Victor Davis Hanson: Anarcho-Tyranny in California/And Things were Bad Enough Before Mass Third World Immmigration!

By Nicholas Stix

The following December, 2010, Victor Davis Hanson essay, entitled, “Two Californias,” is about what the late Sam Francis called, “anarcho-tyranny”: The government’s imposing of terror on certain groups, and granting of license to other groups.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

The only thing wrong with the above paragraph is the last sentence. One might understand compassion for poor Americans, but these aren’t Americans, they are criminal invaders whose felonies are integral to their criminal way of life. If California were still under the rule of law, seeing illegal habitations would be a perfect reason to call in INS, to rid us of some criminal invaders.

They come here illegally, and everything they do is illegal, not just in the broad sense of being acts committed while illegally here, but in the sense of luxuriating in lawlessness. They think they have a license to drive cars without driver’s licenses, inspections, or insurance; to trespass on people’s property, and steal their fruit, and anything else not nailed down, and some things that are; to buy and/or sell false ID; illegally get EITC money; join violent, criminal gangs; steal cars; sell drugs; rape children; steal medical treatment; etc.

Meanwhile, after the authorities give a group of tens of millions of people a pass for most crimes, the former tell us with a straight face that “crime is down.”

They’re just not counting “immigration crimes” (But didn’t they take an oath to enforce the law? Isn’t the refusal by law enforcement to enforce the law itself a crime?) became they’re just not counting “minor” crimes, like anything short of murder. And now they’re not punishing murder, either, for certain groups.

When Hanson mentions California’s rural roads, I think of Trinidad, which the Stix family just visited. In every town in Trinidad, folks will tell you that they have the nation’s worst roads, and they’re not exaggerating.

The country is completely dependent on the automobile, and yet the government workers paid to do the repairs have been MIA for years. Not that here isn’t a huge public sector of well-paid malingerers.

Heavily-traveled roads require constant repair, repairs that once were the sort of thing American governments at all levels excelled at. But to paraphrase Nathan Glazer, about 50 years ago, government switched from doing the sort of things it can do well, like fixing potholes and painting bridges, to doing the sort of things it can’t do well, like fixing broken lives.

Under the anarcho-tyranny of racial socialism, government can no longer even fix potholes.

Sometime between 2015 and 2020, roads throughout California are going to start looking like those rural roads Hanson wrote about.

But let us not forget that the rot began before mass Third World immigration. Many of America’s great cities were destroyed beginning in the early-to-mid 1960s, by the so-called Civil Rights Movement, and then by Hispanics (often Puerto Ricans, who were American citizens by birth, and thus not immigrants), as well.

My marriage to The Boss almost never came about. When we went to City Hall to get our marriage license, while waiting on line, I was attacked by a black couple. (I’ll tell that story another time.)

I think the next hurdle occurred on the day of our wedding, which I believe was a different day, but since The Boss is presently at work, I can’t ask her.

The young woman filling out our marriage license was a tall, broad-shouldered, Puerto Rican of about 26 or 27. Cute face. However, the whole time she was asking us questions and we were giving her the information she needed to fill out the license correctly, she was engaged in a loud conversation with a friend or relative on her cellphone. (I can’t recall if it was in English or Spanish.)

I asked her if she could do her job while talking on the phone. She responded, “I’m Wonder Woman.”

Well, she wasn’t Wonder Woman; she was a total screw-up.

Downstairs, we checked the form, and found that “Wonder Woman” had not listened to The Boss, and had written false answers to questions, which would have invalidated our marriage. We had to go back upstairs, wait on line all over again, and get an unapologetic “Wonder Woman” to write up a new license.

The woman’s mistake was not an innocent accident; she knew she wasn’t supposed to talk on the phone while doing her job, but she didn’t give a damn about doing her job correctly, at least not for non-Hispanics.

I’m not sure whether she deliberately filled out the marriage license incorrectly, but due to her militant negligence, she was just as culpable for her screw-up.

Malingering Puerto Ricans in New York public sector jobs were pervasive in my childhood as to be proverbial, but Hispanics then lacked the sort of political muscle to enforce sympathetic depictions of them in the entertainment media that they now have. Thus, the creators of the James Coco sitcom, Colucci’s Department, set in New York City public agency where Coco played the eponymous supervisor, were able to create a malingering Puerto Rican character, Angel (?) (Jose Perez), whose answer to Colucci’s every request was, “That’s not my yob, man.”

Although the show was short-lived, “That’s not my yob, man” briefly became almost as famous a phrase—in New York, at any rate—as “Show me the money!” would be 25 years later. (It didn’t help the show’s longevity that CBS slated it for the suicide slot opposite Redd Foxx in NBC’s Sanford & Son.)

There’s a saying that we should never attribute to malice what we can attribute to incompetence. Twenty-seven years in New York City—heck, based on just my first one or two—have taught me, at least where protected minorities are concerned—go with malice.

I don’t want to seem like I’m playing fast and loose here, so let me distinguish two kinds of malice: The malice of deciding in general, not to care about doing one’s job properly for members of certain groups, and the malice of deciding on an individual basis to stick it to the person one is supposed to be serving.

Had the clerk been black, I would likely have concluded that both forms of malice were at work. But in Wonder Woman’s case, it is possible that only the first, general sort of malice was at work. But it was malice, all the same.

* * *
Two Californias
By Victor Davis Hanson
December 15, 2010
National Review Online

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

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 crisscrossing 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. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

[A tip ‘o the exposed wire to Brenda Walker.]