MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE MILLARD FILLMORE AGAIN...:

HISPANIC PANIC: Samuel P. Huntington and the return of the Know-Nothings. (JOHN DOLAN, May. 04, 2004, NY Press)

SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is a bigot, convinced that immigrant hordes
are poisoning our Anglo-Protestant America. This in itself is not surprising; there have always been plenty of his kind on the American scene. Nor is it surprising that this bigot is a professor at Harvard. Nativism, in its 19th-century surge, was very much the darling cause of the New England elites.

What is surprising is that now, a century and a half after the Know-Nothings vanished in disgrace, Huntington feels free to promote his nativist hatred in print, and can be celebrated for doing so. Post-9/11 America, as John le Carre has said, has lost its mind. Huntington's screeching is a worthy contribution to the bedlam.

Huntington disguises a disingenuous question as a scholarly inquiry in his sleazy new book, Who Are We? The Challenge to America's National Identity. The question is disingenuous because Huntington already has an answer, the same one that has been peddled by American bigots for hundreds of years: America is and must remain an Anglo-Protestant culture.

Huntington's plan for America's salvation requires "a recommitment to America as a deeply religious and primarily Christian country…adhering to Anglo-Protestant values, speaking English, maintaining its European cultural heritage, and committed to the principles of the [American] Creed..."

Our Anglo-Protestant culture is under threat, according to Huntington, from the Latin hordes sneaking across our southern borders. Huntington violently hates Hispanics, especially Mexicans. The point of this book is to infect the reader with the same fear and hatred. In the process, this eminent academic is more than willing to dirty his hands with the sort of hatemongering anecdote Pat Buchanan would refuse to touch. His favorite, so special that he tells it at the beginning of the book and again at the end, is an account of Mexican fans misbehaving at a U.S.-Mexico soccer game:

At a Gold Cup soccer game between Mexico and the United States in February 1998, the 91,255 fans were immersed in a "sea of red, white and green flags"; they booed when "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played; they "pelted" the US players "with debris and cups of what might have been water, beer or worse"; and they attacked with "fruit and cups of beer" a few fans who tried to raise an American flag. This game took place not in Mexico City but in Los Angeles. "Something's wrong when I can't even raise an American flag in my own country," a US fan commented, as he ducked a lemon going by his head. "Playing in Los Angeles is not a home game for the United States," a Los Angeles Times reporter agreed.

All the classics of race-baiting show up here. There's the "sea" of alien colors, the gratuitous insults to American icons like flag and anthem and, above all, the dirty tricks foreigners always employ. The Hispanic traitors throw "water, beer or worse," a gradation ending with a dark hint that the mob threw urine at American patriots.

The fact is, different ethnic groups have been using sporting events to work each other over for centuries—all over America. In the 19th century, boxing matches allowed immigrants to scream for their champions, who often arrived draped in the flags of the home country or, if they were "natives," in the stars and stripes. The fight in the ring was very often upstaged by the riots in the stands, as drunken fans cheerfully battered each other senseless for tribe and country. Then, as now, the same crowd in a different context would join hands to sing patriotic American songs in perfect ethnic, if not tonal, harmony.

As study after study of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. has shown, Hispanics tend to be fiercely patriotic Americans. The same soccer fans that enjoyed their age-old right to splatter the opposition with beer and piss probably drove home from the game in pickups plastered with the stars and stripes. Huntington might as well have used the Fenway Park tradition of throwing peanuts at Yankees fans to prove that Boston and New York will soon be at war.

The strange thing is that Mr. Huntington's basic idea is correct--America's future, indeed the future of Western Civilization, does require a revitalization and commitment to our traditional Christian and Founding values--it's his application of that rule that is rather demented. If that's your goal it makes no sense to try to keep out Christians who demonstrate their devotion to our ideals by coming here, often at great risk, in the first place. It would seem more effective to get rid of the many natives who no longer believe in the core culture.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2004 8:42 PM