This is a serious diary but I would like to begin with a joke:
What do you call someone who can speak three languages? Trilingual
What do you call someone who can speak two languages? Bilingual
What do you call someone who can speak one language? American
(Oh, and what do you call someone who can't speak any language? George Bush)
I am both trilingual and American. George Bush decided to talk about language the other day, so I say let's do it.
If you find this diary to be worthwhile, I would be honored and flattered if you recommend it. If you think it sucks balls, petition Kos to take Cedwyn's suggestion and add a "Smite This Diary" button on the site.
I speak English, Mandarin, and Spanish. Learning a language isn't the big hairy deal that we make out of it if you travel to other countries and actually speak to the people there. I've never taken a day of Italian in school but I can get by just fine in some very bad Italian... just enough for basic needs... "toilet," "thank you, "hostel," "chocolate," "I have a jealous Italian boyfriend," "go fuck yourself"...nothing fancy. Same for German, and same for Slovenian.
(If you are wondering how I picked up bits and pieces of random languages, I did it by traveling. Usually I start off with a phrasebook and figure out how to pronounce a language and then go from there once I get to the country. I like to try using polite phrases in shops and restaurants, and I've also made friends from other countries and visited them there.)
Let's start with King George's thoughts on the subject of learning foreign languages:
In order to convince people we care about them, we've got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. When somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate the Texas culture. I mean, somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they're interested in somebody else's culture. Learning a language -- somebody else's language is a kind gesture. It's a gesture of interest. It really is a fundamental way to reach out to somebody and say, I care about you. I want you to know that I'm interested in not only how you talk but how you live.
Wow! We agree! I bet you even the French agree. Could this possibly be the first time that Bush, France, and I agree on anything? Unless Bush likes drinking Kir Royale too... oh, no, he doesn't drink.
This would be the appropriate to insert a clever comment about how he's from Connecticut and has a fake ranch, so why is he talking about Texas culture, but back to the topic at hand. Bush goes on:
In order for this country to be able to convince others, people have got to be able to see our true worth in our heart. And when Americans learn to speak a language, learn to speak Arabic, those in the Arabic region will say, gosh, America is interested in us. They care enough to learn how we speak.
Looks like he finally figured out the meaning of "hearts and minds."
He also has an awkward sentence or two:
You can't have an ideology that works if you say to half the population in a part of the world, you have no rights. You can't say to a group of people, my ideology is better than freedom, and if you speak out you're going to get - - you'll be tortured.
I can't tell if he's talking about himself here or about Al Qaeda. I think he's talking about himself. I wish I could take it as an admission of guilt or a promise to reform, or something. But the man lies.
I am going to shift gears and tell you my own thoughts on language, and then we'll come back and have some fun at the president's expense.
My Thoughts on Language & Culture
My mom took Spanish and French in high school and college so from a very young age I wanted to also. I don't know if I was genuinely interested or if I wanted to be like my mom or some combination thereof. I remember wishing I could learn Spanish too while watching Maria count to ten in Spanish on Sesame Street.
I remember my elementary school teachers telling the class that the best time to learn another language is a kid. I felt my little elementary-school-aged biological clock ticking as I thought about it.
Best time to learn a language? Before age 14 or so.
Age when my public high school starts offering foreign languages? Age 14 and after.
That makes NO SENSE.
In high school I took Spanish. I was introduced to the term "ethnocentrism" when I traveled outside the U.S. for the first time (to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, England, and Cyprus). Avoiding ethnocentrism should be a no-brainer. Withhold judgement and try to see the world from someone else's eyes. It might mean using new kinds of toilets or eating strange foods. I think it makes you a better American too. When you can see our culture from British or Chinese or Slovenian eyes, you learn more about our country.
Freshman year of college, I had just finished up four years of high school Spanish, I began four years of college Chinese, I studied cultural anthropology, and I lived in China for two months.
I was fascinated by the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and I wrote my application essay to the Study in China program on it.
In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.
The theory is controversial so take it with a grain of salt but give it a thought if it's the first time you've heard of it. If Eskimos have a thousand words for snow, do they see a thousand different kinds of snow when we just see one? Or to put it in words that will be received well here - think about Newspeak in Orwell's 1984. I think I've seen at least 2 diaries quoting that book today alone.
