Regression and Progress. Yesterday, the bankruptcy "reform" passed by the Republican Right in the service of banks and credit-card companies to trap ordinary people in debt while permitting major corporations to use the bankruptcy laws to void labor contracts and cut benefits, went into effect. It was a dark day in our history that will surely produce grave hardship for tens of millions of Americans. It may ultimately do some good, however, in making the poor, even in the most backward parts of this country (that's code for "the South" and "Bible Belt"), realize that the Republican Party hates them, and produce a revolt that will overthrow the regressive forces that have seized control of this country by using simpletons' prejudices against them. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
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On the other hand, I discovered today that the White House, even under rightwing Republicans, offers various materials in Spanish on its website! There is an index of Spanish-language materials on the White House's official website at http://www.whitehouse.gov/espanol/index.es.html. By contrast, a search within the White House's site for "francais" found no such index and only one "hit" of any kind, a joint press conference of Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Ottawa. A search for "français" (with the cedilla) produced no results at all. So the White House recognizes, unofficially, the special status of Spanish as our second national language.
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The jingoists and alarmists at places like U.S. English must be horrified! That organization is just plain behind the times, as evidenced by the fact that the opening screen at its website employs an outline map of a United States with only 48 states. We've had 50 states since 1959! Its advisory board includes such odious luminaries of the Right as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlton Heston, along with some surprises, such as celebrities Alex Trebek and Arnold Palmer.
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What people like that don't "get" is that, as Wikipedia's article on "Spanish in the United States" points out,

Hispanics who are second-generation American in the United States almost all speak English, but about 50 percent speak Spanish at home. Two-thirds of third-generation Mexican Americans speak English exclusively at home.

That article goes on to point out that Spanish has vanished from entire societies/countries it used to be spoken in. The only way Spanish continues to survive in the U.S., much less interfere with the cultural unity of the Nation, is that we have tens of millions of people moving back and forth between Latin America and the United States in a constant cultural and demographic convection. Without that convection, our Spanish-language media would wither away, as the usefulness of Spanish plunged to nonexistence.
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I'm not eager to see that happen. I often watch some news and such in Spanish when commercials come on in the English-language evening news programs, or I can't find anything worth watching in English (which happens, especially Sundays and late at nite any day, even tho I receive about 130 English channels on my cable service). My Spanish is so crappy that I miss a lot of many reports and almost everything in some dialects, but I get enuf out of some reports to make the effort worthwhile, and I think such viewing is helping me to improve my Spanish for political and economic reasons.
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I do look forward, however, to millions of immigrants from Latin America abandoning their connections to the cultures of their birth at least to the point of taking U.S. citizenship so they can vote, and by voting change the political complexion of the Nation to a more progressive hue.
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Speaking of progress, there's been some progress in the political-satire world. Comedy Central has instituted The Colbert Report (silent-T in both "Colbert" and "Report") immediately following The Daily Show. It had an impressive debut last nite, and now has a website.
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Not all Comedy Central programming is worth watching, to be sure! As we say in Spanish, desafortunadamente, mucho de su programación es estinko ("unfortunately, much of its programming is stinko"), such as the execrable and insane Drawn Together, soon to start its second season. Whatever for? Drawn Together and Too Late with Adam Carolla, but not Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn? What are they thinking?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,981.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 PM