Editorials/Sickle Cell Amnesia/In Defense of the American Language
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
............................................................................................................................................................................ EDITORIALS : SICKLE...
...Before that he was in the Peace Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...But the Journal's editorial page is unique, serving as a kind of samizdat for the 60 percent of the electorate that voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984...
...The policies of the recent past are sacred to them, no matter how futile or palpably pernicious...
...The truth is that many Americans, even many teachers, do not care all that much about English or about any other language as it is spoken and written on these shores...
...Think of all the anti-poor jokes one hears and the plots to keep the poor wretched...
...even the way he stands, feet slightly apart like a boxer ready for a new sparring partner...
...state on a propaganda sally is seen as a campaigning American pot, honing his "image...
...They think they live in a very charming land, and now the redoubtable Time magazine reports that Gorbachev seems to sense their pique...
...So how do we react...
...And of course what the Vineyard Crowd tells Nancy is quite simple and straightforward: "Nancy, if the President can be persuaded to give up Star Wars, don't worry...
...The Wall Street Journal's editorial page did record hilarious American estimates of past Soviet leaders: Khrushchev, surprisingly well-tailored, a potential leader of American labor, or, in industrialist Cyrus Eaton's eyes, "head of one of our greatest corporations...
...This is the way the debate over policy change has been waged for some years now...
...Nor is it the British Isles where practically everyone contributes to the music of the spoken word...
...It may protect free expression, but it certainly has failed to encourage diversity of opinion among the media's major voices...
...If a policy-maker claims that change is needed in welfare policies to bring the poor out of the ghetto and into productive lives, the champions of stand-pattism assert that the innovator is an opponent of the poor-and you know how many of your fellow Americans are out to get the poor...
...If a policy-maker claims that change is needed in civil rights policies owing to changes that have taken place IN DEFENSE OF THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 in society, the champions of standpattism assert that the innovator is a dissembler and an opponent of minorities...
...If there was any dissent it was played pianissimo...
...If back home the scriveners were solemn to the point of being sentimental one reporter, upon beholding the leader of the world's preeminent dictatorship, gibbered of Gorbachev's "quiet authority...
...Gorbachev for lapses into dowdiness and on one occasion for failing to change her linen...
...The problem today with bilingual education, as with so much else in American life, is not that we have the wrong values but that we have no values, at least none that we will resolutely defend...
...E l...
...Verlaine was made pathetic by it in his last days...
...This is not France where the native language is revered...
...There is here a huge egotism that is longstanding and not unique to American journalists...
...General Secretary...
...During and immediately after the General Secretary's visit to Paris, America was suffused with balderdash about his style and "image...
...Perhaps he has an unusually effective psychiatric counsel...
...But in Moscow wit and winsomeness abound, and there has always been a quiet pride taken in the traditional three-button Soviet suit with its dashing cube-look and exquisite materials-light tarpaulin for summer heat, collision matting for the chill of winter...
...Defenses are threatening...
...Foreign language instructors always prescribe perseverance and full immersion in the language being taught...
...As the Wall Street Journal has demonstrated, Americans are forever traveling through foreign lands, imagining the locals to be just like us...
...Don't talk about the Geneva summit, Samovar & Dialogue with the MarxistLeninist Philosophy Professor, Raisa, and her tubby hubby...
...Instead they claim he secretly plans to cut back the $140 million now spent on bilingual programs, despite his assertion that "If Congress is willing to grant us more flexibility, I would be willing to ask for an increase in appropriations, by R. Emmett Trrre11, Jr...
...Learning a foreign language is arduous and uncertain...
...He is himself learned and thoughtful...
...Consider this: Of all the 100 or so famous faces of broadcast media there is only one who might be regularly identified with the views of Ronald Reagan's 60 percent, George Will...
...Bennett values higher education and is serious about improving it...
...If they did they would note the unpromising results of present policy and throw in with Bennett's less rigid approach...
...If our journalists think that they are sweetening the Soviets up by oohing and aahing over Gorbachev's unique social graces, they are regrettably in error...
...In the 1980s comes an unexpected deliverance: the technological capacity to destroy these missiles in mid-flight (an offshoot of the computer revolution...
...Touchdown, Moore...
...Yet there is more here than egotism...
...They would rather not take up his argument that present policies have proved futile...
...The European press, supposedly so decadent and soft on Communism, dealt soberly and skeptically with Gorbachev's travel to Paris...
...Anyone who seeks fundamental change is suspect not only of impiety but also of being a clandestine Scrooge...
...There can be no new style of leadership...
...Incredible" was the word Courter used to describe the present situation...
...Not many years ago he was a liberal Democrat...
...Courter is surely a "comer" in conservative politics...
...Stalin, friend of the underprivileged, champion of the masses, and, in Life's words, Russia's "combination of Tom Paine, Horace Mann, Henry Kaiser, and Jim Farley, rolled together with Clifton Fadiman, George Washington, Henry Wallace, and Paul Bunyan...
...It is hard to believe that Bennett's critics care all that deeply whether, say, Hispanics learn English...
...His voting record suggests that congressmen have more philosophical latitude than is generally recognized...
...He is 44, and was first elected in 1978...
...How he has shaken abulia I do not know...
...and playing kiss-and-make-up with the whole Martha's Vineyard set...
