Saturday In Germany

If I didn't like Buchanan, I should get out of Massachusetts, the thirty-something man in the green down jacket and brown standard issue pants told me as we stood there in the snow awaiting the candidate for whom he was shouldering two wooden-piked campaign placards.

Lexington last Saturday had that kind of surreal character to it, that sense that you were somewhere new--not that fanatical America didn't exist before, but that you had just discovered it, though you always knew it was there and denied it. It was just before three in the afternoon, and I was in America.

The revolutionary battlefield that made Lexington famous is now the center of an affluent suburb, and the one campaign stop Buchanan's men had plotted for this state. Minuteman imagery aside, this was a sublime opportunity for the candidate. Here he would be in the crossfire and be winning. The podium was backed by a red and blue striped and white starred banner; it was surrounded by the Secret Service. Roped in front, about 100 agitated supporters stood, patiently awaiting the descent of their savior who was to arrive some 20 minutes late on a hired bus.

SSG Richard Laird, U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve, a "white, single, heterosexual Vietnam-era/Persian Gulf veteran," was molested while serving by a fellow soldier whom he otherwise would have killed that morning except he decided to leave the corps instead, he told me. Noting my affiliation with "Kremlin on the Charles," he permitted me a copy of what only the White House, Rush Limbaugh and a few dozen senators had been exposed to: his Go-Pat-Go information packet which includes a pretty damn hysterical parody of the president as Uncle Sam declaring, "I want you! One good, proud, patriotic gay or bisexual male for companionship."

ABC News set up camp on the press platform, the producer somewhat nervous of the weather, of the logistics and, more significantly, of the fellow in front of the network's camera who might just prevent their soundbite capture. Lucky for them, this fellow raised his Buchanan posters above their video camera so that he would be able to block the camera from Lexington High instead. The kid from the high school had come out there with a paper sign taped to his baseball cap identifying himself as press; had thought to grab a garbage bag to cover the equipment; had lugged a stool probably from his house; and he couldn't shoot, couldn't see the goddamn podium. The supporter wanted it that way.

I really hadn't thought of Buchanan as a reality before the rally, perhaps because I couldn't believe that he had a constituency. But the working men in union caps and young guys with POW/MIA flags and army boots, the reverent women and their little ducks and that old man chanting about patriotism--they got to me. They were mad, mad at everybody, and it's not even necessary to go through the multi-cultural litany because we all know that they just don't give a shit about anyone that's not like them. And why should they? Believing that they are the true Americans, and the immigrants and Jews and blacks and gays, are trespassers, they appear to themselves in the right to reclaim their country. Cloaked in those colors, they certainly appeared legitimate, especially as opposed to the neon-signed motley crew confronting them.

Buchanan arrived with his Bible and his Constitution and his national socialism, otherwise known as Nazism. The supporters cheered. The protesters booed. The news clips told of ideological conflict.

I went to Widener 2W, the German section, to read some of Hitler's earlier work. And I thought that the great quip about the "original German" was never so real. I was reading in 1929 and thinking about the disillusioned workers and Weimar and the need to have a strong fatherland. I was living in 1996 and living in 1929. I was in Germany and I was in America, and I had to have hope, there in the stacks, that history couldn't be so easily trashed. Hope that America couldn't be so easily manipulated.

Joshua A. Kaufman's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.