So, to connect the disjointed logic and personal history here: How do we achieve world peace if we can't overcome ethnocentrism? And how can we see the world through other people's eyes if we don't speak their language? And how can we speak their language if we wait until kids are ridiculously old and then offer a few languages as an elective in high school?
My high school offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin. The 10 most commonly spoken languages are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, and Wu Chinese (a dialect). Together, 42.5% of people speak those 10 languages. Rounding out the top 30 are a few you'd expect like French and Arabic and a big bunch of Chinese and Indian dialects (and some others). Together those 30 languages account for a little over 60% of the earth's people.
I don't propose that every school offers every language and I don't propose that everyone gives up and learns Esperanto. But how about offering languages earlier and offering a few like Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese occasionally?
Now let's get back to the priceless wisdom of our fearless Monkey-in-Chief.
More About Bush
And so the fundamental question is, how do we win? What do we do? Well, in the short-term, our strategy is to find them and bring them to justice before they hurt us. In other words, we've got to stay on the offense. We've got to be unyielding and never give them a, you know, a breath of fresh air, never give them a hope that they can succeed. It's the only way to do it. We must defeat them in foreign battlefields so they don't strike us here at home.
And that's one of the reasons why the Secretary of Defense is here. He wants his young soldiers who are the front lines of finding these killers to be able to speak their language and be able to listen to the people in the communities in which they live. That makes sense, doesn't it, to have a language-proficient military -- to have people that go into the far reaches of this world and be able to communicate in the villages and towns and rural areas and urban centers, to protect the American people.
Ok, so I admit I hid the actual intent of his speech earlier by sharing the enlightened-sounding part first. He actually starts with a lot of thanking all of the cronies who accompanied him. I was quite shocked to hear him use the colloquialism "heck of a" again - I thought his handlers would have him retire that one.
She's a heck of a Secretary of State, though. And Don Rumsfeld is a heck of a Secretary of the Defense.
I bet Condi won't hold his feet while he does situps for days after that one.
We need intelligence officers who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu knows what they're talking about. That's what we need. We need diplomats -- when we send them out to help us convince governments that we've got to join together and fight these terrorists who want to destroy life and promote an ideology that is so backwards it's hard to believe. These diplomats need to speak that language.
Yes, you read that correctly. Bush just said we need diplomats.
They expect us to be wise about how we use our resources, and a good use of resources is to promote this language initiative in K through 12, in our universities. And a good use of resources is to encourage foreign language speakers from important regions of the world to come here and teach us how to speak their language.
You're going to hear a lot about the specifics of the program. What I'm trying to suggest to you that this program is a part of a strategic goal, and that is to protect this country in the short-term and protect it in the long- term by spreading freedom. We're facing an ideological struggle, and we're going to win.
You see, freedom is the ideology that wins. We got to have confidence in that as we go out. But you can't win in the long run for democracy unless you've got the capacity to help spread democracy. You see, we got to convince people of the benefits of a free society. I believe everybody desires to be free. But I also know people need to be convincing -- convinced -- I told you I needed to go to language school. (Laughter.) And you can't convince people unless you can talk to them.
Bush is paying lip service to good policy without really getting it right. First of all, YES we need diplomats. And we need linguists. (So why did we fire all the gay ones?) And we need to start teaching languages earlier and we need to fund it (Bush said State was sponsoring this - does that mean ponying up cash or does it just mean marketing it on Fox News?).
But you don't set out to another country with the clear idea that you are right and they are wrong like Bush wants. You can't. Trust me. I spent two months, including a Fourth of July, in a communist country. In the very city of the Tian'anmen Square massacre. And two months is nothing, I know. But you go in with an open mind and learn how the people of that country think. You don't lose your Americanism, but you make it stronger and better by accepting new points of view and new truths about the world you never thought of before. And in the end you can still disagree with communism or whatever but at least you understand better how other countries got the way they did and you can work with them. We have people - great Americans like Joe Wilson - who are willing to devote their lives to this.
