While recently perusing unread books gathering dust on my shelves, one tome caught my eye and, upon being loosed from the grip of neglect, fell open to a random page from which leapt the following sentence: “The ancestors of a critical and growing mass of present-day Americans existed in dung heaps of humanity amidst rotting vegetables.”
Naturally, the line seemed providential — if you happen to be a columnist.
Did he say dung heap?
Of course, the difference between “dung heap of humanity” and “shithole,” as Donald Trump recently described countries of origin for unacceptable immigrants, is about the width of a sheet of bathroom tissue. Trump’s comment has been analyzed to within an inch of its life, with most commentators concluding that this was simply another example of the president’s racist attitudes.
The book in question, “The Idiocy of Assent,” was written by F. Reid Buckley, youngest brother of William F. Buckley. As a friend for 30 years before his death in 2014, I never heard or witnessed any suggestion of racism, though he did observe cultural differences among nations and peoples as any seeing-eye human would. On the subject of cultural equivalence, he’d bat away the notion with a flick of his wrist and utter, “The Aztec pyramids were dripping with the blood of human sacrifice.”
It is only because of Buckley’s “dung heap” and Trump’s “shithole” that I noticed the similarities in their immigration views. Buckley would never use Trump’s word, partly because he thought insults should be more artful.
