This is an article from Victor Davis Hansen, a Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institute at Stanford University (Emphasis added by Mr.
Hansen)
Adios, California. 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
over-regulate 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.
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. "
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment