Que E Pluribus Duo? Torre de Babel

“Torre de Babel”,
una creación hecha por la artista argentina Marta Minujin

Spanish is now given preferential treatment because government agencies and social liberals think Hispanics, especially Mexicans, are not mentally capable of learning English and successfully assimilating as other immigrants have done. This is not the case for immigrants from Asia or Africa. How many U.S. Government approved signs have you seen written in Hindi, Swahili, Tagalog or Chinese (outside of Chinatowns) for that matter. Unfortunately, their enabling has forced the Liberal's condescending belief to seemingly come to pass. Had they been treated as all other immigrants, expected to assimilate into the general public of American culture (while choosing their own private culture), including learning and speaking English, they would not be considered as inferior charges of the state with a need for "special " treatment required where there should be none. Now a whole culture of inferiority has been perpetuated and politically exploited. m/r

E Pluribus Duo by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal

America is fast becoming two nations—one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking.

20 February 2013

Last week, Senator Marco Rubio gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech in Spanish as well as English, the first spokesman for an opposition party to do so. (In the past, the Spanish response was delivered by a specially designated speaker.) Is this a milestone worth pondering? Correct thought on both Right and Left would say: “Absolutely not; it is bigoted even to mention the growing reach of Spanish, a phenomenon which should be of no concern to anyone.” (The English-speaking audience was likely unaware of Rubio’s Spanish speech, which he had prerecorded and which ran simultaneously on Spanish-language networks. It might have been interesting to see the reaction had he delivered the two versions live and in sequence on the major networks.)

Elite indifference to the spread of Spanish may well be justified, but it would be useful if its rationale were fully articulated. It’s not hard to guess why the Left would celebrate Spanish’s increasing prevalence: it dovetails with the project of replacing a common American culture with multiculturalism. It’s much less obvious why some conservatives apparently believe that we should be serene about the matter. Two conceivable justifications come to mind—though neither is persuasive.

First, they might say, the use of Spanish in the public realm is just a temporary phase that will wane as assimilation marches inevitably forward. It would be nice to see some hints that this is happening. Instead, the trend appears to be overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Daily experience suggests that the following phenomena are only increasing: “oprima numero dos” options in customer-service calls; Spanish signage in transportation hubs; Spanish packaging on consumer items; billboards and subway posters in Spanish; Spanish-language versions of newspapers; and Spanish-language affiliates of cable networks. Does anyone think that in the future fewer politicians will deliver their remarks in Spanish? The ability to speak Spanish is a “major advantage” for “potential presidential rivals in 2016,” observes the National Journal.

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