Читаем After America полностью

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 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 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?