← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Faust
Thread ID: 15142 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2004-09-28
2004-09-28 00:57 | User Profile
"Pouty White People" A majority of California whites believe their best days are behind them.
Gregory Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times, Sep. 26
Once known as the land of futurists and dreamers, California is increasingly home to pessimists. Often nostalgic, newspaper commentators, novelists, journalists and social critics issue jeremiads about paradise lost and the coming dystopia. California has always had its share of apocalyptic prophets, but these voices are no longer cries in the wilderness; they reflect a growing public mood in the once Golden State.
There is a racial dimension to all the gloominess. The downbeat outlook is in large part driven by Anglos, the stateââ¬â¢s largest minority. Although they enjoy the highest per capita income and are significantly more likely to own a home than any other group, Anglos appear to be suffering from a bad case of declinism.
{snip}
Whites still make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. They dominate the stateââ¬â¢s business, intellectual and cultural elites. They remain the principal authors of the California story. And they have become the most pessimistic of any group in the state, according to an August survey of the Public Policy Institute of California. Fully 57% felt that the state would be a worse place to live in two decades. At 49%, blacks were the second most pessimistic group. Latinos (39%) and Asians (34%) were significantly less downbeat.
Read the rest of this story here. [url]http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-rodriguez26sep26,1,4524680.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions[/url]
(Posted on September 27, 2004)
Mr. Rodriguez thinks white people should step aside if they are not confident about the future of California. The audacity of illegal immigrants never ceases to amaze me.
I think it is almost scary how little the new immigrants have "enriched" our country. What parts of their "culture" have you adopted or learned from? About the only thing I can think of is a once-in-while trip to an ethnic restaurant.
Posted by Dennis at 3:34 PM on September 27
"Pouty White People" And how grateful they are that we give up the land to them.
Posted by Sigurd at 3:34 PM on September 27
...and dawn breaks across the minds of the masses...
Posted by at 3:48 PM on September 27
Surely it won't escape whites, who probably share this pessimism with each other in private, that the way to stop the feeling of decline is to finally think as a unified people and fight back against the only thing that's making them feel such pessimism: other races forcing us aside. Surely it will dawn on them that they still have the ability to do something about it together when they share the feeling together. They must know that it's only because they are white that they feel this way.
If they just give in and wallow in their pessimism while there are still solutions left, then......
Posted by Steven at 4:30 PM on September 27
I can't help but think of the lines which Joe Pesci said in the movie "Casino". "We were given Heaven on earth and we f***ed it up, never again will ordinary guys like us be given anything that valuable again".
Posted by Scott at 4:57 PM on September 27
Imagine an article entitled "Hispanic ingrates"? How is it, that the LA Times feels justified in running this slander in its pages? Where is the ADL when you need them? It just shows you what slimy little charlatans the folks at the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center are. Wouldnââ¬â¢t you just love it, if someone from the ADL posted at Amren.com to explain why they didnââ¬â¢t launch a smear campaign against the LA times for publishing an article entitled ââ¬ÅPouty Whitesââ¬Â? What if someone published an article entitled Pouty Jews? No, Orwellian psychopaths from places like the ADL, who probably read the comment boards with some regularity, wouldnââ¬â¢t dare enter into a civilized debate, theyââ¬â¢re cowards-and theyââ¬â¢re hypocrisy sticks to the high heavens-and everyone, and I mean everyone, can smell the stench of these little bigots.
Posted by Sigurd at 5:04 PM on September 27
The last paragraph of the article:
"California's crumbling infrastructure can be rebuilt, and its broken education system can be repaired. But that's not going to happen until we re-create the social contract that built postwar California. That contract must be founded on a shared vision of the future. If Anglo California is not willing to provide one, then at the very least it should make way for those who do."
I guess all you white Californians ought to move out to make way for the paradise of the future!
I wonder who's money is going to pay to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and the broken education system? The census bureau says the average hispanic woman has 3.0 kids. "English learners" cost over $10K a year to educate in the US today. Do they really think the average hispanic family is paying the $15K a year over a working lifetime that would be needed to pay for their kids schooling?
One big difference between the current immigration wave and past waves (not mentioned by Samuel Huntington) is that today's immigrants get a lot of government provided services. The immigrants of yesteryear got public schooling for their kids -in English- and that was about it. We do a lot of handholding these days - interpreters everywhere, medicaid, "free" health care if they can't track your address, etc. This stuff doesn't come cheap. And of course it just encourages our less competent immigrants to stay.
Posted by Kansas Mom at 5:31 PM on September 27
What a tragedy. The crown jewel of our country has been turned into a place where working and middle class whites dont want to live. I dont think that's an accident.
Posted by John at 5:33 PM on September 27
Mr. Rodriguez thinks the Anglos make up a "disproportionate" share of the electorate. What would be the proper proportion? Zero?
Posted by David Hamilton at 5:36 PM on September 27
[url]http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2004/09/pouty_white_peo.php[/url]
2004-09-28 07:16 | User Profile
The crown jewel of our country has been turned into a place where working and middle class whites dont want to live
Yep... California's the only place that's ever happened! EVERY jewel of our country has been turned into a place where working and middle class whites don't want to... or can't afford to live!
