MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 126

arise in the first place south of San Diego, if not to stop thou-

sands of Mexicans from simply storming through immigration

control and onto the streets and highways of southern California,

endangering themselves and startled motorists? Did a nation that

recently lost three thousand of its citizens to foreign terrorists,

some of whom were here illegally, not have the right to police its

own borders? Did the Mexican government have culpability for the

tragedy in the Arizona desert by not bothering to keep its citizenry

from coming north under such radically changed conditions? And

when the United States decided that in a time of war it wished to

reinforce its border policies, should it have made illegal border-

crossing much more difficult or only a little bit more difficult?

The �śprogressive” worldview that churns out such stories has

completely lost the sense of human precariousness common to all

civilizations. Rather than confess that mankind by its very nature

is prone to be murderous, sexist and racist�"and that only liberal

institutions of the West can rein in these innate proclivities�"we

instead demand instantaneous perfection of our own country and

no other, both in the present and in the past. Nowhere in these

stories is there any allowance for human fallibility or weakness, no

admission that Twinkies can be more alluring to the palate than

cabbage, or that doctors, fearing constant lawsuits and increasingly

employed as bureaucrats by HMOs, naturally feel better able to

relate to people who speak their own language.

Worse still, the constant refrain that �śthey” are doing such

terrible things to Hispanics perpetuates the myth that what one

selects to eat, what language one chooses to learn, what crime one

commits or forgoes�"all that and more is beyond the realm of

individual agency and rather subject to larger deterministic forces,

usually prejudicial in nature.

Sometimes the problem is not so much the slanted ideology

of such popular news accounts, but simply the imbalance that is

a part of basic reporting today. What constitutes real news now?

Take, for example, a typical issue of the Fresno Bee, this one dated