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.MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 110MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 111of the old assimilationist model that integrated my boyhood Mex-ican friends into an American outlook and expectation have beenbig government and big corporations, both entities that have nointerest in local institutions? The former finds power in mindlessconsensus, the latter in money, and both look askance at anythingthat poses an obstacle.Only later, in high school, did I slowly learn why CaesarChavez himself vastly preferred dealing with agribusiness corpo-rations rather than small farmers—with giant, wealthy entities,not sticky little enclaves of cranky and always broke Japanese,Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans and Punjabis who lived next to andnot much differently from their workers.Indeed, if he was ever torealize his ambitions of becoming the Mexican George Meaney incharge of a vast empire of stoop laborers, then Chavez needed theopposition of an easily caricatured rapacious, racist, wealthy, whiteenemy.He wanted a countryside not full of small family farmers,but of a few big agribusinessmen.The agribusiness corporation wasan easy foil, which under an avalanche of liberal commentary, boy-cotts and high-profile visits to Fresno and Delano by the Kennedysand other celebrities could capitulate on television with a wave ofthe pen, sending his own union millions of dollars in paycheckdeductions that, of course, would be looted, lost or mishandled byan extended clique of his family and cronies.And so precisely allthat came to pass for poor Caesar Chavez in the 1970s.Meanwhile, our schools quietly pressed on in presenting theirversion of American history, including the saga of the strugglefor workers’ rights.World War II? We all reviewed the “FourFreedoms” to stress how we had no other choice but to destroythe Nazis and Japanese militarists before we could remake theircountries on principles similar to our own—which, being far morehumane, would ensure that they did not revert to Auschwitz andthe Rape of Nanking.In the early 1960s we knew intimately thestory of Hiroshima and the Japanese internment; yet we learnedthat such tragedies were not the sole themes of World War II, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]