Borderline Buchanan

My accidental incursion into the creepiest book club meeting ever.

By Joseph Peha, University of Denver

I love bookstores because when I go to one I always end up finding something fun that I wasn’t looking for. Take my trip to Olsson’s in Washington, D.C., this weekend as a case in point. Nestled somewhere between the children’s section and science fiction was the anti-immigration ideologue himself, Pat Buchanan.

He was plugging his new book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, to a small audience. Even as he began the speech, Buchanan didn’t waste an iota of time to get to his point: The United States will break up if the current wave of immigration continues. In other words, civil war will break out, Balkans-style, because, “Every American city will look like Los Angeles, and Los Angeles will look like Mexico City.”

Buchanan’s preventive measure of choice? He thinks we should build a fence across the Mexican border. And then it hit me: he’s completely right! One only needs to reflect upon the numerous wonders a wall did for Germany. After the walls went up, all their problems disappeared.

Buchanan continued his verbal assault on anything foreign. He exclaimed, “People don’t trust people who don’t look like them.” And that really seemed to strike at the heart of the matter. My curtains of ignorance had been drawn asunder and a glorious ray of racial insight had been imparted upon me: According to Pat Buchanan, white people don’t trust anyone else.

But what really shocked me is Buchanan’s avid stance on deportation: “The ones you deport are the gang members, drunk drivers, people who threaten the health and safety of Americans – then you go after the businessmen who hire them.” Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Let’s deport gang members, even if they’re naturalized American citizens. After all, sweeping things outside your borders in a globalized world will never come back to bite you in the ass. When deported gang members in El Salvador fed gangs inside the U.S. with new members, it must have been a total anomaly.

Strangely enough, I can somehow sympathize with some of the qualms that Buchanan raises. He warns about the dangers of rampant business interests and the bungled situation in Iraq. But as a wise colleague of mine, August Pollak, told me, “He’s right about so many issues for all the wrong reasons.”

And that’s what compelled me to speak to some of the audience members at the book signing. Who were these people who could so ardently support such bombastic remarks while cupping a copy of Ann Coulter’s book in their hands? I approached a father and college-aged daughter duo and asked for their opinion. As conversations inevitably seem to go, the man inquired where I was from. “Seattle,” I replied. “We have a friend out there. He complains, you know, about the large Asian element. But he moved into a much whiter neighborhood.” It seems to me that Buchanan and his followers talk incessantly about immigration simply because it’s a thinly veiled guise to inject racism back into the public debate.

After nearly everyone left, I approached Buchanan for a photo op. As I did so, one of his die-hard supporters, toting a pin from Buchanan’s 1996 Republican presidential primary campaign, was discussing the prospect of a leftist saboteur in the Minutemen organization. Strangely enough, she was the one who snapped our picture; the aged right-winger seated next to the leftist college graduate. Anyway, I was about to leave his side when a question dawned on me. I turned to Buchanan and asked, “Do you speak any other languages besides English?” He looked at me with a puzzled expression. Apparently he studied some Greek, Latin, French, and Middle English. But no, he did not speak anything else.

And then I realized something: you can only be afraid of something you don’t understand. For as much as Buchanan harps about immersion and assimilation, he hasn’t taken the time to do it himself in another country. If he had spent any reasonable of period of time in a non-English environment, he would have learned something. And with a new language comes a new set of ideas, a new culture, and a new and broadened view of the world. But just like his linguistic repertoire, his political views will probably always be narrow.

One thought reverberated in my mind as I left the bookstore reeling from an hour of anti-immigration rhetoric: I just wished all of it had taken place at Borders.

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