Thursday, September 26, 2002

The Harvard student who learned Spanish in 1975 often did so to follow Che's motorcycle route on a South American road trip. The girlfriend who accompanied him might have studied French, but she didn't want her boyfriend to think she was a snob, so she took Spanish instead. She wanted to seem like a woman of the people.

Like the girlfriend, today's politicians have found that a Spanish vocabulary is useful for disguising silver-spoon roots and expressing solidarity with the masses. Our president, George W. Bush--who comes from a famously privileged background and had a diplomat-class upbringing--demonstrated this in May at a press conference in Paris, when he scolded an American news reporter for having had the effrontery to ask President Jacques Chirac a question in French. Bush huffed to the crowd, "Very good, the guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental." When the reporter, stunned by the hostility, countered that he knew many more than four words of French, the president's disgust only mounted: "I'm impressed. Que bueno (how great)," he said snidely. He clearly meant it to sting--a not-so-veiled suggestion that the reporter was a member of the effete liberal class that was responsible for all that's wrong with American politics. At his birthday this July in Kennebunkport, Bush wore a baseball cap printed with the words "El jefe" (the chief). The message was clear: French is poncey, show-offy, elitist. But Spanish is all-American.

No lesser an authority than Paul Fussell, author of the Bible of the American caste system, Class, told me, "I believe quite sincerely that in 50 years Spanish will be the absolute equal of English as a social and financial and serious alternative to English in this country. America will be bilingual, absolutely. The bright people will be." My fervent hope is that, despite my newfound love of Spanish, the bright people will be trilingual--English, Spanish, and something else, too.