Today’s lecture is ”The Dangers of Bilingualism.” Professor Gingrich stayed up all night studying this week’s near-split of Canada, and he will interrupt his regular sermon to warn us that if English is not made the official language of this country soon, we will split into irreconcilable cultural factions. How that differs from our present condition, he isn’t saying.

Now, speaking English in this country is a good idea. My grandparents were thrown into American life without bilingual education programs to help them. They landed in the deep end, and they swam. They didn’t whine about it, and their kids spoke English as a first language.

No law made them learn English. They learned to speak the language of America because they were smart enough to know they’d do better if they did. But they didn’t abandon their Eastern European Jewish culture. They moved here to be free to practice their culture. They spoke mostly Yiddish in the home and English outside.

The French Canadians, like the French French, take their culture seriously, almost as seriously as Professor Gingrich takes himself. They’re so mad about their Frenchness in France that they actually have a Minister of Culture, whose job is to worry about the purity of the Gallic language, art, philosophy, food and wine. He has spent a lot of time recently agonizing about what American movies are doing to French film. In his darkest nightmares, aggressive, incurable Terminator viruses eat all the subtitles and EuroDisney makes a profit.

I happen to have seen quite a few French films. Voluntarily. I was in college and thought I was an intellectual. French movies invariably feature a small, sad man with fine fingers who broods a lot about the meaning of life. A tall woman with big lips inexplicably falls for him. They run along a deserted beach while he ruminates for two hours about the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Kind of like Newt Gingrich. She ends up in an asylum. He shrugs, says something profound about the human tragedy, and finds another woman to drive nuts.

In other words, French films are about guys Schwarzenegger would shoot in the first scene. Which apparently is what’s happening to French culture in general, and which explains why so many French-Canadians see secession as the way to protect it.

American culture may be, like Canadian culture, being ripped apart, but it isn’t by immigrants trying to protect the purity of the Mexican cinema or Corona beer. It’s by people who speak the language of blame and division, and Professor Gingrich is the reigning expert in that particular dialect. No one in America is more energetically disruptive than Newt Gingrich.

The flowery phrases of anger, hatred, mistrust and derision roll effortlessly off his tongue. It is nothing for Gingrich to accuse his political foes of every kind of mischief, vice, criminality, perversity and treachery. He is a living thesaurus of vituperation.

Ironically, Gingrich himself is bilingual. He speaks the patois of government minimalism, the free market and individual liberty when it serves his purposes or those of his lobbyist friends, and he deftly switches to the cant of overbearing government when the intrusive interests of his right-wing buddies are at stake.

There is one constant in his unending lecture on the American condition: Anyone who disagrees with his idealized image of American life, or with his radical vision of American government, is an enemy of the American people.

If Western culture is indeed dying, don’t blame bilingualism. Blame loudmouths like Professor Gingrich. If Newt Gingrich truly believed in the marketplace of ideas, he’d trust that the culture and language of this country will sort itself out, as it always has. American films will swamp French films because they’re more entertaining, and English will overwhelm Spanish because it’s more universal.

If we are disintegrating, like a crumbling print of an old celluloid movie, let’s do it, not to the noise of a Newt Gingrich harangue, but in the hundred languages of immigrants, with subtitles.



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