Posted on 07/02/2003 6:17:03 AM PDT by Valin
Once upon a time, when I lived on the East Coast,I suffered from the prevalent East Coast prejudice that most people who live in California are crazy. Having now lived in California for most of my adult life, I have probably become one of them. For, if we are to believe the warning issued by the late Marc Reisner, the author of "Cadillac Desert," in his posthumously published book, "A Dangerous Place," you’d have to be crazy to live in a megalopolis situated at the juncture of tectonic plates that sooner or later will bring about an enormous earthquake.
California is hardly the only place on earth that is prone to earthquakes: Turkey, Mexico, Italy, China, Japan all spring to mind. But Reisner would remind us that California has a problem that renders it a more dangerous place for an earthquake: Its reliance on an elaborately engineered water system. In addition to causing buildings, roads, bridges, and tunnels to collapse, a severe earthquake could also rupture gas lines, power grids, and the water system, leaving Californians with insufficient water to put out all the earthquakegenerated fires — not to speak of the water needed for agriculture, drinking, washing, and everything else.
With such urgent news to impart, Reisner spends rather too much time rehearsing the well-known story of how California got to be so overpopulated. He takes a certain relish in recounting the misdeeds of early hucksters and boosters such as L.A. newspaper publisher and real estate magnate Harrison Gray Otis (known for his vitriolic editorials and flagrantly slanted news stories, Otis "often said he considered objectivity ‘a form of weakness.’") Alas, even if Los Angeles and San Francisco had been founded by benevolent altruists eager to provide new homes and a mild, salubrious climate for Midwestern farmers, asthma and arthritis sufferers, and other deserving folks, the problems posed by earthquake and drought would still be the same.
Then,too,as Reisner points out,even as recently as 1964, nobody understood the workings of plate tectonics. Had this been known a century earlier, he speculates, fewer people might have come to California, and those who did might have settled farther inland, away from seismic zones.
In some respects, this book seems to suggest that California has a problem without a solution: Too many people, too many buildings, all settled too closely together in just the wrong places. And while a small town might decide to relocate in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake, once a conurbation reaches the size of the San Francisco Bay area, let alone Los Angeles, Tokyo, or Mexico City, it is almost certain to go on rebuilding itself, however wastefully, no matter how massive the disaster it has just undergone.
But the author also shows us some steps that could be — or should have been — taken. For more than 30 years, experts have been urging the state to build a canal that would bypass the quake-vulnerable areas to insure a reliable supply of water to Southern California. But this project, the Peripheral Canal, was anathema to most environmentalists and was defeated in a statewide referendum in 1982. Reading Reisner’s book, it is hard to decide which is scariest: the scarcity of water, or the scarcity of foresight and common sense among lobbyists, activists, politicians, and voters.
Ostrich-like behavior is also the target of Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming." The good news is that he offers some concrete and eminently doable proposals to deal with the problem his book treats: massive illegal immigration.A farmer who is also a classics professor at California State University, Fresno, Mr. Hanson presents ideas in clear English. He sums up the Californian (and ultimately American) dilemma in a nutshell: "Americans want the work they won’t do to be done cheaply by foreigners who, they wrongly assume, will inevitably transform themselves into Americans.In turn,the downtrodden Mexicans who come here and their elite advocates in America romanticize Mexico, a nation that brought them the misery they fled, while too often deprecating the place that alone gave them sanctuary."
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in a small town in California’s prime agricultural area, the Central Valley, Mr. Hanson had the opportunity to see how the assimilationist ethos and practices of those days enabled the overwhelming majority of his Mexican-American schoolmates to speak perfect English, find rewarding careers, and become a successful part of their new country. But the situation nowadays, as Mr. Hanson (still living in the same town) sums it up, is just the opposite: Many of the children of today’s illegal immigrants are unable to speak English, unable to find good jobs, unwilling to do the hard physical labor that their parents took on, and uninterested in becoming Americans. Meanwhile, and not just coincidentally, their self-appointed advocates, "professors in the race business," profit from preaching a gospel of ethnic separatism that ensures these children’s failure.
In eye-opening detail, Mr. Hanson sets out the contrast between the assimilationist model that prevailed in his youth and the current enshrinement of ethnic identity, group rights, and generalized America-bashing practiced by Americans themselves. (Anyone who doubts the prevalence of the last need only consult Diane Ravitch’s exposé of the anti-American bias of many of today’s high school history textbooks in her latest book, "The Language Police.")
"The catalogue of courses from any California university reveals the intellectual world that immigrants and their children can be press-ganged into," notes Mr. Hanson. Among the classes offered in 2001–02 at University of California, Santa Barbara, Mr. Hanson found 62 courses in Chicano Studies, including "Methodology of the Oppressed," "Barrio Popular Culture," "Chicana Feminism," and "De-colonizing Cyber-Cinema." Not to mention 13 similar courses in the history department, which offered just one class on the American Civil War and none dedicated either to the American Revolution or World War II.
If no effort is made to assimilate the continual tide of illegal immigrants, Mr. Hanson warns, California will, in effect, become Mexico.The problem is not one of "race"; he considers it a virtue that America is a multiracial society. What concerns him is the danger of what he calls "a multicultural" society, one that has lost its sense of common political and civic values. A multiracial society "welcomes all races to learn one language and heritage," while a multicultural society "encourages separate but purportedly equal languages and traditions, and is a prescription for disaster — as we have seen in Bosnia."Although Mr.Hanson has a penchant for sweeping statements, what he has to say seems on the whole more right than wrong.
"One solution," Mr. Hanson suggests, "would be to continue with de facto open borders, but insist on rapid cultural immersion, an absolute and immediate end to all ethnic chauvinism, bilingualism and separatism."This would follow the "proven assimilationist model of the nineteenth century, which Americanized millions of Poles,Irish,Jews and Italians." A second solution would be to patrol our borders "to ensure only legal and vastly reduced immigration," a policy which would result in higher labor costs, but also higher wages for American citizens. The best possible solution, Mr. Hanson believes, would be to do both: restrict immigration and insist on assimilation. The fourth approach — adopting none of the above proposals and simply going on as we have — will lead,he warns,to the Third Worldization of California: "Mexifornia."
Mr. Hanson’s suggestions seem to be in line with the thinking of many voters (he cites polls taken even before the events of 9/11 which showed 70% of Americans in favor of reducing immigration and 90% wanting to designate English as our official language). But such ideas are heresy to both the multiculturalist Left and the corporate Right. The latter vastly prefer to have on hand a huge pool of willing, cheap labor. And the multiculturalists — guilty liberals whose mode of liberalism is more notable for guilt than for genuine liberalism — prefer to give in to the demands of self-serving avatars of group identity for fear of being labeled "bigots." In an atmosphere rife with so much hypocrisy, Mr. Hanson’s outspoken book is quite a breath of fresh air.
Ms. Rubin reviews books regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor.
Mexifornia: A State of Becoming
by Victor Davis Hanson Encounter Books 152 pages, $21.95
From the lack of apparent interest on the part of our elected leaders, nothing will happen for another ten, or until the wheels start coming off, whichever comes first.
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