House of Eratosthenes

Mexican President Vicente Fox has apologized for his “race remarks” as The Chicago Tribune calls them. Speaking Friday in Peuto Vallarta, Fox extolled the virtues of his country’s #1 export product which is illegal aliens.

“There’s no doubt that the Mexican men and women � full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work � are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States,” Fox told a meeting of the Texas-Mexico Frozen Food Council in the western city of Puerto Vallarta on Friday.

Oops, that’s pretty far from what passes for politically-correct in the USA these days.

And that’s exactly the point some of the Fox sympathizers tried to make yesterday.

Victor Hugo Flores, a 30-year-old bond salesman, cringed when asked what he thought of Fox’s Friday comment, but said it isn’t too different from popular sayings celebrating what Mexicans see as a strong work ethic among blacks.

“It was bad, but it really isn’t racist,” he said. “Maybe the president shouldn’t have said it. But here we say things like, `He works like a black person,’ and it’s normal.”

You know why a defensive argument like that devastates President Fox and his comments, like no assaulting argument possibly could: It makes sense. As Americans we tend to forget that when we have imposed cultural pressure on people’s individual thoughts, coercing them to comply with what is considered acceptable by our prevailing culture, the rest of the world isn’t doing the same thing. So from time to time it’s natural we have a rude awakening with how other people think.

But doesn’t that make Fox’s comments all the more telling. This whole thing the United States has gone through — that it’s wrong to say “Mexicans steal things” or “Jews haggle over prices way too much” or “white people always lie” — it turns out, that whole taboo makes sense.

A guy steals stuff. Some guy is known for working his ass off. Some guy builds a rep for lying all the time. You don’t paint an entire race of people that way, unless you enjoy being wrong, often.

That’s the American style of thought — individual attributes for individuals, group attributes for groups. Vicente Fox showed on Friday he has a different style of thought, and if he wants to hide behind apologies like this, he’s still showing it.

How is this relevant? Because Vicente Fox is in a shouting match lately with right-thinking Americans like myself, about what it is his chief export product does to the American economy. It’s been going on and on because it’s so hard to prove one side right or the other side right — but it’s critical to President Fox’s argument, to demonstrate that he has his finger on the pulse of what is really going on. That when he says his people who are immigrating to my country, illegally, are working their butts off and not committing any crimes, he knows what he’s talking about.

Well, it is unlikely he has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on if this is the way he thinks. You can’t point to tens of thousands of people running across a river, and make an unfounded blanket generalization like “they are working their butts off and obeying all the laws” unless you don’t really have a stake in the veracity of what you’re saying. But that is exactly what President Fox has been doing for years now.

Now, his sympathizers are in an intellectually untenable position. They must maintain it is correct to say “undocumented immigrants from Mexico work harder than American citizens” but at the same time excoriate the idea that “blacks have a different work ethic from whites” (better, or worse). Essentially, they have to champion one unfounded blanket statement while rightfully repudiating another, solely on the basis that it is an unfounded blanket statement.

If Captain Kirk were having this argument with an ancient computer, this is just about the time the smoke would start coming out of the vents and circuits would start popping.

Fortunately for President Fox, his audience is not people who think logically. That is a blanket statement that finds reasonable foundation in the content of his messages: He has been maintaining “I am encouraging these people to cross the border and get the hell out of my country but that doesn’t mean they’re people you don’t want around, you should accept them with open arms even though I don’t want them where I am.” There is a certain strain of people who buy into this. Out of logical necessity, they must be the kind of people who never ask “If it’s such a great deal, why do you need me?”

They get e-mail about exciting ways to make money at home, and they nibble at the bait instead of asking the obvious question “why is this guy who wrote the e-mail, not quietly taking advantage of this without my participation, if it’s such a great deal?” This audience is not exactly filled with rocket scientists. If they possessed even average intelligence, the message wouldn’t work.

Because that’s exactly the offer Fox is making: Hey, these are wonderful people — that’s why I want to get rid of them.

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A Style Of ThoughtTuesday, May 17th, 2005

A Style Of Thought
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005