MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 150

my drawer. Just as age or gender distinctions have been absorbed

by media and entertainment, so it is, at last, with race and national

heritageâ€"the last and most stubborn of man’s traditional pecking

orders to fall.

To the alien from Mexico, so often young and male, immedi-

ate inclusion into this new dynamic civilization has had a startling

effectâ€"perhaps deleterious to his moral development, to be sure;

but for the purposes of immediate assimilation, on the other

hand, undeniably good. Movies have sexy women of all colors.

Images of a Hispanic Penelope Cruz dating Anglo Tom Cruise

splash across magazine covers. The public cares little what color

are Oprah, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez

(most recently engaged to Ben Affleck), Ricky Martin or Antonio

Banderas. The only requisites for success in this glitzy culture are

charm, athleticism, looks and pizzazzâ€"none of it the property of

any one ethnicity. If a Latina is curvy, she not only captures more

attention than a rail-thin white womanâ€"such universally human

propensities and tastes are hardly newâ€"but for the first time wins

commensurate money, status and celebrity as a pinup in a world

where the prejudices of the past are shown to be money-losers in

the present.

The result is that millions of illegal aliens are seeing brown

women and men arm in arm with blacks, Asians and whites at

Food4Less and Starbucks, but also in limousines and giving celeb-

rity interviews. Superficial equality? Perhaps. But again, for the

first time in civilized memory all the old readily perceivable biases

are simply vanishingâ€"and that does affect a deeper reality. What

class divisions we have are far more fluid than Europe’s or Asia’s.

Moneyâ€"a much fairer and more fluctuating barometer of status

than birth and breedingâ€"can put a prosperous cesspool franchiser

on the local ballet board and lead his kids to be courted by the top

universities.

This almost instantaneous blending of the social classes

through shared cravings has, of course, nearly wrecked the efforts