After America - Mark Steyn [118]
Once upon a time, the mill owner and his workers lived in the same town. Now American municipalities are ever more segregated: the rich live among the rich, the poor come from two or three towns away to clean their pools. Nor is the segregation purely economic. The aforementioned Bell, California, was the town whose citizens had a per capita income of $24,800 but a city management that awarded themselves million-dollar salary-andbenefits packages. It comes as no surprise to discover 90 percent of its inhabitants speak a language other than English at home. Bell is an impoverished Latin American city, and so, like thousands of others south of the border, it has corrupt, rapacious Latin American government. Celebrate diversity!
Ask not for whom Bell tolls. Joe Klein, the novelist and columnist, was one of the most adamant of media grandees that the Tea Party’s millions of “teabaggers” were “racists and nativists.” “Sarah Palin’s fantasy America,” he explained to his readers at Time magazine, “is a different place now, changing for the worse, overrun by furriners of all sorts: Latinos, South Asians, East Asians, homosexuals ... to say nothing of liberated, uppity blacks.”57 Joe, naturally, is entirely cool with all that. “The things that scare the teabaggers—the renewed sense of public purpose and government activism, the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism—are among the things I find most precious and exhilarating about this country.”
Joe Klein finds “the burgeoning racial diversity, urbanity and cosmopolitanism” of America so “exhilarating” that he lives in Pelham, New York, which is 87.33 percent white. By contrast, Sarah Palin’s racist xenophobic hick town of Wasilla, Alaska, is 85.46 percent white. (Percentages courtesy of the 2000 census.) As for those “furriners of all sorts” that Klein claims to dig, Pelham’s “uppity blacks” make up only 4.57 percent of the population, and Asians, whether of the southern or eastern variety, just 3.96 percent. Unlike Wasilla, which is a long way to go, Pelham is within reach of splendidly diverse, urbane, and cosmopolitan quartiers—the Bronx, for example—yet Joe Klein, Mister Diversity, chooses not to reside in any of them, and prefers to live uppitystate of the uppity blacks. Statistically speaking, he lives in a less diverse neighborhood overrun by fewer “furriners” than that chillbilly bonehead’s inbred redoubt on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Yet she and her supporters are the “racists and nativists,” while Joe preens himself on his entirely theoretical commitment to “diversity.”58 He would seem to be volunteering himself as a near parodic illustration of the late Joseph Sobran’s observation that “the purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”59
I don’t mean to single out Joe Klein, who I’m sure is the soul of kindness to lame dogs, l’il ol’ ladies, uppity blacks, and South Asian furriners, where’er he encounters them. No doubt Pelham has the occasional African-American college professor, East Asian hedge-fund manager, and perhaps even a Muslim software developer or two sprinkled among its 87.33 percent upscale honky populace. But Joe Klein is like a lot of Americans of his class: “diversity” is an attitude rather than a lived experience.
And it will be ever more so: the more starkly we Balkanize into Bells and Pelhams, the more frenziedly the Kleins of the world will bang the “diversity” drum. The more rarefied the all but all-white communities get, the more “COEXIST!” stickers they’ll plaster on their Priuses: hybridity is for your cars, not your municipal demographic profile.
In an age of political correctness, older people sometimes express bewilderment at the lack of “common sense.” But you can’t have common sense in a society with less and less in