...We can guarantee him an Assured Place in History, and a handshake with the King of Sweden, although he'll have to share the latter with Mikhail, of course...
...Put another way, most liberal legislators from the Northeast are that way not so much because their constituents want them to be as because they want to be...
...CAPITOL IDEAS LUNCHEON REVERIES It's surprising to find someone like Congressman Jim Courter, a conservative Republican, representing the congressional district that includes Princeton, New Jersey...
...All that the reactionary progressives would change is the funding, which is never sufficient to the task at hand...
...Chernenko, Andropov, and Brezhnev were all hail fellows well met by Soviet lights, and as for Gorbachev's haunting beauty, there is not a man on the Politburo who does not compare himself very favorably with the present Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...One of his main concerns these days is the use of the 1972 ABM treaty to obstruct development of the strategic defense system known as Star Wars...
...In effect they are saying one cannot trust this innovator...
...well did you know she has been strolling the beaches of Martha's by Tom Bethell Vineyard with Katharine Graham and Bill Styron (the Bill Styron...
...This should come as no surprise...
...It's incredible," Courter was saying, his voice, the winking clocks, and buzzing bells finally piercing the fog of my reverie...
...The French even snickered, ribbing Mrs...
...We argue that putting up defenses is intimidating to the attacker...
...Gangway, I am in need of a restorative...
...The press's tendency to express astonishment over the virtues of each incoming Soviet leader is obviously beginning to irk the Soviets...
...Courter recently in one of those subterranean dining rooms inside the Capitol Building, where clocks light up, buzzers ring every few minutes warning of impending votes, and everything happens at about double speed of normal restaurants, for half the price...
...He lies...
...I had lunch with Mr...
...Thus we hear news and sports commentators as they reduce spoken English to a series of yells, and the verb as a part of speech seems to have disappeared completely: "Marino, back to pass...
...Only the reactionaries object...
...EDITORIALS : SICKLE CELL AMNESIA I should think that back in the Kremlin these days there are patriotic types who find the American press's sudden discovery of the suave Gorbachev vaguely offensive, a reminder, if you will, of just how pervasive the hellish anti-Soviet mentality really is in that faraway land where the bankers hold sway...
...0 something along the lines of 10 or 15 percent...
...Bennett insists that his changes in bilingual education are "to ensure that students learn English...
...Corps in Venezuela, and worked as an assistant prosecutor in Warren County...
...Liberation, a popular radical paper, got a good laugh out of how Gorbachev slurped oysters, his little finger pointing idiotically toward his forehead...
...Neoliberals have flumped into our midsts, and now there are the reactionary progressives, those being the champions of 1970s stand-pattism...
...Poets have suffered it before...
...Next to this patois, Dizzy Dean was Shakespeare...
...Why should the poets of America's media be considered free of the disorder, especially when they so slavishly manifest its symptoms...
...Because she wants to be, how should one say, accepted...
...Courter can really articulate them...
...Today he is doing the same thing he would have been doing in his liberal days, namely: suggesting reforms to advance opportunity for all...
...He hopes to increase flexibility in bilingual programs so that "local school districts" can "pursue whatever educational methods they judge best suited to help non-English speaking students learn English...
...Since the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s we have lived in this shadow of worry about a potential surprise attack by the Soviet Union, a country which has aggressively sought world domination since 1917 and doesn't hesitate to say so...
...Through an aide he has insisted that "There is no Gorbachev style...
...That was it, you see (I went slinking off playing mental hookey again, although I was sitting there nodding agreement whenever the Congressman said anything...
...This is America where grammar and diction are sacrificed by the vulgar urge to emote rather than to speak vividly and correctly...
...The childish conformity of the press as it serves up the week's big story suggests that its members suffer from what the shrinks call abulia, the inability to decide or to act independently...
...invited to the right parties by those gloriously languid, thin, and powerful people at the Social Summit...
...Thus dictators are seen as Presidents, a Soviet head of Modern America is always aburst with political change...
...Bilingualism has failed to make a sufficient number of foreign-speaking students bilingual...
...President Reagan is keen on the idea but President Nixon is not (he signed the ABM treaty, after all), and Nancy Reagan...
...Why should such prescriptions not apply, at least occasionally, to youngsters learning English...
...Brezhnev, earthy, eager, and, according to Time, comparable to LBJ...
...expressed in subtle ways: the soft, authoritative voice, the deferential attitude of his aides...
...Current policies "rely almost exclusively on instruction in the youngsters' native language," leaving students with English skills that are "no better than the skills of those who simply remained in regular classrooms where English was spoken, without any special help...
...That is how Secretary of Education William Bennett's proposal to change the federal government's bilingual education policy is being greeted by critics...
...It is time to let local authorities try new approaches...
...The Yankee press may find General Secretary Gorbachev stupendously superior to the average Soviet shishka in terms of wit, winsomeness, and tailoring...
...Although Princeton itself votes inevitably for the Democratic candidate, Courter wins comfortably in his district, capturing 66 percent of the vote in 1984...
...The Americans are 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...Most conservatives just appreciate the issues at an instinctive level...
...In recent years there appeared neoconservatives and populist conservatives...
...The pass, to Moore...
...Now he is making a name for himself as a member of the House Armed Services Committee...
...To see the stalwarts of the American press corps all goose-stepping together once consensus has been established does weaken one's faith in the need for the First Amendment...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
