After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (37 page)

have formally erased the distinction between U.S. citizens and the armies of the undocumented. This is the active collusion by multiple jurisdictions in the subversion of United States sovereignty. In Newark, New Jersey, it means an illegal-immigrant child rapist is free to murder three high-school students execution-style for kicks on a Saturday night.74 In Somerville, Massachusetts, it means two deaf girls are raped by MS-13 members.75 And in the 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, where four young men obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flight on September 11, 2001, it means Saudi Wahhabists figuring out that, if the “sanctuary nation”

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(in Michelle Malkin’s phrase) offers such rich pickings to imported killers and imported gangs, why not to jihadists?76

So here is another proposition for the proposition nation: Is it more likely that these trends will reverse—or that they will accelerate? Consider life in a permanently poorer America with higher unemployment, less social mobility, and any prospect for self-improvement crushed by the burden of government. Will that mean more or less marijuana? More or less cocaine?

More or fewer meth labs? Mexican cartels account for approximately 70

percent of the narcotics that enter the U.S. to feed American habits.77 Arizona already has a kidnapping rate closer to Mexico’s than to New England’s. Are the numbers likely to rise or fall in an ever more Mexicanized United States? If you’re lucky, San Diego will seem no worse than Cancun, eastern resort capital of the Caribbean Riviera and generally thought of as relatively far from the scene of Mexico’s drug wars.78 Yet even in Cancun, within the space of a year, the head of the city’s anti-drugs squad was murdered; the chief of police was arrested on drugs-trafficking charges; and then the mayor was, too. We will start to read similar stories of wholesale corruption and subversion from the cities of the American Southwest. And similar tales of depravity, too: in 2010, the bodies of four men and two women were found in a cave on the outskirts of Cancun.79 They had been tortured. Their abdomens were branded with a “Z.” The mark of Zorro?

No, the Zeta drug cartel. Three of them had had their chests ripped open and their hearts removed.

As I said, Cancun is regarded as one of the towns least afflicted by drug violence. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq between 2003 and 2010.

In 2010 alone, some 13,000 Mexicans were killed in the drug wars.80 More than 3,000 died in just one town—Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.81 America will be importing not just drugs from Mexico, but the dominant players, the municipal outreach, and the business practices.

It’s foolish to assume “globalization” is a purely economic phenomenon.

In 2006, a group of Muslim men raised in suburban Ontario were arrested and charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime fall 253

Minister.82 Almost simultaneously, the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River.83 In 2010, four headless bodies were left dangling from a bridge in the picture-postcard tourist town of Cuernavaca.84 The same year, authorities arrested a leading hit-man beheader for one of the Mexican drug cartels.85 He was fourteen years old, and a U.S. citizen, too (the anchor baby of an undocumented Californian).

The drug cartels weren’t Muslim last time I checked, but decapitation isn’t just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head.

How about stoning? Isn’t that something they do to women in Iran?

Yes, but a good idea soon finds an export market. In 2010, the body of Gustavo Sanchez, mayor of Tancitaro, in the Mexican state of Michoacán, was found with that of an aide in an abandoned truck.86 Both men had been stoned to death. Tancitaro isn’t anywhere important: it’s a town of 26,000

people. Nonetheless, in the year before the mayor’s fatal stoning, the city council chief was kidnapped and tortured to death, and Sanchez’ predecessor and seven other officials resigned after being threatened by drug gangs and left unprotected by local cops. The entire 60-man police department was subsequently fired. In Santiago, they found their mayor’s corpse with his eyes gouged out.87 Mexico is degenerating into a narco-terrorist enterprise with a sovereign state as a minor subsidiary. George W. Bush liked to say of Iraq that we’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here. In Mexico, America has no choice in the matter: the decapitations and stonings and eye-gougings will move north of the border.

Of course, the real narco-state is not Mexico but America: if we didn’t take drugs, we wouldn’t need someone to supply them, and running a cartel wouldn’t be such a lucrative enterprise. America’s hedonist stupor has real consequences for others, and we will be living with them north of the “border” all too soon. But it’s not necessary to argue about the drug cartels, or the gang killers, the child rapists, the drunk-drivers. Even without these, the central fact of Hispanic immigration—the wholesale transformation of innumerable American municipalities at unprecedented speed—

would place a huge question mark over the future. Don’t take my word for 254

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it, take the
New York Times’
. In 2009, it ran a story of immigrants in Langley Park, Maryland, “Struggling to Rise in Suburbs” (as the headline put it).88

Usual sludge, but in the middle of it, helpfully explaining Langley Park to his readers, the reporter, Jason DeParle, wrote as follows: “Now nearly two-thirds Latino and foreign-born, it has the aesthetics of suburban sprawl and the aura of Central America. Laundromats double as money-transfer stores.

Jobless men drink and sleep in the sun. There is no city government, few community leaders, and little community.”

At which point I stopped, and went back, and reread it. For it seemed to me at first glance that Mr. DeParle was airily citing laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, and dysfunctional metropolitan government all as evidence of “the aura of Central America.” And that can’t be right, can it? Only a couple of days earlier, some Internet wags had leaked a discussion thread from the JournoList, the exclusive virtual country club where all the hepcat liberals hang out. In this instance, the media grandees were arguing vehemently that Martin Peretz of
The New Republic
was, in the elegant formulation one associates with today’s J-school alumni, a “crazy-ass racist.”89 The proof that this lifelong liberal is a “fucking racist” came in his observations on our friendly neighbor to the south: “I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations,” said Mr. Peretz. “A (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict.”90

Martin Peretz’s assumptions about “the aura of Central America” are not so very different from Jason DeParle’s, but Mr. Peretz brought down the wrath of his own side’s politically correct enforcers. Even though his remarks are utterly unexceptional to anyone familiar with Latin America.

