Obama and Learning a Second Language

Twice in recent weeks Barak Obama has mentioned a bizarre tenet of his campaign: his desire that all Americans should speak a second language.

Bizarre because Obama himself speaks nothing other than English, though he spent part of his childhood overseas.

Bizarre because most Americans will never leave the borders of the United States. They will live their entire lives speaking English exclusively without suffering any negative consequences.

Bizarre because having one common language unifies people and simplifies government.

Bizarre because historically the first thing immigrants have thrown into the melting pot upon arrival in the United States is their language. The challenge to learn English is implicit in an immigrant’s decision to move, legally or illegally, to the United States.

I am not criticizing Obama because I am an ignorant American who refuses to learn a second language. I speak, read, and write English, French, and Danish. In high school and college I studied three other languages as well just for fun: German, Latin, and Polish. Why have I invested so much time and a fair amount of money in the acquisition of various languages? Lots of reasons, none of which involve impressing hordes of unknown Europeans.

Learning a language for me was an intellectual exercise. (I grew up in Kansas, after all, hundreds of miles from the nearest border.) I planned to travel some day, of course, but an occasional two-week trip would not have been sufficient motivation for the hours I devoted to French. I loved the language – how it looked on paper and how it flowed from the tongue. I loved the recognition of borrow words and common roots, the idioms, the French fairy tales and Christmas carols, the patisserie and the mousse au chocolat. All of it.

And it wasn’t long after I started studying French that I noticed I was learning a lot more about English in the process – an added benefit of language acquisition.

In Denmark I attended a college preparatory high school with classmates who were on the ‘language line’ as opposed to the ‘math and sciences line.’ We studied five languages that year, but mastering all five languages wasn’t really the point. We were developing mental discipline in a classical sense. (Please note: the vast majority of their peers were not studying languages at all – they were attending trade schools, having opted out of higher education at 16.)

Obama seems to forget (quite frequently and on a variety of issues) that Americans are FREE. In this case, they are free to study anything they like. The government has a vested interest in making sure that students master the fundamentals: English, math, and the hard sciences. If those subjects are the leafy green vegetables of an academic diet, foreign languages are the desserts.

What Obama seems to be hinting at, though he may be unable to articulate it, is that Americans need to have more world-awareness. If we accept this premise, let’s begin, then, not with superfluous language acquisition, but with geography. Knowing how to say ‘river’ in Spanish is less important in a global economy than knowing where the major rivers of the world are and what cities and civilizations lie along them.

And while we’re in the process of studying geography, maybe we will learn a little more about history.

Because I enjoy French and Danish so much, I would encourage everyone to learn a second language – but only if they are interested in doing so. I would not shame them into it, and I certainly would not mandate it.

Finally, I would not take an overseas trip while running for president and ridicule my fellow citizens for not speaking foreign languages. Obama could have apologized for his own lack of scholarship in language acquisition, but he couldn’t resist blaming American culture instead.

As Obama himself demonstrates, an American can do very well in this world knowing only English. There’s nothing wrong with that and nothing to be ashamed of. Historically, conquering nations have dominated linguistically as well. Whether we like it or not, the United States has conquered most of the world ideologically and technologically – to the victor go the spoils.

That's Entertainment...Isn't It?

My morbid fascination with crime (of which I am not proud, by the way) began in elementary school when a rash of kidnappings of young girls in Kansas City had me shaking in my bed or sleeping on my parents' bedroom floor. (One of the girls was kidnapped walking home from the community pool where I swam every day that summer. Her headless body was found some time later, but no one was ever charged with her murder.) From that time forward I thought if I kept one finger on the pulse of violent crime, especially in my area, I would know where to go and not to go and what to do and not to do in order to remain safe. I began a lifetime of reading newspapers and watching the evening news.

I recoil at the idea of watching fictionalized violence on TV or in movies, and marvel that such programs succeed, but long before the OJ trial, I was entranced by the real thing. The grizzly details were secondary to me - I wanted to know where, when and why crimes happened. I thought being well informed was like being well armed. It gave me courage.

Occasionally through the years a particular case has grabbed my attention. When I told my brother about BTK years before his capture, Brent thought I was talking about a hamburger at Burger King. The artist's sketch of the Unabomber in a hoodie with sunglasses haunted me because I learned that he had mailed one of his bombs from the same post office I used for several years. One of Ted Bundy's victims was taken from my college campus. I kept a file in my brain full of such information.

I followed the Elizabeth Smart case in Utah, the Lacey Peterson case in California (Why? I don't even live in California) and the Natalie Holloway case in Aruba (of all places) and became hooked on daily updates from Nancy Grace and Greta Van Sustern, whose programs on rival networks air simultaneously when I am going to bed.

So the other night I was flipping channels to see which stories the two programs were covering. Greta, who is from Green Bay herself, was interviewing Brett Favre -- no interest in that story. I switched to Nancy Grace and settled in.

She was interviewing a grandmother about her missing two-year-old granddaughter. As I read the ticker to get more information, snapshots of the wide-eyed little girl were blinking in quick succession on the screen.

