the loss of American culture, mores, values, and heritage.
Someone called talk radio the other morning to say she and her husband had left California a few years ago, but that her husband happened to be there on business on one particular day: No Mexicans day, whatever they called it. No Mexican labor anywhere in the state would show up for work. Her husband had said Los Angeles had turned into Mexico until that day when lo and behold the illegals stayed home. No clunkers on the road, no sullen Hispanics of any sort lining up for welfare, food stamps, work,etc.. It was like LA of old, but only for one day, alas.
Until the Progressive Era and the rise of hygiene agitation, big cities were population sinks, with more people dying than being born there, and only rapid immigration accounting for growth.
I was just reading, apropos of another thread completely, that Stephen A. Douglas, "the Little Giant", lived in small-town Illinois. He moved his family to Chicagos to further his political career in 1847, and within five years his first wife died a young woman (leaving him two kids). He remarried three years later, in 1855 or so, and then he was dead of typhoid himself six years after that -- still a man of relatively young middle years.
Metropolises are a good deal for the people who own and run them. They suck for others.
I heard that woman’s telephone call, too.
I think it was Glen Beck’s radio show when Glen was on vacation.
This is very true!
The majority of Mexicans are NOT assimulating. They lack our work ethic and bring their thrid world culture here. They are here for the HAND OUTS and want to drag U.S. down.
I beleive the liberal ELITE, want this for OTHERS but not for themselves. The liberal ELITE want to RULE over people. The liberal ELITE doesn’t want smart, INDIVIDUALS that can do for themselves. They want DUMB SERFS that will look UP to them to run the show.
the same principle happened during integration in the 60’s which left ghettos in our major cities.
I agree; I was watching something on the History Channel about our “crumbling infrastructure”, and couldn’t believe that a number of cities dump raw sewage into rivers when their older systems can’t handle the volume. As someone who lives around some very nasty cities, I don’t recall the smell of raw feces when I’m near the river, so I assume we’re not doing it around here. That was a real eye-opener for me!
I've had the "pleasure" of working on one of those houses. It was owned by a mall near me and they used it to "house" their workforce. They had several of these houses in the area around the mall. It was about 20 folks living in a 1950s style ranch built for a family of 4. The mall would pay these people minimum wage then they would get to live there for a nominal rent. Truly disgusting, mattresses all over the place, the kitchen with grease and dirty dishes everywhere, and of course roaches. Kind of the modern version of slavery.
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