Ancestral Voices Prophesying War

...He finds a Mexican man slapping around a Mexican woman in a car parked on his property...

...The new system is the result of guilty white liberals for whom academic and cultural relativism is religion, race-hustlers who see in an alienated Hispanic 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 populace their political power base, and the general academic/cultural dissolution given us by that marvelous generation of the 1960s and 1970s...

...He sees what his white employers have and recognizes he will never have it...

...and pride in the old country was subordinated to love and respect for the new...

...Monterey Bay housewives wanted special discounts for their lavish dinner parties...

...And most of all, he is brilliant at understanding the life of the Mexican laborer, the men who have worked side by side with him in the fields all his life...

...Anyone who has read his journalism on the War on Terror knows that he is a man of supreme confidence in the "Western Way of War" and in America...

...way into Washington...

...He is a mere fifth generation Californian of Swedish extraction...

...When he takes his son to the local emergency room to receive stitches for an athletic injury, there is a bloody mess of a young Mexican gang member, stabbed in a fight, with other gang members, including rivals, hovering nearby in the ward...

...And that would be to no one's advantage...

...never complaining about the quality of the produce, the price, OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 53 BOOKS IN REVIEW or their own poverty...

...But we need to do a lot more things right, and in that regard, if it is read and acted upon, Mexifornia could be Victor Davis Hanson's most valuable and important book...

...He, however, lives in the family farmhouse in the Central Valley...

...Ancestral Voices Prophesying War Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Encounter Books, 150 pages, $21.95) Reviewed by H. W Crocker III TCOULD PULL RANK on Victor Davis Hanson...

...A frustrated, hawkish State Department official said at the time, "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan...

...It can "buy us a little time" but it is no long-term substitute for restoring educational standards, instilling "a common and elevated culture" and civic life, and enforcing the laws of citizenship...

...As one Mexican frankly admitted to Hanson: "If you let us make California into Mexico, we will just go to Oregon...

...he enjoys it enormously (despite its perils, including fellow Mexicans who prey on cash-rich farm workers with greenback bulges in their pockets...

...If we turn Washington into Mexico, we'll sneak into Canada...

...He is regularly burgled and can't even safely leave mail in his mailbox...

...One potential dystopian future is that the "California of today—the state with the highest number of Nobel Prize winners living amidst the highest rates of English illiteracy in the general American population—would morph into a new California without the Nobel laureates...

...He is proud of his Hispanic students who have excelled in classics...

...To them, the back-straining life of a farm-laborer is far better than life in rural Mexico...

...There was a firmly held understanding that immigrants came to America for a reason—a reason that presumed American superiority in its economy, culture, politics, law, and everyday life...

...To recover our state, our region and ultimately our nation, we still need not do everything right...

...And in their hard work, positive attitudes, and religiously inculcated humility, it is impossible not to see some superiority to their white liberal hosts...

...As Hanson saw, and as everyone knew, this worked a charm, producing students who were well adjusted, well educated, and productive...

...Hanson argues that California (and the federal government with its border responsibilities and welfare state requirements) got into this present mess only by doing nearly everything wrong for the last thirty years...

...came up silently, put twenty pounds of fruit and vegetables in a bag, joked about picking such produce themselves, and then slapped down a wad of bills...

...As Hanson writes: For years I peddled my fruit at farmers' markets in Carmel and Santa Cruz...

...The system now produces students, especially Hispanic students, who are uneducated, likely to drop out, and alienated...

...At this point, one must rush to assure the reader that Hanson is far from anti-Hispanic...

...But as a classicist, he also conveys this warning about our mutual home state: if Thucydides were to consider the cultural conflicts between Mexicans and Anglos in California today, he would prophesy war...

...His book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years, is published this month...

...That, in turn, means imposing strict and serious border controls and not tolerating (as California does now) one more restrictive body of law for citizens and one hypocritically liberal nudge-nudge-wink-wink body of law for illegal aliens...

...But his life in California becomes addictive...

...The education system drilled American patriotism into its students and held them to high moral and academic standards (including even teaching them the classics in grade school...

...They asked a litany of questions about sprays, fertilizers, and farming techniques—all as a prerequisite for buying $2 worth of tomatoes...

...Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a syndicated columnist...

...He finds Mexican trespassers on his land and is told, "Hey, it's our land anyway—not yours...

...His entire life has been spent in a town where Hispanics constitute the majority (though that majority has grown overwhelmingly...

...The government of Mexico, of course, loves the current system, because America provides a convenient safety valve for its own enormous problems with unemployment, poverty, and political dishonesty...

...Until three decades ago, as Hanson relates with his usual candor, the old chauvinism of the melting pot worked...

...But if I have ever envied Hanson his career as a farmer, classics professor, and military historian in California's Central Valley (and I have), his new book Mexifornia quickly disabuses the reader that his is a rural idyll...

...But Mexican shoppers...

...He has Hispanic in-laws and relatives...

...Cars, driven by drunken Mexicans, scythe his vines and are abandoned by their owners in his ditches...

...Had they dressed in white pants, deck shoes and chic sunglasses—and the Carmelites in garish, glittery shirts and cheap polyester pants—you would have thought the aliens were the munificent gentry, and the Monterey Hills crowd the boorish poor...

...His sons, imbibing their father's bitterness and lacking his work ethic, easily fall prey to the lures of gangs, racial hatred, and other social pathologies...

...the idea of returning home disappears...

...On this score: viva la raza...

...I alas have been exiled to Virginia, and my maternal grandparents' house is now an historical building (my mother goes on the tours occasionally to correct the tour guides...

...and though his life remains better than anything he could have dreamt of in Mexico (including, as his body breaks down, for medical care and other state-provided benefits), he becomes embittered...

...Hanson is no alarmist...

...The sad thing is that none of this is necessary...

...t, H. W Crocker III, a former California gubernatorial speechwriter and author most recently of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History, is a senior editor with The American Spectator...

...Ironically, as Hanson points out, America's morally degraded popular culture is the unreliable glue that holds California's ethnically diverse young people together...

...If we turn Oregon into Mexico, we'll stampede our America's morally degraded popular culture is the unreliable glue that holds California's ethnically diverse young people together...

...Immigrants from Ireland or Russia or Armenia left their homelands far across the seas...

...Mexican" used here as it is used in California, as ambiguously as regards citizenship as the amorphous California-Mexican border...

...As a crass generalization, the Asians and whites complained about the price, demanded samples and seemed always to eat at least one fig or plum without paying...

...Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon...

...I am a sixth generation Californian of English extraction...

...He tells the man to stop, and both beater and beaten berate him...

...But with Mexico, a fluid border makes for all sorts of confusion, for which the ultimate price might be catastrophic, as defensive ethnic pride is given no reason to conform to an American ideal, save the new Western ethic of grievance and entitlement and surly, radical, unrestrained individualism...

...Hanson's fields are dumping grounds for caravans full of refuse, left by Mexicans who consider any acreage not their own a suitable rubbish pit...

...They come to California for all the obvious reasons...

...There was no going back...

...And so the domino theory moves from Southeast Asia to the American West...

...But the system makes for internal dilemmas within the immigrant himself...

...There was no belief that one day there would be so many Armenians in the Central Valley that it would be annexed to greater Armenia...

...He is no faint-heart...

...Initially, the first generation Mexican immigrant's goal is to make such a financial killing from working in the fields that he can return to Mexico as a sort of hidalgo...