ZOMG. I saw something the other day on cable that made me raise an eyebrow… after a movie ended on cable, they ran the credits like always. I was working on homework so I was slow grabbing the remote. After the credits ran, they ran a second time… in Spanish. Then tonight I had on another movie… and discovered the same thing happened. First English, then Spanish.
What the hell is going on now?
Are you fuckin’ kidding me? I have to have this Rant? And on Martin Luther King Day?
You bet your ass I do, and in this situation I feel I’m justified.
For the record, I didn’t have on HBO Latino. Do I have a problem with HBO Latino? Hell no. I don’t have a problem with HBO Latino or RAI or Japan TV or MTV Spanish or any other culturally targeted channel. I guess you can add MTV and BET into that list because I don’t really understand rap and the like either. I’m all for different channels. As many as a cable box can hold.
Why the beef about Spanish credits in an English movie? It’s an English movie and yes, I’d be having the exact same conversation about French credits or Japanese credits. It’s not the culture – it’s what a shift like this means. You see, this is something that got passed into law, while we were busy beating Bush in effigy. Haven’t you noticed the labels on your clothing? If it was bought in the last year or two, it’s got English and Spanish. Items in food stores? Yep. Signs in public places? Not all of them obviously but a number of places are slowly and quietly becoming bilingual.
If I wanted to see everything in two languages, I’d move to Canada. I can’t even say Hong Kong because they’re losing their bilingual status quickly, sliding to Chinese only.
The movies are just the latest example of this and it’s only going to get worse. Did I say worse? Yes, I said worse because if the trend continues, you may someday find yourself unable to speak the language of your nation. Our schools teach English as it’s primary language. Coast to coast, if I’m not mistaken. Middle school? High school? College? There’s options, true, but English is still required. Most high schools offer Spanish or French. Can’t even say that we’re pushing Spanish as a second language if there’s a choice. Some schools offer Latin – is that our second language? Hardly.
Then there’s an ongoing uproar from the Hispanic population in this country. “It’s not fair” is the common cry. I once got into an argument for defending an Amtrak ticket seller about such a thing. A customer was yelling at this guy for only speaking English. Mind you she was yelling at him in English. She was pissed because her relative didn’t and she didn’t think she should have to translate for him. Riiiiight. Because fair means that an entire corporation should train people to be bilingual just because a customer might not know the local language? How is if “fair” that people migrate to a new nation and expect the nation to change for them? We don’t speak Italian in Connecticut because of my relatives, do we? If the US was supposed to be a dual language country, we’d be teaching it as mandatory in our schools, wouldn’t we?
The bigger problem? According to law, there is no official language on record for the United States. This is why I haven’t had reason to comment on it before – no law means that this is all legal and what’s worse, calling attention to it is dangerous. But I’m cranky tonight and avoiding homework. Truth is that this very thing was already voted on… in the late 1700’s; we were one vote away from speaking German before the bill fell apart. [Shoulda checked Snopes, after all!] And now with a Democratic congress in place… they’ll never see it this way. It’ll be “oh, these poor people – we need to change our entire nation to make them feel more comfortable” even though we’ve never done this for any other emigrant group. Ever.
This is no longer a question about making things equal. It’s about one group getting their demands raised above that of another. Promoting that is simply discriminatory against the English speaking populous. It’s about numbers in population and government. Meh… screw it. Bush would probably veto a bill for this anyway, thinking he can run for a third term and is afraid of The Spanish Vote. Sad that ya can’t even use his dictator ways for good for a change.
Welcome to Los Estados Unidos.
And in Texas, we give the state mandated standardized reading and math tests in Spanish in the lower grades. And we wonder why they can’t pass them in high school when they are in English.
And I’m a high school teacher and didn’t let that register until this year. I think I might have heard it but didn’t really think about the ramifications until this year.
I am going to take a class offered by my district in Spanish this semester, but my goal is to be able to chew out parents in their home language — and maybe even a few kids.
Swahili comes next and I’m not kidding.
“Truth is that this very thing was already voted on… in the late 1700’s; we were one vote away from speaking German before the bill fell apart.”
Nah, that’s an old urban legend that’s never been true. A very goofy one too, b/c it’s not even close to being true. The first United States colony (i.e. the colony starting what would evolve into the USA) was Jamestown in 1607, then Plymouth Rock and Mass Bay. All of these were founded under charters of King James I in England, as English colonies specifically. The English later did get other colonies founded by other countries (e.g. New Amsterdam, now New York, which was Dutch with a huge Dutch population), and in Pennsylvania in particular there was massive German settlement and German was used there for a long time (still is in fact). That “one vote English vs. German” story is a myth– there were various votes in early Pennsylvania about languages to use, but Pennsylvania was still chiefly an English Quaker settlement. German’s popular there but it’s been a primarily English colony from the get-go. Indeed along the East Coast of what’s now the US, those were English colonies and English was the main European language from 1607 onward.