Here's an example I find very illustrative of what I am trying to say. The Jesuits went to China in the sixteenth century and learned about the culture. Scholars were respected in Chinese society so the Jesuits dressed and lived like scholars. Here's a blurb about Matteo Ricci, a famous Jesuit who lived in China:
Ricci arrived in south China in 1582, and at Beijing in 1601, where he presented himself at the Imperial court of Wanli. Not only could he write in difficult ancient Chinese, he was also renowned for his great understanding of Chinese culture. Unlike missionaries in South Asia, he found that Chinese culture was strongly tied to Confucian values and concluded that Christianity had to be adapted to Chinese culture in order to take root. Ricci was the first to translate the Confucian Classics into a western language, Latin; in fact "Confucius" was Ricci's own Latinisation. He called himself a "Western Confucian" (西儒). With the introduction of Western science and state-of-the-art gadgets like an automatic clock and a world atlas, he attracted the attention of some traditional Confucian literati and officials. In 1607 he and Chinese Catholic mathematician Xu Guangqi translated the first parts of Euclid's Elements into Chinese. Ricci's work on a Chinese-language atlas of the world included coining Chinese names for European countries, many of which are still in use in Chinese today.
However, the Pope outlawed ancestor worship and subsequently the Chinese outlawed Jesuit missionaries.
What we need to do is understand the complexities of the culture of the part of the world that is generating Al Qaeda terrorists. What do the people in other countries care about? What is the economy like? What are the prospects for young people to find jobs or buy a house? What is life like for women? What is the school system like? What do people there do for recreation? Do they visit other countries? What are they proud of in their culture?
Would you believe that when I was in Slovenia this past year I found people who were nostalgic for Communism? It's because their city was economically gutted at the same time that the safety net was taken away. The Slovenians have their own country now and they are proud of their language, the natural beauty of their country, their famous poets, and prosciutto (the Italian name for the food Slovenia gave the world, prsut). The economy of the capital, Ljubljana, is doing well I think. My friends live in the second city, Maribor. Maribor was industrial and it got a lot of business from Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, etc, when Yugoslavia was together. Now that Yugoslavia split up, Maribor's business dried up and none of the companies there can compete in a capitalist economy. The twenty-somethings I met cannot afford to move out from their parents' apartments. Everyone speaks at least Serbian or Croatian AND English or German (and some speak all four!) - in addition to their own language. Some said they can't wait to leave Slovenia, some said they would never leave Slovenia.
The point is, there is a universe of complexity at play here. It's not as simple as "pinko commie bastard" vs. "freedom loving American." So you can't go there with the mindset of "I'm going to learn about them but I'm right." Osama bin Ladin is a piece of work, no doubt, but so are Fred Phelps (of GodHatesFags.com fame) and Randall Terry (Randall Terry is linked to murders of abortion doctors and he was Terri Schiavo's parents "spokesperson" last spring). You can't paint America with a broad brush and say we are all hateful murderous bigots like they are. Learning what factors in Saudi Arabian culture created Osama bin Ladin and found him a worldwide network of followers and governments who will shelter him is as complex as studying the American religious right and figuring out why Pat Robertson can advocate murdering Hugo Chavez and say god is punishing Ariel Sharon without so much as one word denouncing it by the Bush administration. And why did Bush hop a plane to sign the Terri Schiavo bill to placate fucking Randall Terry, among others?
I do agree that we need worldclass intelligence from people who are experts in all areas and languages of the world. Next Friday I am going to visit a relative of mine who is in the U.S. intelligence and his career started with a fascination with East Asia and the Chinese language. But I think there needs to be a distinction made between doing intelligence the Valerie Plame way (looking for WMDs) and doing it the George Bush way (spying on any American he feels like). I don't think my cousin sees a conflict between a love and fascination with the Chinese people and culture and doing whatever it is he does against the Osama bin Ladins and AQ Khans of this world (I have no idea what he does bc he can't tell me, so those are just examples of foreign boogie men who we should be keeping tabs on, not his actual job).
In the end, Bush has the right idea to teach world languages to children in K-12 grades and fund it, but he's really no more right than the bumper sticker that says "Join the army: Travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them."