Friday, February 25, 2005

During this [CPAC] conference, one of the interludes between panels featured Patrick Henry--that is, a gentleman dressed up as Patrick Henry who exhorted his audience to live virtuously and recited a lengthy passage from the "Give me liberty, or give me death" speech. It's a stirring bit of oratory. And it made me ask myself: How much do liberals today draw convincingly on 1776 or 1787? They often present themselves as the heirs to FDR or JFK, but rarely, it seems, to Madison or Washington--it's as if liberal history begins in 1933. Sure, I like Medicare and Head Start, but they don't resonate with me as strongly as the Federalist Papers or the Bill of Rights. Conservatives, perhaps by nature, understand this, and they've effectively grabbed our revolutionary history for themselves.

I wonder if Frank, and the other Democrats calling on the party to rediscover their Jeffersonian roots, are aware that several years ago leading Democrat Representative Lynn Woolsey dismissed Jefferson as a "slave holder" whose views should not be taken seriously.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Just as you won't win over a crowd of Mexican villagers by speaking Latin, the United States can't sell democracy and reform to Arab populations by speaking to them in modern standard Arabic--and ignoring the Middle East's more widely understood vernacular languages.

The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues as "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. ...

The proliferation of Arabic-language blogs means thousands of webpages are updated daily in the versions of Arabic spoken in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Tunis, and so on. Rather than fall behind this curve, the United States should adjust and adapt its strategy for reaching Arab audiences. We stand to gain considerably from speaking to the Middle East in languages that Arab majorities, not just elites, can understand.

The specific complaint I've heard, dialect-wise, is that most of the personalities on Al-Hurra [the U.S. backed TV alternative to Al Jazeera] speak with heavy Lebanese accents which is bad because Christian Lebanese are held in some ill-repute among the Muslim Arab majority. Certainly the Angry Arab Guide to Middle East Media seems to indicate that things with Lebanese involvement are ipso facto suspect. Obviously, though, this is a bit hard for non-speakers of Arabic to weigh in on. I suppose the analogy would be that if you were trying to win "hearts and minds" in the United States you wouldn't put a British Muslim on the air.

If you start speaking in vernacular, you'll have to have separate efforts all over the Arab world, as Egyptian Arabic differs from Iraqi differs from Gulf and so on. Modern Standard Arabic is at least a lingua franca for educated people around the region, which it's used. And more people know it than did a few decades ago - I've heard at least one professor say that in Morocco he used to go to villages where people who ask him to translate the radio news into Moroccan Arabic, but that hasn't happened in recent years. If Moroccans are learning MSA, everyone probably is.

While MSA is a lingua franca, it's the Cairene dialect [the dialect of Cairo, Egypt, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic]that dominates Arab television:

The Cairene dialect is today used in television, radio, and political speeches. Through the 1950s and 1960s, it gained prominence because it was seen as a way of promoting democratic populism. Cairene is widely understood throughout Egypt and beyond because it is used in Egyptian films, plays, popular music, and television dramas, which are popular nationally and in other Arabic-speaking countries.

Almost the opposite of 'BBC English', really. And the written language is another thing entirely.

(And Moroccan Arabic has always been an outlier here. If anything, Moroccans are picking up Egyptian, and particularly Cairene forms, a bit like the way young British speakers started showing signs of uptalking -- ending sentences on a rising cadence? as if asking a question? -- that may have been picked up from watching Australian soap operas.)

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

If Mexican-Americans in Southern California are not "Spanish" or even their first cousins, then what are they—besides being Spanish-speaking Americans?

The Times asked this question recently of Dr. George I. Sanchez, University of Texas expert on ethnic groups in the Southwest.

"They defy categorical classification as a group and no term or phrase adequately describes them," he said. ...

Even their language, Dr. Sanchez points out, is heterogeneous.

"Their mother tongue, their vernacular, is usually Spanish—of every conceivable variation, that is. In fact, for some the home-language is English; for others a part-English, part-Spanish vernacular is the rule."

The reason the "Spanish heritage" is propagandized out of proportion at the expense of the Mexican-Indian heritage is the Anglo-American's attitude toward the so-called non-white races, several educators charged at a recent Mexican-American seminar in Phoenix.

"The Mexican-American is a victim of confusion, frustration and insecurity because he has been taught through social pressure to be ashamed of and even disown his ethnic ancestry," says Marcos de Leon, teacher of Spanish at Van Nuys High School.

Use of the Spanish language, say other leaders, is one thing that Mexican-Americans have over other students and they tend to exploit it.

The controversy centers on two arguments:

Mexican-American students should concentrate on English because speaking Spanish too much hurts their proficiency in the "national language," English. Besides, said a school psychologist, children growing up in a bicultural environment are more prone than others to neurosis and mental disorders.

