MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 146 revenge, bodies littered about, nudity, obscenity, sex scenes, syrupy endings. Video games, unlike books, plays or board games, are universally hypnotic precisely because they demand little literacy, provide explosions of color and imagery, and require only a type of eye-hand-brain synergy that is not culturally specific. Fast food offends few since it is neither spicy nor sour, and thus calls for no acquired taste. Instead it grows increasingly bland, ample and cheap—and packaged in such a way that it is as easily edible in a car as at a table. Americans are criticized for preferring quicker, cheaper Taco Bell to more conventional and tastier real Mexican dishes; but then, illegal aliens too—especially young males—increasingly buy such American take-out rather than traditionally prepared tortillas. Their girlfriends agree, and—costs being about equal—likewise choose to eat in the car en route to the mall, rather than stay home in a hot kitchen rolling corn-flour dough. Mass communication through darting images on television, pictures on computer screens and photos in printed matter are more easily digested than written texts. If such schlock is sweeping the globe—and along with it American English, American business protocols, American sports, American advertising, American media and American casual behavior—one can imagine the net effect of it all at its place of birth in America, of which California remains the epicenter. At a time when illegal immigration is at an all-time high, and formal efforts at forging a common culture and encouraging assimilation are at an all-time low, the habits, tastes, appetites and expressions of everyday people have offered a rescue of sorts—perhaps del- eterious to the long-term moral health of the United States, but in the short term about the only tool we possess to prevent racial separation and ethnic tribalism. Informality in dress, slang speech, movies, videos, television—all this makes assimilation easier, even at a time when professional racialists are calling for highbrow separatism.