But since when have the PC police cared about observable reality?

Langley Park is a good example of where tiptoeing around on multiculti eggshells leads: there is literally no language in which what’s happening in fall 255

suburban Maryland can be politely discussed, not if an ambitious politician of either party wishes to remain viable. America is a land where the NAACP

complains about the use of the widely known scientific term “black hole”

on a Hallmark greeting card, and Hallmark instantly withdraws the card;91

a land so obsessed by race that, in order to reverse an entirely fictional manifestation of “racism,” it invented the subprime mortgage and sat back as it came within a smidgeonette of destroying the housing market, banking system, and insurance industry. But, even if it had, at least we’d have demonstrated our anti-racist bona fides even unto self-destruction, so that’s okay.

To exhibit any interest in immigration or its consequences is to risk being marked down as, if not a “racist,” at least a “nativist.” And “immigration” isn’t really what it is, is it? After all, in traditional immigration patterns the immigrant assimilates with his new land, not the new land with the immigrant. Yet in this case the aura of Maryland dissolves like a mirage when faced with “the aura of Central America.”

Two generations ago, America, Canada, Australia, and the rest of the developed world took it as read that a sovereign nation had the right to determine which, if any, foreigners it extended rights of residency to. Now only Japan does. Everywhere else, opposition to mass immigration is “nativist,” and expressing a preference for one group of immigrants over another is “racist.” Until the Sixties, governments routinely distinguished between Irish and Bulgar, Indian and Somali, but now all that matters is the glow of virtue you feel from refusing to distinguish, as if immigration is like a UN

peacekeeping operation—one of those activities in which you have no

“national interest.”

Very few elderly, established residents of Langley Park knowingly voted for societal self-extinction, yet in barely a third of a century it’s become a fait accompli. And in a politically correct world there is no acceptable form of public discourse in which to object to it.

And so it just kinda happened. Another proposition: When large tracts of the United States take on “the aura of Central America”—laundromats doubling as money-transfer stores, jobless men drinking and sleeping in the sun, civic collapse, to cite only
New York Times
-observed phenomena—will 256

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such a land still be the United States? Or will it increasingly be the northern branch office of Latin America? None of us can say for sure, but, underneath the smiley-face banalities about hard-working families wanting a shot at the American Dream, I think most of us know which way to bet.

Human capital is the most reliable indicator of what society you’ll be.

Even liberals, even Martin Peretz, even the
New York Times
acknowledge that, at least in unguarded moments. For almost half a century, the human capital of the United States has transformed faster than at any time since the founding of the republic.

“Poor Mexico,” Porfirio Diaz, the country’s longtime strongman, is supposed to have said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.”

Today Mexico is America’s southern quagmire—farther from God than ever, and not close to the United States but in it.

After the Arizona court decision, Jon Richards published a cartoon in the
Albuquerque Journal
. It showed three Indians standing on the shore watching the Mayflower approach. “Are they legal?” wonders the chief.

“What do we do if they have babies?” asks his squaw. “Is it too late to build a fence?” says the brave.92

What is the message of this cartoon? That America has always been a land of immigrants? Or that the tide of illegal settlement is going to work out as well for the United States as it did for the Algonquin nation? Is Richards’ cartoon just the cheap triumphalism of a self-loathing Anglo’s cultural relativism? Or is it actually a portent of the future? The latter isn’t so hard to imagine: a largely impoverished Hispanic Southwest, with a few tony Anglo gated communities—or, if you prefer, “reservations.”

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ShadowLandS

The Conformicrats live off the fruits of the productive class and they need to keep them in a state of quiescence. They achieve this with their allies fall 257

in the dependent class by a kind of pincer movement. From above, the ideological aristocracy can inflict any amount of pain through its administrative enforcers. From below, there is the seething dysfunctional jungle of the underclass. You can measure civilized societies by how easy it is to insulate yourself from the predators, and in America it is still easier than in Britain. But, lurking in the Conformicrats’ coercion of the beleaguered productive class is the implicit threat of a good cop/bad cop routine—or good statist/dysfunctional statist: if you don’t give us what we want—more money for more agencies and more bureaucrats—we may not be able to hold the underclass in check, and you’re within easier reach of ’em than we are. It is a worthless guarantee: given the human wreckage piled up by half-a-century of diseducation, welfarism, sexual self-destruction, and much else, the Eloi aristocracy cannot hold a Morlock dependent class in check.

“We have not yet seen what man can make of man,” wrote the behaviorist B. F. Skinner.93 Well, we’re about to.

Under Big Government, the ruling class get power and perks, some of the ruled class have workarounds (gated communities, offshore accounts), but others among the ruled class just get unruly.

What will the statists do? We are already watching municipalities drown in the pensions liabilities of their bureaucracies. Do they fix the problem or do they cut core services? The latter’s the way to bet: you don’t fire the police officers, but you reassign them to desk jobs where they’ll get out less and thus require fewer vehicles, less gas, less equipment, less ammunition.

It’s already happening in the poorer cities, but, like rot in the boarded-up houses, the signs of decay will creep further up. A lot of cities will take on the character of Third World swamps the colonial authorities are resigned to losing: the police hole up in well fortified headquarters venturing out in heavily armored vehicles ever more rarely. Think St. Louis, Missouri, or Gary, Indiana, with a Green Zone, and your house is twelve blocks outside the perimeter. When the neighborhood’s up for grabs, all that expensive law enforcement of the Security State won’t be there for you. Get yourself a gun, while you’re still allowed to.

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Picture an American airport on the Friday afternoon before a big public holiday—the long, slow trudge to gain admission to the secure area. The