By Rodolfo F. Acuña
I just finished watching a surreal film that reminds me of Arizona. The difference is that you cannot alter the xenophobes’ dreams by entering the REM (Rapid Eye Motion) stage of their sleep and repair their character.
Hence, there is no hope for the Arizona nativist cabal who are permanently trapped in their dreams and illusions. They are addicted to their dreams; they are prisoners of their dreams; and jolts of reality or humanity will not awaken them.
I have tried to understand their obsession with hunting down the “replicants.” I have traded barbs with Glenn Spencer, the founder of Voices of Citizens Together and the American Border Patrol who after the passage of California’s Proposition 187 moved to Arizona “to secure our borders.”
Spencer ranted about his patriotism and love for America. One day out of the blue I asked him if he had ever served in the military. Spencer stuttered and responded that he had had other obligations.
In my family, if you believed in something you fought for it. You never espoused a course of action for others unless you were willing to do it yourself.
The last time I heard, Spencer was at his Sierra Vista, Arizona ranch, still ranting about the Second Mexican American War, assisting his Minuteman pals. Running around in fatigues and playing soldier is an awful lot safer than being a real soldier.
It cannot be assumed that all xenophobes are gunslingers like Sheriff “Joe” Arpaio or failed politicians and businessmen like Tome Horne. Many racist nativist are educated, although some like Pat Buchanan have forged a cottage industry in bashing immigrants.
It is difficult to understand Buchanan’s brand of racism. He wears his Irish heritage on his sleeves but he makes the same reckless accusations of today’s immigrants that were made about his ancestors. Reading the works of John Higham and Ray Billington on American Nativism, the historic pattern of violent nativism is unmistakable.
In 1834, an anti-Catholic mob burned down The Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1844, mobs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania invaded Irish Catholic neighborhoods and burned down two Catholic Churches. They killed at least fourteen people, injured an estimated fifty people, and drove two hundred from their homes.
Dreams and illusions are part of the mob’s mentality. The normal stage of sleep characterized by REM may have been short circuited. REM sleep supposedly consolidates procedural and spatial memories. However, this state has been blurred in the racists’ minds and their illusions have taken over—it cannot be repaired.
Recently I had an exchange with a Matthew Richer, a resident of the Boston, Massachusetts area. Richer was evidently disturbed by an article that I had written about Arizona. I labeled the article “Rough Draft” since I write those pieces more as blogs rather than finished products— I don’t get paid for them.
I always remember Harry Gamboa Jr words that many artists have poor techniques but important messages, while others have great techniques but no message.
Richer’s claims to fame are few—an article in the Policy Review on “Boston’s busing massacre,” he was once a graduate assistant at Columbia and he now writes for the web site VDARE.
Richer was presumptuous enough to question my take on the evolution of fascism, believing that I would defend my historiography because he demanded so. It was evident during the exchange that although he was a literature major, Richer had absolutely no grasp of historical or sociological literature.
At one point the discussion became ridiculous with Richer claiming that Boston Jesuit School was better than Loyola because Loyola had been corrupted by affirmative action. The reality was there was no affirmative action when I attended Loyola High.
Richer is also living the illusion that he is an intellectual, claiming that William Buckley Jr. was not the intellectual leader of American conservativism; by inference he and his cabal were the leaders of the white rabble.
For as much as I disagreed with Buckley and his National Review, they were rational. Having read Richer and VDARE, I can say that Richer is no William Buckley Jr. and VDARE is no National Review.
The similarities between Richer and Spencer are striking. They are super patriots who live life behind desks never having served in the military while championing war and stereotyping whole races of people. They lack a historical sense and are driven by their pretensions.
One can imagine the Tea Partiers as the campus bullies while Richer and Spencer lived in dread of minorities, secretly admiring the bullies who sometimes played sports and were part of the “Mean Boys.”
People like Richer cope with their mediocrity by developing historical amnesia, attempting to rewrite history. Richer forgets the old expression that he learned in grade school, “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
It must be a blow to his ego that after all his opportunities and the money his parents paid for him to attend Boston College High School that he is reduced to writing blogs for VDARE—hardly a peer reviewed journal.
Like I said at the outset, our dreams help form our reality. Rather than living an illusion, for example, I want to be like Segismundo, the protagonist of Pedro Calderón de la Barca La Vida es Sueño, who fears awakening and being put back into the tower for his transgressions.
If they weren’t so damn destructive, I would pity the racist nativists. All their hopes and illusions dashed by their mediocrity. When they die, not even their spouses will miss them. Scholars in years to come will dismiss them as those “no nothings.”