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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT
COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell
recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks"
have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an
"insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians
are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror
stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000
to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque.
As neocons
and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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Give
Us Your Poor, Your Tired, Your English-Speaking ...
Xenophobia in a
Land of Immigrants
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
"One of the important
things here is that we not lose our national soul."
George W. Bush
Was George Bush speaking of some truly
shattering event in American affairs? Perhaps the imprisonment
and torture of thousands of innocent people? Perhaps the lack
of democratic legitimacy in his own coming to power?
No, what Bush was describing
is a version of the American national anthem in Spanish -
Nuestro Himno (Our Anthem) - which was played on American
Hispanic radio and television stations recently.
Now, in many countries with
multi-ethnic populations, most people would see this as charming
and flattering. Canada's anthem has two official versions, French
and English, and were a group of immigrants to offer it in Ukrainian
or Mandarin, most Canadians would be tickled. It would undoubtedly
be featured on CBC.
But in America, the broadcast
of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner has aroused
a somewhat different response. Charles Key, great great grandson
of Francis Scott, offered the immortal words, "I think it's
despicable thing that someone is going into our society from
another country and changing our national anthem."
"This is evoking spirited
revulsion on the part of fair-minded Americans," offered
John Teeley, representative of one of innumerable private propaganda
mills in Washington commonly dignified as think-tanks.
Mr. Teeley continued, "You are talking about something sacred
and iconic in the American culture. Just as we wouldn't expect
people to change the colors of the national flag, we wouldn't
expect people to fundamentally change the anthem and rewrite
it in a foreign language."
A foreign language? There are
roughly thirty-million Spanish speakers in the United States.
The analysis here is interesting: an immigrant singing an anthem
in his own language resembles someone changing the national flag.
This argument does, perhaps unintentionally, reveal the real
concern: Hispanics are changing our country, and we don't like
it.
So it is not surprising that
the American low-life constituency's political and moral hero,
George Bush, should declare: "I think the national anthem
ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be
a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought
to learn to sing the national anthem in English."
Never mind that the American
Constitution says nothing about language. Never mind that waves
of immigrants from Europe about a hundred years ago founded countless
private schools and cultural institutions in the United States
where German or Italian or Hebrew were the languages used and
promoted. Never mind that after a generation or two, minority
immigrants always end up adopting the language of the majority,
something which is close to an economic necessity. And never
mind that xenophobia in a land of immigrants should have no place.
An entertaining historical
note here is that Francis Scott Key did not write the important
part of The Star Spangled Banner, its music. Key wrote
a breast-swelling amateurish poem whose words were fitted to
an existing song. The existing song, as few Americans know, was
an English song, To Anachreon in Heaven, a reference to
a Greek poet whose works concern amour and wine. The Star
Spangled Banner, in any version, only began playing a really
prominent role in America during my lifetime, that is, with the
onset of the Cold War. In Chicago public schools during the early
1950s, we sang My Country, 'Tis of Thee, another breast-sweller,
written not many years after Key's, by another amateur poet,
Samuel Smith, sung to the music of the British national anthem,
God Save the King.
It shouldn't be necessary to
remind anyone in an advanced country that things change, and
they change at increasing rates. Even in the remote possibility,
a century or two from now, Spanish or some blend of Spanish and
English were to become the dominant language of the United States,
what would it matter to today's angry and intolerant people?
After all, the English language came from another land, and it
grew out of centuries of change from Latin to early versions
of German and French layered onto the language of Celtic people.
Throughout history, fascism
is closely associated with xenophobia, but then we find many
other unpleasant aspects of fascism - from illegal spying to
recording what people read in libraries, from torture to illegal
invasion - feature in George Bush's America.
John Chuckman lives in Ontario.
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