Well, actually it’s a lot more literate, but nonetheless, I don’t think Marty Peretz misses a single stereotype about Mexico or Mexicans, and all are cherished by Southwestern racists like it was their mother’s milk.
Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because 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. Then, there is the Mexican diaspora in America, hard-working and patriotic but mired in its untold numbers of illegals, about whom no one can talk with candor.
Via Lindsay. It’s hard to pick out the most amusing/disturbing part of this rant, but I have a special affection for the bullshit at the end. One thing that I’ve discovered whenever I venture west of the Pecos is that people talk about their loathing of immigrants (always presumed illegal) with surprising candor. True, they rarely call them “patriotic”, except to wonder, Michelle Malkin-style, if their loyalty to their families back home means they are some sort of Fifth Column. I’m unsure how Peretz manages to work in both stereotypes about how Mexicans are relentlessly hard-working with stereotypes about how they’re lazy and addicted to siestas, but the ways of blatant racists (and their ability to hold contradictory stereotypes in their heads) will always be a mystery. But that, alas, is far from my favorite contradiction. I far prefer stereotyping the Mexican government as unduly authoritarian, but also stereotyping all resistance to the government as unjustified—-in adjacent phrases, no less.
I have zero doubt that writing this will get me accused by some obsessive wingnut blogger of “race-baiting”, and demands will be made to justify this thing that the government of Mexico did that’s offensive to liberal sensibilities. But as long as we’re holding prisoners without charging them and extending them their full human rights, we’re in a definite glass house on the issue of authoritarian governments. And I’m not even going to entertain a point by point comparison of Mexican culture to ours on the subject of religiosity when I read, right before this, a bunch of anti-choice religious wackos who get taken seriously by our media and government glory in the deaths of 14 people because they were family to an abortion provider. In fact, I will say that I find it amusing that Peretz leans on the liberal value of religious freedom to justify his ugly racism, when I’d argue that the fact that the Mexican government covers abortion under its national health care plan shows that they beat our asses in separating religious dogma and government policy.
But seriously? He invoked the stereotype of laziness. That really ends any credibility he or his arguments have. Christ, what an asshole.
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Welcome to Massachusetts! Well, maybe, Massachusetts 1975, but this still captures the essence of the place. Rhode Island too.