She was a darling child, just as darling as Polly Klaus, JonBenet Ramsey, Jessica Lunsford, and all of the rest. As the story unfolded we learned that this little girl had been neglected by her mother in the past. Who could neglect such a person? Who could neglect any small or helpless person?

And that's when it hit me -- I am watching this program for my own entertainment. If someone somewhere didn't kidnap or kill someone else, there would be a void in my own life.

So I am done with Nancy Grace and Greta Van Sustern and the whole cottage industry that has sprung up to satiate morbid curiosities like my own. I am not really using this information - I am feeding off of it, but I won't feed off of it anymore.

Terrible things will no doubt continue to happen at the hands of horrible people, but I will no longer be a party to it.

Worth the Wait: The Writing Class by Jincy Willet

I finished reading The Writing Class by Jincy Willett last night at 2am. I would use the old cliche that I 'could not put it down,' but being a mother of four (one in absentia) I had to put it down quite a few times, reluctantly.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Caveat to Sensitive Readers: You might reasonably be put off by the language of the 'bad guy' in the book, but hey, what kind of language would you expect a murderer to use while writing threats? Which reminds me of the Polly Klaus case in a northern California courtroom when her molester/murderer drew criticism and disgust for flipping off the child's family when the verdict was read. What kind of behavior did anyone expect from a person capable of killing a lovely little girl? The media seemed more outraged by his hand gesture than by his crime.]

The main character, Amy Gallup, is rather cynical, to say the least, which is partly why I find her so hilarious. Her take on life is brutally honest, but she has rare moments of warmth and compassion, too, especially while interacting with her basset hound, Alphonse. She embraces her flaws and insecurities and allows them to define the boundaries of her life so that she can live in a perpetual comfort zone, but her comfort zone is shaken with the new writing class she's teaching at the university extension.

"With remnants of creative energy," Amy Gallup blogs, too. Jincy writes about bloggers: "They clearly believed themselves on some sort of world stage, where they just might be attended to. They needed to communicate. Amy did not. If people stumbled across her site, fine, but it would exist without them, just like her books, whose continued presence in the Library of Congress was her ego's only comfort."

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a non-formulaic, literary murder mystery, to anyone who enjoys laughing and reading at the same time, to anyone who has ever thought of attending a writing class, to anyone who writes....

Jincy Willett is AMAZING! I only wish she were more prolific. On the other hand, I would not want to rush her. She's a writer who knows what she's doing. I stand in awe.

Anticipation....

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of two novels I ordered from Amazon yesterday. (I ordered them online after checking with local Barnes & Noble stores - not in stock. Ugh!)

I will be reading the first book, A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich, for my August book club. I'm looking forward to it because of its great reviews. Here is one of those:

"If a book can be valued by the number of times that it is recalled in the reader's mind as a source of humor, comfort or warm nostalgia, then this book is among my most cherished few. Get this book, read it, love it. "

I stumbled across the other book, The Writing Class, while checking to see if Jincy Willett had written another book since Winner of the National Book Award several years ago. I loved that book (despite its dark humor) and found her writing to be incredibly good. So now she has another novel out and it's on its way to my house, even if it isn't on the shelf at Barnes & Noble for some inexplicable reason. Here are some comments about The Writing Class:

“The funniest novel I have read, possibly ever. Brilliant, totally original, and worthy of its title. I promise you will laugh constantly and to the point of stomach damage.”---Augusten Burroughs, bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry

“Riotous [and] hugely funny . . .Willett’s satirical abilities remain deliciously undimmed…. Amid the antic, hilarious, gender-bending battle of the sexes that Ms. Willett whips up in this book, either one may qualify as a reason to kill. Either that, or to die laughing.”---The New York Times

I'll have to post later to tell you what I thought of these, but I am REALLY looking forward to reading them!

A Great Quote to Share

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses...

It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities,

it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them,

that we should conduct all our dealings with one another,

all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal….

Your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

C.S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

Distracted...

If I have any regular blog readers remaining out there (Mom, you know who you are...), they have probably noticed that my blogging intensity has waxed and waned over the months since I started blogging. When I am distracted, I do not blog as well or as often -- I guess that makes sense.

So what are my distractions?

• My oldest child left on his mission a month ago. He's living in what he describes as an oversized Tuff Shed in dense jungle on a small island. (On the upside, he can see three waterfalls from his porch and the night sky is full of stars.)
• My other three children are home for the summer, coming and going with camps, etc.
• I'm working now, though only 20-40 hours a month, and doing what I really enjoy doing (writing for a newspaper) but I have deadlines.
• Girls' camp...still recovering from that, while planning our post camp party (next week).
• Team teaching Sunday School each week.
• Trying to finish outlining and begin writing a novel.
• Housework, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, bills...the usual stuff that's always there.

All of those things are good things, so I will have to learn to function despite distractions. Words always help me, so let me define some terms:

distraction: something that divides the attention or prevents concentration

focus: to direct toward a particular point of interest for maximum clarity

"I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,

as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence,

for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation

of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."

John Adams