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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: What Can We Learn from the Mexicans? In his essay "America Vs Mexico: Clashing Civilizations", Frosty Woodbridge [sic], a columnist with a generally good head on his shoulders, puts forward ten points which he claims demonstrates that "everything about Mexico degrades everything about America." While I am sympathetic with Frosty's view that Mexicans do not make good Americans, and certainly not in the numbers which are now washing across the border like wastewater from a gigantic broken sewer line, I think he is seriously mistaken in the flaws he assigns to our Little Brown Neighbors. The following is list of Frosty's ten points, numbered here for convenient reference, each one of which is followed by my response: Response: Puberty, which arrives around the age of 12, is the time which Nature has selected for children to become sexually active, and I think it is both presumptuous and repugnant to require pubescent children, surging with hormones, to find satisfaction in masturbation, homosexual contact, bestiality and other perverted forms of sexual release. On the contrary, puberty may be the perfect time for marriage, since a strong sexual urge may help boys and girls to form a stronger pair bond, to say nothing of aiding teenagers to get thru one of the most difficult periods of life, helping them to avoid gangdom and other urban ills that plague otherwise unoccupied youngsters, and making it easier to establish early on the life patterns of responsibility and hard work that are needed for survival. Indeed, thruout most of history, men and women have typically married around puberty, and have learned to assume adult roles out of necessity. The suspended animation of extended childhood, which is now forced on boys and girls till age 18 or 21, is a perversion and abnormality of nature, and leads not only to a dependency mentality, but to unnecessary conflict with parental authority which is inevitably generated by adult children living at home. Even more important, extended childhood delays the exposure of children to the one thing that is critical for helping a great many of them to grow up -- children of their own. And on top of that, it ignores the implicit advice of one of the most socially and financially successful segments of the American population, the Pennsylvania Dutch, who typically marry at 14. Response: The term 'sexism' is merely a smear word intended to denigrate the natural relation and differing roles of the sexes. As Freud said, anatomy is destiny, and unless the woman's role as the bearer and nurturer of children is honored and supported by society, that society will fail to reproduce and eventually die out. Likewise, it is impossible for families to be stable unless the ultimate authority devolves upon a single person, since 'equal authority' is simply a recipe for fighting and stalemate; and Nature, by virtue of anatomy, has placed that authority with the man: He is both strong enuf and aggressive enuf to enforce his authority, but equally, he is usually sufficiently blinded by his love for the woman to prevent his doing the woman any serious harm, and indeed his love will allow him -- once his position of power is secure -- to listen to the woman's advice and eventually become civilized as a result of it. Response: As proponents of drug legalization have pointed out time after time, the problem with 'drug crime' is simply that drugs are illegal. This is because drug illegality forces drug dealers to protect their property and their turf by themselves -- something that the police would presumably do if drugs were legal -- and such protection requires violence, which is the only language that most drug dealers can understand. Also, since dealers can't just open up a storefront and let the customers come to them, they are forced to develop customers themselves, and this requires that they induce youngsters to give drugs a try. Response: I don't know what the 'spontaneous hangings' are about, but I do not believe in the existence of uncaused events. Mexico is politically unstable, is full of drug dealers, and is accustomed to doing business by bribery, so it is not difficult to see that such a mixture could easily lead to ugly violence. America has been thru its own periods of violence, so I do not believe that the cited events are a reason to condemn Mexico to Hell just yet. Response: The poverty of Mexico makes education a luxury in many cases. A man who must scratch for a living cannot concern himself with reading Shakespeare or Cervantes. In addition, television, which is just as important in Mexico as in the US, tends to undercut the desire for reading and schooling. Mexicans may not be nearly as educated as Americans, but on the other hand, most Americans are not well-educated because of the dumbed-down curricula that passes for education in the present day; and in any event, to say that Mexicans 'abhor' education is without foundation. Certainly the lack of diplomas has no intrinsic relevance to education, and if Mexicans stay out of school and educate themselves, I would count them as smarter than most Americans. I would expect that Mexicans will start to get educated once they are made to see the relation of education to earning a good living -- something which, for cultural reasons, may take a while, but does not necessarily make Mexicans into meatheads. Response: Drunk driving, like terrorism, drugs, pedophilia and baldness, is one of America's great bete noires, all of which share the characteristic that their importance is tremendously overblown. In fact, there is nothing strictly wrong with drunk driving at all, provided only that one makes the drunk driver responsible for any damage he may cause. Unfortunately, we live in a Nanny State which seeks to extinguish individual responsibility in favor of protecting everyone from risk, and especially from ourselves. This is why we have seat-belt laws, this is why we have drug laws, and this is why we have drunk driving laws -- we must at all costs be protected from ourselves and from others. I, on the other hand, say that people should drive in whatever condition they desire, and be made to pay the costs of whatever damage they do. Needless to say, Mexicans are unlikely to have enuf cash to pay for anything, so I say put 'em in the work house till they earn enuf to pay off the debt. Stupid as they are, I think they would learn this lesson pretty quickly. And it will at least have the virtue of keeping the muthas off the road. Response: As an animal lover, I don't have a great deal of enthusiasm for animal blood sport, but -- except for horse tripping, which I have never heard of, and which seems absurd in view of the cost of horses -- I don't think it is especially cruel, and indeed, maybe it is not cruel at all. Animals are made to fight, and letting them follow their natural instincts may actually be liberating in some sense. Just as the Olympic athlete trains for years for the Great Day, so in some sense do bulls and cocks and dogs. They will meet their deaths just as we all will, and if it happens to be in a burst of glory rather than a slaughterhouse or a veterinary parlor -- a bang rather than a