2004-09-29 00:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=londo]Yep... California's the only place that's ever happened! EVERY jewel of our country has been turned into a place where working and middle class whites don't want to... or can't afford to live![/QUOTE]
That's it. If you find a place that prices out the riffraff, the decent average folk are also priced out. If you find an affordable place, you're going to be living with the riffraff (thus crime, pollution, etc.)
2004-09-29 01:12 | User Profile
If the L.A. Times had printed an article entitled "Pushy Jews" or "Whiny Blacks" or "Ungrateful Mexicans", how many people would have ended up losing their jobs?
I live in a midwestern state where the local rag still tells PC fairy tales about Mexican immigration. Californians (white and black) can no longer be fooled, so their rag has changed its tone. Since things are better for the immigrants, that's all that matters. If you gringos are unhappy about living in a third-world country, well, you're just pouting. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, and leave your wallet behind.
2004-09-29 23:15 | User Profile
Interesting how the term "Anglo" is now being used as a substitute for "white", considering that not all Whites are of Anglo descent. This is not limited to non-White (preferably Latin) point-of-view; I heard a Jewish correspondent on CNN say it as well. :dry:
2004-10-03 03:43 | User Profile
**Without "Pouty White People," Will New California Be Like Old Mexico?
By Sam Francis**
Race, it has now pretty much been proved, is not "just a social construct" but a fact of nature, but it does have social and cultural meaning. Most of the talk about what race means centers on non-whites, but last week Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor at the Los Angeles Times, took a look at what it means to be white in California. What it means is not very encouraging.
What Mr. Rodriguez [Send him email] saw is that while California has historically been the "land of futurists and dreamers," the place where dreams came true and the future really happened, it is now "increasingly home to pessimists," with the state's chattering classes cranking out "jeremiads about paradise lost and the coming apocalypse." Moreover, "There is a racial dimension to all the gloominess. The downbeat outlook is in large part driven by Anglos, the state's largest minority." [Pouty White People, LA Times, September 26, 2004]
"Anglo," of course, is a racial epithet that can still be used in mainstream publications like the Los Angeles Times, while epithets referring to non-whites usually can't be.
That fact itself might just explain why California whites feel gloomy: Having ceased to be a majority of the population, they know it's no longer their state, and they're starting to see what happens to racial groups that get ousted from cultural dominance.
As Mr. Rodriguez notes, whites have a long way to fall. They still have the largest per capita income of any group in the state and
"still make up a disproportionate share of the electorate. They dominate the state's business, intellectual and cultural elites," but "they have become the most pessimistic of any group in the state, according to an August survey of the Public Policy Institute of California. Fully 57 percent felt that the state would be a worse place to live in two decades. At 49 percent, blacks were the second most pessimistic group. Latinos (39 percent) and Asians (34 percent) were significantly less downbeat." [Survey, PDF]
"What these polls do measure is expectations," Mr. Rodriguez concludes. "A majority of Anglos clearly believe that their best days in the state are behind them."
Mr. Rodriguez, a Hispanic himself, has an easy (and rather self-serving) answer as to why Anglos are so sadââ¬â"it's that the Anglo myth that dreams should be achieved without struggle is gone." Of course there was never any such myth, though it probably makes Mr. Rodriguez feel good to think there was. It's more likely Anglos are gloomy because they see that the dreams for which they and their families worked so hard are vanishing.
They're also starting to figure out that, as a result of mass immigration and the implosion of the white birth rate, the future doesn't belong to them or their descendants. Mr. Rodriguez notes that "the median age of whites (40.3) is significantly higher than all other groups" and suggests that "Anglo declinism may stem from the aging of the Anglo population." The reason it's older than everyone else is that it has fewer children.
Mr. Rodriguez himself is not happy about Anglo pessimism. He thinks it's a cop out, that the state's problems like a withering school system and creaking infrastructure can't be fixed until "we re-create the social contract that built postwar California." "That contract must be founded on a shared vision of the future. If Anglo California is not willing to provide one, then at the very least it should make way for those who do."
It doesn't seem to occur to him that the "shared vision of the future" was a white thing, that no other racial or ethnic group in the state, regardless of how chirpy they are about the future, has such a vision or is likely to formulate one, and that whites' "making way" for others won't fix much of anythingââ¬âfor California or for the country of which California is only a forerunner.
What the "Anglos" brought to California was not only their genes and a shared vision of the future but a shared heritage from the past. That heritage included a work ethic as well as an ethic of creativity and cultural dynamism that was largely unique to white Anglo-American civilization. That's the thesis of Samuel Huntington's recent book "Who Are We?" which received so many sneers when it was published last spring.
Today, not only has mass immigration and differential fertility started displacing the people who carried that vision, but the vision itself is being discarded asââ¬âwellââ¬âtoo "Anglo"ââ¬âwhich means, too snooty, too "elitist," too "exclusive," and too "oppressive." Forerunners of the new civilization like Mr. Rodriguez can't expect to have it both ways: Either you have the Anglos and the California (and the America) they created, or you have the Third World from which the new America comes.
Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future.
http://www.vdare.com/francis/gloomy_ca.htm