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CNN and Lou Dobbs: Journalism or Jingoism

Posted January 18th, 2008
by Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

In a time when the national temper calls for reason in the solution of problems facing the American people, a powerful media venue like CNN mixes jingoism with (advocacy) journalism, not just with Lou Dobbs but with Nancy Grace and others. Fox News is not any better. Networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC have pretty much stuck to reporting news rather than making news or stirring the pot of distemper with jingoism.

This is not to say that Lou Dobbs does not have the right to his opinions and to articulate them per the First Amendment. The issue is his “right” to air them over public airwaves without recourse for an equitable response. Sending emails to Lou Dobbs is not the same as equal time for an opposing view.

But the still larger question is: why is CNN airing such programming in its line-up? For many of us, the racial inferences inherent in the issue of “immigration,” over which Dobbs rants nightly, are inescapable. It’s not immigration that has Dobbs’ knickers in a knot, it’s Mexicans. Lou Dobbs doesn’t like Mexicans. He’s not pushing for a border fence along the U.S.-Canada border. Or to keep out “illegal” European immigrants. Or Cubans rushing into Miami. He wants to rid the United States of Mexicans.

His rants make no distinction between Mexicans and Mexican Americans. To Dobbs, a Mexican is a Mexican. His rhetorical brush paints over the differences. Night after night pursuing his bête noir, he insults not only Mexicans but Mexican Americans as well. Via the soft under-belly of the United States, Dobbs sees hordes of terrorists infiltrating the United States to carry out their nefarious schemes of violence.

Has it not dawned on Dobbs that the pilots of the planes that rammed into the twin towers in New York were not Mexicans and they did not come into the United States through Mexico?

Never mind that despite the historical American dismemberment of Mexico in 1848, Mexico has maintained enthusiastic diplomatic relations with the U.S., becoming one of the country’s most favorable trading partners. But Mexicans are not streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border to inflict physical harm on Americans. On the contrary. The Mexicans who have crossed into the United States without documentation are doing so to improve their economic circumstances.

But Dobbs thinks their very presence in the United States harms the American economy. Ignore reports and studies to the contrary. Dobbs has his mind made up, and he will not be confused with the facts. Moreover, for Dobbs, that horde of “illegal” Mexican immigrants imperils the values of American life and culture. Mexicans are today’s whipping boy and Dobbs is wielding a big crop. There is a growing movement of Catonists in the American Republic who fear immigrants and what they augur for America’s future. Catonists are pessimistic about that future.

Cato was a senator in the Roman Republic during the Punic Wars with Carthage in the third century BC. He was an “anti-intellectual monumentalist” who fed Roman fears of encroachment by decadent foreigners whose alien values, he contended, would disrupt the Roman political tradition and the organization of the nation. And though the Roman Empire was a multicultural enterprise, Cato was a Roman supremacist who believed that

Rome was for the Romans. Americans like Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor of foreign affairs, believes multiculturalism will destroy the United States. It was not multiculturalism that destroyed Rome; it was the arrogant excesses of its leaders that destroyed Rome. It’s out of this fear of multiculturalism, hardened and institutionalized, that the current wave of American nativism rises. In the mid-18^th century, just after the U.S. War against Mexico (1846-1848), American attitudes about the territory dismembered from Mexico focused more on the promise of the land than on patrolling it. The wrested Mexican territory was, after all, an expansive piece of real estate, and, according to the propaganda of the time, sparsely populated, which is why it was there for the taking. But the fact of the matter is that the annexed Mexican territory was much more populated than Anglo statistics have suggested.

The Tejano historian Arnoldo De Leon has painted, perhaps, the best “picture” of this land and its population of the time. He describes the landscape as dotted with small communities and family jacales connecting the larger population clusters like San Antonio, El Paso, and Santa Fe, communities of Hispanos doing for themselves as frontier people everywhere have done for themselves. Anglo American accounts, however, have distorted the reality of the Hispanic Southwest to fit their own providential purposes.

All of this is to say that Mexican Americans have historical priority in the American Southwest, which was once part of their patrimony. But missing in the current debate over immigration are the voices of Mexican Americans, those who are at the crux of the issue. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Mexican American voices are absent in most public policy discussions in this country.

This is why, as Mexican Americans, we must debate the debaters, those who are arguing most strenuously for immigration reform, not because we are opposed to immigration reform but because we are a vital part of that issue and our voices ought to be, therefore, part of the debate.

Unfortunately, the only views Americans get about public policy issues like immigration are those advanced by mainstream mongers like Lou Dobbs, who are caught up myopically with the topic, Catonists who have only a single-minded view of America’s future and what the United States should be. Instead of a populist vision of America that includes all our visions, we are subjected to a singular apodictic vision of America based on one man’s view – an American Cato.

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