The Globe Was an English Theatre

At a recent meeting on “globalization” I got to hear an enthusiastic adminucrat welcome his new insect overlords by pointing out that they own various enterprises spanning said globe. (well, mostly Latin America, a interpretation of “global” that we will visit in uno momento.) This particular leg-tingling was due to a newly perceived opportunity to become part of the New One World Order by learning new languages (sometimes I wish people would just learn English better, a walk-before-you-run type of thing, but many with no first language will continue to preach the benefits of a second one, irregardless). Hussein Obama, in his typically pes in os fashion, joined the battle from the distant rear when he lectured recently on the need for learning Spanish, since all we can say is merci beaucoup. What a polyglot. In the USA, of course, Spanish is synonymous with foreign language or bilingualism just as Latin American is often substituted for global. In many schools it is the only "foreign" language taught and the number of its native speakers in those schools entirely invalidates the premise under which it is sold.

Of course the adminucrat and the civic organizer both have it exactly wrong. By specifically 180 degrees and whatever that would be in the metric system, which I’m sure they both prefer and also don’t know. As any seventh-grader science fiction fan knows, the unity of the world so desperately yearned for by Gaians is not one in which everyone is multilingual, but one in which everyone speaks the One World language: English. For those of us already communicating in Earthean, (what will used-to-be-called English) this is advantageous. Just like scientists who grew up using centimeters and liters have a slight advantage in science class. (And no, there is no mandate for them to learn inches, quarts and hogsheads.) Funny thing is, this is obvious to everyone in the modern world except the very Americans who claim we Americans are linguistically provincial. (The Islamists, not being part of the modern world, are pretty much left out of all this. Their “globe”, such as it is, is dark, tiny, rather malodorous and communicates via explosions rather than words). The Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Africans, Europeans, pretty much everyone on the train spends their time learning English and being perfectly fine with that. Even the protesters in Tajikistan write their protest signs in English, aimed at CNN more than at their oppressed brethren. That is why we don’t need to learn more than merci beaucoup when we go to countries where they still say that. Chances are overwhelming that the foreigner so thanked will respond with, “OK”. Even the Chinese, with 60 ganillion native speakers don’t pretend that there is a Mandarin Mandate. Go to Tokyo— that’s in Japan— and you’ll find almost everything written in English as well as Japanese, even on their POLICE cars and government buildings that use the exonym JAPAN. In fact, there are only three groups on the planet that still indulge their fantasies that their tongue is a Lingua Relevanta outside their yard. The French political class, whose people really do speak English so much that their own government has to pass laws against it; the Russians, whose whole national identity is consumed by the search for a criterion by which Russia could actually be judged as a great nation besides missiles, masochism and weather that rivals a Jovian moon— though they’ll take those; and, lastly, La Razanista Hispanophiles in the USA. Not real Latin Americans, mind you. Argentinians, Chileans, Brazilians, tend to learn English with similar nonchalance as their European counterparts. And not rank-and-file Hispanics in the US. They tend to learn Engllish quickly unless they are actively impeded from doing so by their misguided dons, donas, and public schools.

All this aside, it should be recognized that knowing more than one languages has many advantages. So do learning to play musical instruments and ballroom dancing. But any self-respecting, semi-informed One Worlder should know that anything that impedes the final conquest of English as the Earthean language—like bilingual education-- does not help, but rather sets back their cause of World Unity.