Mexicans are indigenous to the Southwest, and so the Spanish language is part of their culture which should not be tampered with. Having colonized the Southwest, Spanish-speaking people refuse to abandon their traditions because of the advent of Anglo-American culture. ...

This approach infuriates the growing number of militant Mexican-American leaders, many of whom now insist that meetings held to discuss the problems of this ethnic group should be conducted in Spanish.

Some education experts say that what is needed in the Southwest is for non-Mexican-Americans to become "Mexicanized"—not the other way around. Asked how the Mexican-American can find his way into U.S. society, Dr. Jack D. Forbes, research program director of UC Berkeley's Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, recently told the U.S. Civil Rights Commission:

"The Anglo-American, quite obviously, is the new-comer." It is the Anglo-American, he said, who should learn more about the Mexican-American, his heritage and his culture. No one, he continued, can truly call himself a Southwesterner "unless he is a Mexicanized person to a considerable degree."

Not Enough

To the extremist Mexican-American leaders not even this is enough. What these leaders want for the 5 million Mexican-Americans in the five Southwestern states—California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas—is separatism not a "Mexicanized" society.

The controversial New Mexico Spanish-speaking leader, Reies Lopez Tijerina, who preaches to his followers that they should speak Spanish as often as possible, is a prime advocate of a separate—but equal—state for Mexican-Americans.[*]

Though few take the separatist movement seriously, educators in the Southwest worry about Mexican-Americans retreating into a "Mexican shell."

The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it--and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today's society, the Hell's Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand. ...

It is safe to say that no Hell's Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a Bushmaster, but nevertheless they are somehow related. The I.W.W. had serious plans for running the world, while the Hell's Angels mean only to defy the world's machinery. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. There is nothing particularly romantic or admirable about it; that's just the way it is, strength in unity. ...

The Hell's Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hell's Angels unmanageable for the police and morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they "don't start trouble" is probably true more often than not, but their idea of "provocation" is dangerously broad, and their biggest problem is that nobody else seems to understand it. ...

By the time I parted company with them--at 6:30 the next morning after an all-night drinking bout in my apartment--I had been impressed by a lot of things, but no one thing about them was as consistently obvious as their group loyalty. This is an admirable quality, but it is also one of the things that gets them in trouble: a fellow Angel is always right when dealing with outsiders. And this sort of reasoning makes a group of "offended" Hell's Angels nearly impossible to deal with.

In 1967, a 14-year-old kid wrote Thompson a fan letter saying that Hell's Angels had inspired him to join a motorcycle gang. An alarmed Thompson replied by telling the boy to do his own thing, not imitate others, and warning him about what was wrong with the Angels: "The best of the Angels--the guys you might want to sit down and talk to--have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who are left are almost all the kind who can't do anything else, and they're not much fun to talk to. They're not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They're just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk. They're not even happy; most of them hate the lives they lead, but they can't afford to admit it because they don't know where else to go, or what else to do. That's what makes them mean."

Monday, February 21, 2005

The fewer the tongues, the more easily societies communicate. Languages are barriers to trust and understanding. Even in well-off places with few social problems, language barriers create mistrust: Think of Quebec or Belgium. ...

People who romanticize indigenous languages usually, themselves, achieved comfortable positions in life by speaking and writing one of the top ten tongues and by living in a society that has single-language cohesion. A person who communicates only in a rare language--especially a spoken-only dialect that cannot be written--is at a huge disadvantage in anything other than an isolated community. Why is Singapore so much more affluent than its neighbors? In part owing to a long-standing policy of teaching public-school students English.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Watching Jennifer Lopez struggle and strain her way through a ballad duet with her husband-for-now Marc Anthony and hearing country hunk Tim McGraw apply his nearly nonexistent range to the schlocky "Live Like You Were Dying" both had me wishing I could click away for a bit. ... I guess I'll give the worst-moment nod to McGraw since the fact that J-Lo was singing in Spanish saved me from understanding what she was attempting to sing.

Friday, February 04, 2005

The poll also notes that while 72% of all non-Latino "Traditionalist" Catholics voted for Bush, "Modernist" Catholics went for Kerry 69-31, the same percentage as Latino Catholics. What this indicates about the relationship of Latino voters to Catholic doctrine, I leave for others more knowlegible than I.

Bleg: Has anyone seen a breakdown of the 2004 Hispanic vote by gender? Write me at jboulet@englishfirst.org.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Teresa Heinz Kerry was perturbed. Her husband, John Kerry, once the frontrunner for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, was slipping in the polls, steadily losing ground to former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Heinz Kerry intended to fight back--and she knew exactly how to do it. So she telephoned her husband's campaign manager and told him: "I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean."