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PARTISAN REVIEW
At the other end of the field, but actually right next to Farrakan, is
Patrick
J.
Buchanan, who is trying to become the Tom Watson of his
time, a vulgar populist whose appeal is to every veiled and unveiled form
of xenophobia troubling the soul of our country. It is equally true, as one
writer said of Buchanan, that he is part of a phenomenon that has spread
its bile across the stretch of our mass communications network, substitut–
ing shock for substance, rage for reason, threat for thoughtful assessment.
In this time, we observe politicians who realize that the drama of political
insight is much harder to achieve than the voluminous insults that draw
whoops and cheers from the audience. All of these diatribes on the stump
fuse into a talk-television spear, jammed into the side of the body politic,
itself already crucified with spikes of simple-mindedness and wearing a
thorny crown of omni-directional fear and bitterness.
In the horror of the bombing of the World Trade Center by Arab
extremists, and the greatest act of mass murder in American history, the
Oklahoma City bombing, we are able to see two variations on the politics
of rage. As Martin Peretz has pointed out, the explosions at the World
Trade Center detonated our traditional idea of immigrants, whether, I
might add, that idea was hostile or tolerant. Previously, even if we re–
sented them, we thought of immigrants as people who came to America
for something better than what they were getting where they had been
born. The point was to move ahead, to take advantage of the public
school system, the medical expertise, the job market, and the freedom to
invent a way for yourself. Now we wonder if we might also be con–
fronted with a small or large number of indoctrinated immigrants who
see America as "the Great Satan" and find it perfectly reasonable to con–
sider or commit terrorist acts that bring about death, destruction, and
chaos.
If, on the other hand, the many in that federal building in Oklahoma
City met eternity at the hands of native rebel groups, then we have felt
once again the horror and the heartbreak wrought by some amorphous
monster within, a beast whose ancestry is least traceable back to the anar–
chic forces that troubled the Natchez Trace of two hundred years ago, or
the various badlands that moved farther and farther West, where law was
always seen as the enemy. The presence of both kinds of destructive indi–
viduals truly reflects our age, where all is capable of being magnified.
Whether these people arrive from outside of the country or are home–
grown, they are made ominous because the nature of contemporary,
destructive technology is such that those with small, porous minds can
surely create large, tragic disasters.
These sorts of people and their ruthless actions also make it as hard as
it has ever been for us to get beyond the surface distinctions our demo-
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