It's been quite a week in the illegal immigration, err, "undocumented worker" debate. First came the release of Nuestro Himno - our National Anthem sung in Spanish by Latin pop stars, and then another "Day Without an Immigrant" protest.
For the rest of us, there was the solace that came from the text of a speech spreading like wildfire online. Its purported author and orator is former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, and it is titled "I Have a Plan to Destroy America". Cyberspace lore holds that Lamm, a Democrat, began his remarks by saying to a Washington crowd:
"I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let's destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time."
I've been sent the speech no less than five times. It's one of those things friends keep circulating with captions like "right on" or "you won't believe someone had the stones to say this".
The elements of Lamm's Plan to destroy the country include:
"We must first make America a bilingual-bicultural country. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual."
"I would then invent "multiculturalism" and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture. I would make it an article of belief that all cultures are equal: that there are no cultural differences that are important. I would declare it an article of faith that the black and Hispanic dropout rate is only due to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is out-of-bounds."
"We can make the United States a "Hispanic Quebec" without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity."
"I would encourage all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the melting pot metaphor with a salad bowl metaphor."
Talk about un-Muzzled. No wonder the "speech" is ablaze online. While the logic speaks for itself, I nevertheless wondered whether Lamm actually said these things, or if it were the Internet equivalent of New York City's continuing problem with alligators in the sewer. So I tracked down Governor Lamm and asked whether he'd uttered these words. He told me 'yes' then expanded on them.
"I knew by the impact on the audience that it was a good speech. I really spent a lot of time thinking about how you get the maximum amount of meaning on the minimum amount of words, and how you can compress. I think most politicians speak way too long and I think that conciseness helps focus the mind."
He said that his title, "How to Destroy America", achieved its purpose of turning heads.
"It's an attention-grabber...I often find that if you can find an attention-grabber like "I want to destroy America." [The audience] will think, "Who would want to destroy America? What is this crazy guy thinking about?" it sure gets their attention."
He also cited a local example for another of the elements of his Plan, ("...to get big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would establish an ethnic identity, and I would establish a cult of victimology"). Governor Lamm told me: "I think one of the most outrageous examples of this is the Ford Foundation, although your Pew Foundation is not particularly helpful."
"I chaired a commission for the Pew people...I know those people, they're very well meaning people, but they're traditional. They're not really advanced thinkers. They have not thought through what illegal immigration has done to this county, what bilingualism does to other countries, multiculturalism. You have to have a social glue. You have to have a common denominator. People have to ask, 'What commonalities do people have in a diverse society that hold us all together?' I, frankly, think that they just knee-jerk, come down, on the liberal side of things."
Governor Lamm told me that while he believes that immigration has been good for America, right now we are taking more than four times more legal immigrants than we've averaged over our 200 year history, and we're taking another million illegal immigrants every year. He said too much emphasis is made of minorities as victims, and left unsaid is that the highest incomes in America are all minorities that have been discriminated against.
"I'm an old Civil Rights lawyer. My family marched at Selma. We don't need lessons about civil rights. Racism and discrimination are never justified, but the Jews, the Chinese-Americans, the Japanese-Americans, the Korean-Americans; those are the highest incomes in America, and none of them had it easy. They were all, in effect, victims, but they never focused on their victim-hood."
Governor Lamm even has an element of The Plan for those who do not like what he has to say.
"I would place all these subjects off limits - make it taboo to talk about. I would find a word similar to "heretic" in the 16th century - that stopped discussion and paralyzed thinking. Words like "racist", "xenophobe" that halts argument and conversation."
The Plan is almost complete.
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