The "progressive" worldview that churns out such stories has completely lost the sense of human precariousness common to all civilizations. Rather than confess that mankind by its very nature is prone to be murderous, sexist and racist - and that only liberal institutions of the West can rein in these innate proclivities - we instead demand instantaneous perfection of our own country and no other, both in the present and in the past. Nowhere in these stories is there any allowance for human fallibility or weakness, no admission that Twinkies can be more alluring to the palate than cabbage, or that doctors, fearing constant lawsuits and increasingly employed as bureaucrats by HMOs, naturally feel better able to relate to people who speak their own language.
Worse still, the constant refrain that "they" are doing such terrible things to Hispanics perpetuates the myth that what one selects to eat, what language one chooses to learn, what crime one commits or forgoes - all that and more is beyond the realm of individual agency and rather subject to larger deterministic forces, usually prejudicial in nature.
Sometimes the problem is not so much the slanted ideology of such popular news accounts, but simply the imbalance that is a part of basic reporting today. What constitutes real news now? Take, for example, a typical issue of the Fresno Bee, this one dated Monday, November 25, 2002. Greater Fresno and the surrounding sprawl are now a considerable metropolis of nearly one people - a large city more than a rural backwater. And November 2002 was a perilous time in American history, as the United States began to ponder war with Iraq while continuing to wage a multi-pronged campaign against terrorists. Yet nobody would suspect any of that from reading the front page of the city newspaper. The top headline blared, "Man Slain After Chase Ends Near Selma," over an article detailing how a young Hispanic criminal confronted law enforcement officials after a carjacking, threatened to kill them, and then was gunned down not far from where I live.
The next story on the right, headlined "Donations to Mexico Stranded," explained how efforts by local Hispanics to send food and clothing to the Mexican town of Nayarit after the devastations of Hurricane Kenna had been stymied by the inefficiency and obduracy of the Mexican consulate. The care packages were still sitting on pallets in a Fresno warehouse weeks after the disaster. The third headline, on the left side of the front page, announced that "Fresno's Motel Kids Find New Digs," and the story chronicled new efforts to house foster children.
At the bottom of the page, "Young Migrants Follow Perilous Path North" presented the theme that very young Mexicans are crossing illegally on their own and not being treated very well by smugglers. The story suggested that their harsh experiences were somehow the fault of the United States because of a failure to enact a new border agreement with Mexico. One illegal alien in Georgia was quoted as reassuring her underage son, who had been sent back across the border, not to worry because she would employ the smuggler to try again to lead him across the desert.
Still searching for a story about world affairs this November morning - was there anything going on besides unfair treatment of local Hispanics? - I turned to the editorial page. There were three opinion essays. At the top was a column by Roberto Rodriquez entitled "Exceptions to 'All Life Is Sacred' Tough to Reconcile." Rodriquez faulted the hypocrisy of anti-abortion activists for supporting the death penalty (but not pro-abortion activists for opposing it) and detailed how such insight about the preciousness of life was inculcated in him by Mexican elders when he was growing up in Tijuana and had an irrational fear of ants. The logic in the rambling and incoherent piece was hard to follow as it skipped between the death penalty, Mexico, abortion, bombing and ant colonies, but somehow I gathered that an older generation of Mexicans had taught Rodriquez about a superior way of viewing life on earth, and that we as Americans should follow his creed so that we don't go to war to "crush them like ants" and kill "tens of thousands of innocent civilians." Inasmuch as I had just read on page one that some Mexican parents were sending their own twelve-year-old children unescorted across the scorching Arizona desert in violation of American law, and that the Mexican government was abetting such a dangerous trek, and that Mr. Rodriquez had obviously abandoned his beloved Mexico for a callous United States, I was confused by his invective.
Ruben Navarrete Jr. wrote the second essay, right below the Rodriquez piece: "Ethnic Hyphen Symbol of Pride, Not Separatism." In it he argued that using hyphenated self-identification was hardly antithetical to national unity. This also troubled me inasmuch as the usually sensible Mr. Navarrete grew up near me with middle-class parents, had little if any contact with either Mexico or recent immigrants, and does not speak Spanish. His call for people like himself to self-identify as Mexican-American would be as useful as my adopting the label
