a society of laws and customs, not a frontier town like the current
one, in which thousands reside illegally, have no lawful documen-
tation, and assume that Selma must adapt to their ways, not the
reverse.

Time passes; things must change. And so I accept transfor-

mations that are inevitable: a price-cutting Wal-Mart would drive
out our third-generation Japanese-owned nursery, and multina-
tional agribusiness would overwhelm the once prosperous Sikh
family farm down the road. While I saw all this happening as if
by time lapse, I hoped that the new Selma would at least retain the
language, customs, laws and multiracial but unicultural flavor of
the old. But it has not.

I look at these things, however, also as a classics professor

at the local California State University campus twenty-five miles
away. As a historian I accept in the abstract that culture is unstable
and always evolves—often radically. The Greek polis became the
Hellenistic municipality; the Italian republic turned into the poly-
glot Roman Empire; Hebrew Palestine became in turns Persian,
Greek, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, English and Israeli. By training, we
in the academy are detached observers who try to inculcate a sense
of distance and objectivity, an acceptance of the fact that history is
restless and culture mutable. There are age-old processes far larger
than ourselves, which predate us and will go on long after we are
dead. So I mostly watch Selma and listen, trying to forget about
my own past and present, and attempt to chronicle dispassionately
what is going on around me—especially the strange paradox of
immigrants streaming toward Western countries even as many are
angry at themselves for doing so. I still try to drive out the echoes
of my grandfather’s subjective folk wisdom and my long-dead
aunt’s exhaustive Selma genealogies (e.g., “The youngest Josephson
girl married Aram Eknonian’s older brother who lived on Tucker
Street”) to replace it with the cold logic of Thucydides, who knew
so well the nature of man and the predictable mess he creates (e.g.,
“an exact knowledge of the past [is] an aid to the understanding

MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson

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