According to Fischer, you're a native American if you're born here
but if you're a native American you're an immigrant - or something. He's
not sure…
It is no secret the religio-wingnuts detest the idea of immigration reform. After all, borders, they say, are set by dog and should not be crossed without permission. Unless, you know, America has to go kick some ass for dog somewhere in the world. Then it’s okay.
In response, we try to remind them that we are a “nation of immigrants.” This is a point we have made here as well in response to Fischer’s frequent ethnic nationalist rants.
Because we are. All of us, or are parents, or our
grandparents or their parents etc, all the way back to the first
settlers, came here from somewhere else. This is just a simple,
indisputable fact. Some came willingly, some because they were brought
here, like African Americans, to be slaves to those who came here
willingly (and Fischer has already said the whole slavery thing is islam’s fault.)
Fischer didn’t respond well to the idea that we are a
nation of immigrants. In fact, he melted down in a big way
trying to wrap his mind around it.
That’s another thing
that kinda bothers me about that whole ‘Native American’ thing. You
know, this ‘nation of immigrants’ business. You know we’re not – we are
not – a nation of immigrants. Eighty-five to 87% of the people that live
in the United States were born here. You know what that makes us? It
makes us native Americans. We are Americans by birth.
Which only goes to show he is missing the point entirely.
So we are natives, he says. But according to Fischer, Native Americans are not natives. They’re not natives because they immigrated too. Watch him try to wrap his head around this:
You know, National
Geographic had this big story. Now some evidence that the Native
American tribes, the Indian nations migrated here from Eurasia as well
as from Asia. The thinking all along has been that they migrated here
from Asia. They came to American soil from Asia. Now they’re saying,
well it was also from Eurasia. Well what does that mean? I mean, they
don’t even stop to kind of contemplate the significance of that. It
means that Native American tribes are immigrants too!
Sure, they arrived here too, from across the Bering Strait, but it was so many thousands of years ago –
about 15,000 to be exact – that they had already been here for thousands of years when the first Europeans arrived to settle.
Which brings up the question: if we’re natives
because we were born here, as he just said, then why are Native
Americans who were born here going back those 15,000 years, not natives? Didn’t he just contradict his own objection of a moment before?
You wonder at this point if Fischer actually wrote
any of this down before speaking, or even thought about it, because it
almost seems he argued himself into a place no Right Wing crazy wants to
find himself: a world of facts. This is the point at which Fischer
seems to lose it, having a fit of cognitive dissonance right there for
all to see as “realities” collide.
If we’re a nation of
immigrants, to use their expression, that has to apply to the Indian
Nations that were here when European settlers arrived. Everybody here is
an immigrant. Everybody here is a descendant of those who immigrated to
these shores.
Yes!
That’s the point liberals have been repeatedly
making as their contribution to the public discourse on the immigration
question. Hello? Statue of Liberty? Ellis Island?
Isn’t that game, set match?
Don’t count on it. Fischer and his friends hate
Native Americans too. According to repugicans, multiculturalism is
“raping” the West, and that’s what this is really about – about
protecting right white privilege by rooting out all the “brown people”
who make life so difficult for them and cut into their profits. Let’s be
clear about that.
As Tom Tancredo has said, “No more of this
multiculturalism garbage…the cult of multiculturalism has captured the
world [and is] the dagger in the heart [of civilization].”
I guess if civilization is to be defined as white
people doing what racist white people already do. If you have any
questions about what that is, look to America’s reservation system. Look
at Ferguson, Missouri.
But if we are all immigrants, a conclusion Fischer himself just came to, then why are white people the only good immigrants?
And to go back to Fischer’s original argument, if we’re not
all immigrants, then how is it that people whose ancestors have been
here 15,000 years are NOT natives, and people who are just now arriving
are NOT natives, but people whose ancestors have only been here for
three or four centuries at most ARE natives?
Fischer has been down this road already, trying to justify his irrational racism:
If…there is a moral and
ethical basis for our displacement of native American tribes, and if
our westward expansion and settlement are in fact consistent with the
laws of nature, nature’s God, and the law of nations, then Americans
have much to be proud of.
So we “Anglo-Saxons” have a right to have immigrated
here. Native Americans do not have this divine sanction and so
apparently should never have been here and therefore have no right to
complain that we took all their land, and today’s Latino immigrants have
no right to be here either, because they are now crossing borders
created by dog.
Thus there was a “Goldilocks” zone that was just
right, when the Chosen People were allowed in. Everything before and
after represents a violation of “the law of nations” and “nature’s dog.”
(And remember, “natural law” has been used against not just Native
Americans and Latino immigrants, but against gays and also against non-christians.)
Everyone who doesn’t belong here, who can’t be grandfathered in through
some sort of “Goldilocks Exemption” must be “vomited forth,” in the old testament sense (Lev 20.22-25; Jer 3.2-3).
Convert or die or face dog’s wrath. This applies not only to muslims but for Fischer, also to those Native Americans he was having such trouble with.
No need to go to Syria or Iraq to fight ISIL. We
have our own here. And we thought they were bad as Talibangelicals. We
had no idea. And Fischer has already admitted to being in “theological accord” with ISIL.
This is why it is amusing to see someone like
Fischer come up against the world of facts, and this is why his response
is an epic rant. It’s no easy matter to make a rational-sounding
argument in favor of something that is inherently irrational, as Fischer
just found out.
But if we’re stuck with them, they are also stuck with us. Take heart from that, my friends.
by
by
Robert Schroeder
