Google tells me that I have criticized Victor Davis Hanson hundreds of times on LRC. Each of those critiques targeted Hanson’s abstract notions drawn from the ideological imagination, rather than principles drawn from reality.
Today, however, Hanson delivers a riveting report from the ground describing in painful detail the current condition of the California agricultural neighborhood he grew up in. Here Hanson soars because he actually writes abut what he sees — and what the ideological media will avoid reporting at all costs because of the truth that such reporting reveals.
Hanson’s description of third-world encampments everywhere in the central California valley hit home with me because I spent years traipsing through Latin American “informal communities” (the term coined by a friend of mine, is often referred to in English as “slums”). What Hanson describes I saw all over Mexico and Latin America. Like the Turkish children in Austria, the children of these barrios probably don’t even know they’re in the United States, not even in “school” (the primary benefits of which are the taxpayer-provided breakfasts, lunches, “snacks,” and often supper).
Hanson’s reality-based observations are vital: every other customer in line at the store pays for groceries with a Food Stamp Program card; California bureaucrats are too lazy, or afraid, to address the rapid disintegration of a huge part of the once-“Golden State”; and the government buildings elsewhere referred to as schools? You will groan.
Compliments are due: this is an important and valuable article. And a question arises: there are over two billion people in the world who live on less than two dollars a day. How many, I wonder, do we want to invite in?
9:29 am on December 16, 2010
