The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Five years ago, Victor Davis Hanson, known affectionately in certain quarters as "VDH," interrogated the notion that "we are creating a unique regional culture that is neither Mexican nor American, but an amorphous, fluid society that is the dividend on our multicultural investment," a "Calexico or Mexifornia." Dissenting from prevailing orthodoxies, he made a plea for a return to "to an imperfect, insensitive, but honest assimilationist past that nevertheless worked." During the past five years...well, you know what's happened. Now he's revisiting the issue, finding that things have subsequently become even worse than he had foreseen, but seemingly heartened that "the controversy over illegal immigration [has] moved so markedly to the right."
El Tri are currently on a five-city US tour, and last week I ventured out to join the festivities in a momentary Mexico, a fleeting creamy center surrounded by the greater American donut. I was there for the terrifying lows and the dizzying highs, though the balance turned out tilted sharply toward the latter. It wasn't quite the goleada Hugo Sanchez and I had hoped for, but the home team sent the overwhelming majority of us fanáticos home quite happy. (Highlights here, complete with the pitch invader.)
And yes, it's true, it is, if you let Stanley Fish spoon-feed you that "carnival or festival of cultures" goop it goes down more like saccharine than honey. But the organic shit, man, that shit is superb. It was only a friendly, but the exuberance and collective exhilaration manifested there easily exceeded the comparatively impoverished refractions of Absolute Spirit one finds at the culturally hegemonic "native" sporting events:
Supplying Mexican soccer fans with noisemaking equipment is like hauling corn to Kansas. It's so superfluous that it's silly. The Mexican national team in action last night competed to a ceaseless soundtrack of shouts, screams, chants, horns, inflatable noisesticks, matracas and miscellaneous merriment from a record San Diego soccer crowd of 63,328.
Chargers games, by comparison, are like 60 minutes of chamber music; Padres games like poetry readings. Though last night's game was completely without consequence – it was, in essence, cross-border barnstorming – the decibel level was totally indiscriminate.
[...]
College basketball can produce comparable sounds in some places, as can October baseball in the South Bronx. But the typical American spectator, more and more a product of corporate tickets, is mostly mute except for the brief spasms of sound that accompany a significant play. If it weren't for gambling and alcohol, some games could be conducted in a library without palpably disturbing the peace.
I’m not interested here in making a tackle on the whole immigration imbroglio, nor do I wish to get too can't-we-all-just-get-alongy, but I wonder whether there is perhaps an opportunity for real improvement at a different level than that of the policies and arrangements being hammered and beaten and thrashed out by the politicians, the activists, and the special interest groups with dogs in the show.
If “assimilation” really is the best model for immigration, maybe part of the problem is connected to the question, assimilation to what, exactly? Perhaps part of the problem is that the dominant culture is cold, sterile, spontaneously segregationist, and rather boring.
Some folks say that the Cold War situation forced our power elites to help the civil rights movement along. Maybe we could use the urgency of the immigration issue--real or exaggerated--as a stimulus for some overdue aesthetic refurbishments in our common culture.
I am not suggesting that some of Victor Davis Hanson’s worries aren’t legitimate or serious. But everybody knows that one man’s poison is another man’s fugu. Apropos of his concern with the Mexican poison, so to speak, and relevant as well to one of his other favorite issues, here is how Ramin Jahanbegloo concluded some thoughts on “Celebrating diversity”:
As the Muslim poet and theorist Muhammad Iqbal wrote: ‘Thou didst create the night, but I made the lamp. Thou didst create clay, but I made the cup. Thou didst create the deserts, mountains and forests; I produced the orchards, gardens and groves. It is I who made the glass out of stone, and it is I who turn a poison into an antidote.’ It is time for us to turn the poison of violence in Islam and Hinduism into an antidote of nonviolence for the future of peace in the region and in the world.
If you’ve been raised in the culturally underprivileged American-exceptionalist ghetto, the beautiful game is like wine or scotch: a taste you have to cultivate, not a natural one. But I've found it well worth the effort. Moreover, maybe the social cultivation of common pleasures such as this one could help span some of the more problematic cultural gaps within our society, and serve as a good starting point for the alchemical project of transmuting the poison--if it is a poison--into its own antidote.
If you’re in the Bay Area on March 28, try a sip.
