by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n Editor\u2019s Note: These passages are drawn from recent articles on\u00a0The Corner<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Mexifornia, Quite Literally!<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI love this country, it has given me everything that I have, and I\u2019m proud to be part of it,\u201d said Victor Sanchez, a 37-year-old Monrovia resident wearing a Mexico jersey. \u201cBut yet, I didn\u2019t have a choice to come here, I was born in Mexico, and that is where my heart will always be.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s a quote from a\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0story on the booing of the US soccer team by an overwhelmingly Latino audience during a US\u2013Mexico match at the Rose Bowl. Examine the odd logic: Mr. Sanchez is booing the country that gave him \u201ceverything\u201d while cheering the country that apparently gave him very little. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a choice to come here,\u201d he says; one immediately thinks, \u201cBut you most certainly do have a choice to return to the nation where your \u2018heart will always be.\u2019\u201d Can Mr. Sanchez not even offer symbolic thanks to the country that blessed him, perhaps a clap or two at the Rose Bowl when the United States is mentioned? And if the immigration service arrived at the Rose Bowl to bus spectators without legality back to Mexico, where his \u201cheart will always be,\u201d would he boo or cheer?<\/p>\n He reminds me of a former student who, during the anti\u2013Prop 187 marches years ago, was marching with a group waving Mexican flags \u2014 that is, the flag of the country he did not wish to return to, as a Mexican national \u2014 but desecrating the flag of the United States, the country that he most certainly wished to remain in.<\/p>\n That schizophrenia is what confuses so many about illegal immigration \u2014 the simultaneous furor over even the suggestion of compliance with federal immigration law and the occasional symbolic expressions of dislike for the United States in public\u00a0fora<\/em>, whether booing at the Rose Bowl at mention of America, or walking out of a California high school\u00a0en masse<\/em>\u00a0at the sight of an American-flag T-shirt on Cinco de Mayo.<\/p>\n When a foreign nation is treated as the home team, and when the home team is booed in the Rose Bowl, I think we can see why the entire open-borders, non-enforcement, \u2018La Raza\u2019 paradigm of tribal chauvinism based on ethnic solidarity has been proven an abject failure \u2014 summed up by one word, \u201chypocrisy.\u201d Of course, if America asks nothing of the would-be immigrant \u2014 no legality upon entrance, no knowledge of the English language or American customs, no proof of autonomy and independence from government entitlement \u2014 then tens of thousands of American residents booing the very mention of America is logical and would, of course, continue until and unless fundamental ideas about illegal immigration, assimilation, and national identity change.<\/p>\n Greece Bewilders<\/strong><\/p>\n I have lived in Greece and visited it over 20 times, and it still bewilders. The current strikes at the height of the tourist season will only curtail one of the few remaining Greek opportunities to earn scarce foreign capital. I organize and lead a lecture tour every year for 50\u201360 Americans interested in visiting the monuments of Western civilization, especially those pertaining to military history and wars of the past. We have not gone back to Greece for two years and won\u2019t next year either \u2014 given the chance that a bus, hotel, or air strike could derail the enterprise.<\/p>\n Millions must be thinking the same thing, which raises the now surreal question: What do Greeks in the street want? Simply to renege on the $170 billion debt and claim someone other than themselves borrowed the money, or that their elites borrowed it and squandered it and alone should pay, or that the Germans owed them that much anyway for reparations from 70 years past? Is there any self-reflection that the current standard of living and infrastructure in Athens do not seem to be a product of the Greek GDP, but make sense only in the context of 30 years of northwest European money loaned to Athens?<\/p>\n And finally, if Greeks feel the terms are unfair, or the proposed austerity measures not to their liking, it is of course their choice simply to go deadbeat and not pay the capital back; then they can issue their own currency, craft their own laws apart from EU oversight, and have no need to daily scream at their German bankers. But as it is now, we are witnessing teenagers who demand the use of their parents\u2019 credit card in the manner they see fit. It is long time past to move out, and set up house on your own.<\/p>\n Live and Die by Hype<\/strong><\/p>\n In Al Gore\u2019s latest diatribe \u2014 lamenting how his climate-change crusade has been undermined by self-interested skeptics \u2014 he seems weirdly unaware of the role of imagery in our media-driven society \u2014 weird because he himself used to be the past master of the sound bite, the bombastic phrase, and the multimedia publicity campaign that, in part, won him a Nobel Prize and hundreds of millions in green profits.<\/p>\n He deplores the Climategate e-mail fraud, but it was as understandable as it was an enormous setback \u2014 just as would have been Sarah Palin\u2019s leaked e-mails had they revealed commensurate and conscious efforts at deception.<\/p>\n