whimper, in the famous words of TS ("Tough Shit") Eliot -- I don't think it makes much difference. Besides, animal blood sports are teaching devices -- they make us realize that, when it comes down to the wire, human beings must be brave and be prepared to die, and an acquaintance with the struggles and deaths of brave fighting animals is a good lesson for us all. Response: I see nothing whatsoever the matter with racism. I am a racist, and indeed so is everyone, altho they may not put it in so many words. Racism is merely a desire to live, work, marry and mingle with one's own kind. It is a law of nature most commonly expressed as 'Birds of a feather flock together.' I just don't want La Raza to displace Ma Raza. Response: Mexico is often described as being 'riddled with corruption', and from this it is usually concluded that Mexico is an 'immoral' country. At best, however, this charge is only partly true, and at worst it is grossly misleading and unfair. To begin, let us ask, What, precisely, is 'corruption'? The answer, in general, is 'A failure to play by the established rules, as by giving others special favors or waivers, usually in exchange for clandestinely-provided goods or services'. What this amounts to in the case of a country is that its officials accept bribes -- in Mexico they are called 'mordidas' -- in exchange for waiving the rules or speeding up bureaucratic processes. But it would be a mistake to think that taking bribes is considered immoral, for in most Third-world countries, this is simply the way things are done, and no opprobrium is attached to it. We may think of bribe-taking, if you will, as a fee for services rendered, where the payment goes to a 'facilitator' whose job is to speed things up or otherwise clear a path for his client. In America it is called 'influence-peddling', but is only illegal in its more blatant forms. But there is more to the matter than this, because the underlying reason for 'corruption' in a country is that the central authority is weak, and not that its employees are 'immoral'. More specifically, when the central authority is poor, as it is in Mexico, then the salaries which it pays to its employees are small, and therefore bribe-taking is not just a temptation, but often a matter of economic survival. More generally, when the central authority can only pay its employees small salaries, the employees do not consider the risk of a penalty for bribe-taking to be greater than the reward which that bribery is able to provide, whereas a larger salary -- as a rich country like the United States can provide -- makes government employees cherish their jobs, with the result that they are very wary of taking bribes unless the risk is small and the bribe is large. The problem, then, is to make the central authority strong enuf (and rich enuf) to keep corruption at bay, as opposed to 'rooting out immorality' at the employee level. This, however, presents a problem all its own, because the central authority itself (as opposed to the employees) is often corrupt: As Lord Acton put it, Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It should be noted, however, that the central authority of Mexico is no more corrupt than the central authority of the US, so in this sense the countries are equal in their degree of corruption. What is more, the US government is itself a corrupter of other governments, for it is accustomed to bribing foreign governments with so-called 'foreign aid'. The principal ones who suffer under a corrupt government are the poor, for it is the poor who cannot afford the bribes that will bring them justice, or whatever it is that they are seeking. In this sense, then, the poor is the group to whom corrupt governments are most unfair; and yet it is life itself which is most unfair to the poor, so one might wonder whether the effort to stamp out corruption is really very helpful to the ones who need it most. But if corruption has a downside, it also has the upside that it provides a welcome way to cut red tape, ie, a welcome way to motivate otherwise-immobile bureaucrats to get off their duffs and do their jobs, Elvis. We have all heard stories of how some put-upon person has gone from agency to agency and individual to individual, all to no avail in getting a great and important project off the ground; but in a place where the mordida is standard operating procedure, the project can get off the ground with only a bit of palm oil to grease the upturned skids. While we have noted that corruption is defined as 'not playing by the rules', it is illuminating to realize that corruption is actually independent of morality, unless you are what is called a 'rule utilitarian', who believes that morality is DEFINED as 'playing by the rules'. I say this because it is perfectly possible that the central authority makes the rules, and that the central authority is corrupt. Thus a more accurate definition of corruption is that there is a difference between the way things ARE and the way things S'POSED to be. Given this, it is easy to see that the powers that be could be on a higher moral plane than the ones that are "s'posed" to be, as might be the case if space aliens are the powers behind earthly events; and given this, it would be odd to say that events caused by those on a higher moral plane are 'corrupt', as we would do if we adhered to the normal definition of the word. In a somewhat similar vein, while we might normally think of a dictatorship as corrupt because it does not adhere to democratic principles, it is entirely possible for a dictatorship to run a 'cleaner house' in some sense than a 'democratic' one, as might be argued in the case of Cromwell's 'Puritans' replacing the parliamentary kingship of Charles I, or Hitler's 'clean regime' replacing the corrupt Weimar republic. In conclusion, we have tried to make several points about 'corrupt' regimes, which are important in formulating a judgment about corruption. These include the following: * Corruption is normal for weak central authorities * Corruption is a way of doing business * Corruption does not imply immorality * Strong central authorities have their own moral problems * When immoral central authorities make the rules, corruption may be preferable to its absence. Response: Most Mexicans are poor, and the poor tend to identify with Marxism because Marxism is the poor man's philosophy. But I also think that Mexicans are not philosophers and don't really think much about Marxism -- my guess is that they are mainly interested in prospering economically, and are willing to take risks -- including crossing the Southwest American desert -- in order to improve things. What that means is that they are CAPITALISTS, irrespective of rhetoric or party affiliation. In conclusion, let me just say that, in spite of giving Frosty such a frosty reception for his essay, I do believe that he has his heart in the right place, and that I am perfectly happy to cheer him on in his campaign to put Mexicans and other latrinos in their place. I would add, however, that America has a few things to learn from these folks -- some of which are mentioned above -- and the sooner we learn them, the sooner we will be able to turn back the Rising Tide of Color.
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