The Anger of Compassion

How Do You Say "Deep Doo-Doo" in Mandarin?

Apparently, American students are going to find out. Including kindergartners -- courtesy of, among others, the Department of Defense.

I read this story at Inside Higher Ed, and, uh, well, I do have a comment or two...

Under the plan, President Bush will request $114 million in the 2007 fiscal year, with approximately 75 percent of that amount coming through the State and Education Departments, for the National Security Language Initiative, and the Department of Defense would allocate more than $750 million during the 2007 to 2011 fiscal years to groom skilled personnel in languages deemed critical.

First of all, any post-Nixon use of the term "national security" is automatically suspect. Period, and no apology for that. As evidence, I offer Presidents Bill Clinton and (anyone named) George Bush. Ditto the terms "broad-based" and "initiative," the latter not being a characteristic usually encouraged by anyone in government employ, unless it's to fuck up something that already works.

The president said that his administration’s short-term international strategy is to “stay on the offense,” providing troops, intelligence officers and diplomats with “all the tools necessary to succeed.”
“That’s what people in this country expect of our government,” said Bush. “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.”

Yeah...the feds taking the initiative in K through 12 education, as well as universities. Like we don't already have enough problems.

The president then went on to allude to his proposed guest worker program:

Bush also said that “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.”

Now, if this were true, there would be a whole lot of Anglos in this country speaking Spanish a lot better than they do at present. As it is we already have plenty of private citizens coming here on their own initiative -- citizens of Mexico and Guatemala, but citizens they are -- and I don't know that Americans, by and large, are any less monolingual than we've always been. Unless President Bush agrees with former senator Tom Daschle's famous claim that "you can't professionalize unless you federalize." Now there's a guarantee of effectiveness.

This one puzzled me a bit, too:

Department of State officials stressed the need to have more people master “critical” languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Farsi. Officials, noting that fewer than 2 percent of American students currently study any of the target languages, said that they are critical to national security and cultural understanding.

Rice noted that the “country made a huge intellectual investment in winning the Cold War” and said that in recent years America has not made similar investments, especially surrounding the teaching of critical languages. She added that the countries where the critical languages are spoken “will define the 21st century. Nothing is more important than being able to converse with them in their native tongue.”

So our esteemed Secretary of State believes that speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, and Farsi are going to "define the 21st century," does she? While I have no wish to trivialize those languages or those who speak them, I would take exception to that word "define." Spoken by hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Britain, and India, it is English which will "define" the 21st century, if it can be said that any language will define it.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the effort aimed at high school and college students will fail. As I see it, it's a matter of motivation. You can use French to pick up girls. Spanish, too. And German. Girls in miniskirts or in tight jeans on the streets of Paris or Lyons, of Juarez or Madrid, of Berlin or Munich. And girls who appreciate a guy's linguistic efforts may just, shall we say, respond with by showing that appreciation.

But Arabic and Farsi are different. Try your language skills on some abaya-clad cutie on the streets of Jeddah or Riyadh or Tehran and you run the risk of having your head cut off. At that point, being able to say "deep doo-doo" in the native language will probably not be enough to do you any good.

Posted by Craig Ceely at January 10, 2006 10:16 AM