Now, this is where things get interesting. I see where you’re coming from and on one level, I do agree with you. But the reason the US has never had an official language, is precisely this tangled history. There were lots of Dutch in New York and in fact, as one of the terms negotiating the handover of New Amsterdam to England in the late 1600’s after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (where the Dutch actually defeated the English FWIW and got control of Suriname and maritime gains in the English Channel and East Indies), the rights of the Dutch founders had to be respected. That included support for the use of Dutch. The German founders of some of the Pennsylvania hamlets got similar respect, and most of all, after the American Revolution so as to avoid conflicts with the native Americans who were embittered and ripe for riots, the native American languages got respect. There were all deemed “founder languages” along with English– especially the native American languages– and to keep the peace, the Founding Fathers deliberately avoided any mention of an official language and cast scorn on attempts to enact one. English was the main language in use by custom, but not the only one.
Now, I know that this can raise debate today, and I have my own mixed feelings about the result of this, but it’s there, and it’s what we’ve got. This is also why Spanish in particular gets big-time protection and status for public use– more than any other language aside from English, Spanish was a founder language and in fact was THE language in the Southwest, Puerto Rico, Florida and a few other places prior to the US Mexican War, Florida clashes and Spanish-American War. Again, to keep the peace, Spanish was given very special dispensations in all those places, which have been reinforced for centuries.
I say this b/c I ran smack-dab into this myself a while ago in California, where you are on the way to bankruptcy if you don’t know Spanish. I goofed around in high school and never bothered to learn Spanish, but then found out that even up around Fresno, I wasn’t gonna get hired until I improved my Spanish significantly. My need to eat and pay rent sorta overcame my own political annoyances, so I picked it up. Still annoying in some ways but it wasn’t as hard as I thought– luckily it’s a pretty easy language to pick up.
And in terms of education? Yeah I used to think that, English from coast to coast. But again, as I grew up in California I found out that’s a false perception. There were a whole bunch of treaties negotiated e.g. after the Mexican War, Spanish-American War, all kinds of agreements and contracts and whatnot, and Spanish as such a massive founder language gets all kinds of *public* protection around these places. So in California and some other places, any kind of public institution– government office, library, school, university, public parks– technically, is supposed to offer Spanish in full equality with English, and people of professional backgrounds or in the public sphere are supposed to be fluent in Spanish. That’s treaty-bound and it’s pretty pervasive, so when I finally had to go job-hunting myself I just sucked it up and learned it. Even all the big immigrant communities in California– the Chinese, Koreans, Armenians, Iranians, Vietnamese and whatever– are all picking up Spanish, and it’s the chief language of a lot of shops depending on where you go.
Again, I have mixed feelings about this whole thing but that’s how the history in this region has evolved. My own suggestion, though I agree it can be irritating, is just feel lucky that the other language you have to know is Spanish and not something like, Korean or Finnish or something. Blech, if we had to learn Korean we’d be screwed. But Spanish really is easy to pick up, a little tough to listen to for a while but it’s not that difficult to get good at.
And besides, now you have a ready excuse to watch all those scantily-clad sexy Latinas on Univision and those Spanish-language TV stations, or browsing Spanish babe mags, when you’re girlfriend walks in on you unexpectedly. ;)
I agree with you completely! This is pretty annoying, I absolutely hate it when I go through some drive through and I can’t understand a damn word the person is saying because it is in Spanish. But now here in Dallas, we are accepting Pesos as valid payment! ARGH!
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/010607dnbuspesos.31047f5.html
Ah, oops, on the vote issue… I wouldn’t have thought to check Snopes, particularly where I heard it from. Anyway, totally: the fact the we never had an official language before – by law – is the problem of this all.
And I do agree with you on California: it’s part of the state’s history, but part of that history involves becoming compatible with the union they joined. Which they did do in the 1800’s – it’s just sliding back in the other direction, due to whatever influence: people today expect the nation to change so they don’t have to…
The biggest problem I have with it is an ongoing issue that I have with “fairness”… whenever a minority is given more influence then the majority in the vein of fairness just infuriates me on every issue. Consider OS’s. In the EU, Windows had to be re-packaged to remove it’s Media Player for fairness, yet every other OS going to the EU can include one. In Korea, it’s Media Player and IM client; OSX ships there with iTunes and iChat. All done in the guise of “fairness”.
Meh.
Anything for a buck. If HBO figures they’ll make more money pandering to hispanics then they’ll lose pissing off you (and me), then they’ll do it. You’d better get used to it; this one ain’t goin’ away.