FEAR & ENVY IN CALIFORNIA

Since the age of Cortés, Mexico has been a distorted medieval economy in which a few thousand manorial families own the entire country. But even this great disequilibrium of wealth in a feudal Mexico is not so psychologically injurious to the peasant as is the ubiquity of the American upper-middle class. In Mexico, real money is far distant, never sprinkled about the countryside in the form of luxurious haciendas or sparkling condos. The far fewer Mexican wealthy act differently; they live in castles, so to speak, and remind you that they are the "patrones", and not the sort of folk that "clientes" can chat with between spraying shots of malathion and Miracle-Gro on their petunias, as they do in egalitarian America.

You can snip the roses of an orthodontist who is worth a cool ten million and yet stands a few feet away from you, talking on his cell phone. His garage, which you wheelbarrow weeds by, is filled with a Mercedes, a Lexus and a BMW. You can skim his pool with Jacuzzi and treat it for algae while he sits by its side. In fact, you may be at his estate - painting, spraying weeds, changing diapers - more than he, who, after all must somehow pay for it all. In America the wealthy - often rising from the middle and lower classes - are ostentatious, familiar, accessible, and so a generous and constant reminder that while you may be royalty compared with those of your station still in Mexico, you, the service worker, are still a peon in the American plutocracy.

Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia.

Comments

[Jake]

All the more reason to expect that the Mexican gardener will figure out the game, start his own gardening company, and send his kids to college where they learn how to chat on cell phones by pools that they don't have time to swim in.

I suspect Hanson yearns for a day when he was reading Plato in the original Greek under a fruit tree in the Valley, and the all the "social disruption" was in squalid tenements back in Brooklyn.

(How easily the natives forget the armed gangs at the border keeping the Okies out!)

[Jim]

I think Hanson's family is Okie. Funny that he thinks that Mexicans will react with resentment while his ancestors just got motivated.

He is not the only one who is failing to ask or think about what effect this is having on Mexican society. I can't find statistics on the spread of English in Mexico to compare to the spread of Spanish in the US, for instance. What is going to happen when Mexicans get used to the idea of talking to rich people and expecting a civil answer?