(It has been a rough-and-tumble political season. Nerves are raw. Perhaps it’s time to dream a little bit.)
It doesn’t happen that often any more, but there are still times when my English-born wife gently—sometimes not so gently—awakens me in the middle of the night to tell me that I have been talking in my sleep again…in Spanish.
Invariably, she will ask me in the morning what I was talking about. Invariably, my answer is that I don’t remember, which most of the time is the truth. Needless to say, at my age of 68 she need not worry—not even about my dreams.
Dreaming in Spanish is sadly one of the last remaining vestiges that Spanish was once my native language, my mother tongue. Just as sad, the last time I was truly fluent in any language was 58 years ago, when I was 10 years. That is not to say that I am not proficient in English or in other languages. It is just that I am shamefully rusty at my native language; that I am no longer fluent in my first acquired language, Dutch; and that if you listen closely and read carefully, you will detect a slight accent in my spoken English or may notice some unusual constructs in my writings.
Some will say that this is a small price to pay for speaking several languages. Perhaps. But, when it comes to languages I feel like an orphan. Let me explain.
When I was 10, living in my native Ecuador, I spoke Spanish with the fluency that any 10-year-old has in his or her mother tongue. Spanish was the only language I spoke, with the exception of a couple of English and Dutch words I picked up from my Dutch father. These were words and phrases the meaning of which I did not necessarily know, such as “Such is life,” which my father pondered when he got into a philosophical mood, or “verdomme!” (damn!) on other less philosophical occasions. It was at that young age that we moved to Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles. Living in a Dutch “company town” and attending a Dutch school, my sister and I became fluent in Dutch in less than a year.
After four years of “total immersion” in Dutch, and after picking up some “choice” words in the local Papiamento (a delightful language derived mainly from Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and West African languages), our family moved to the Netherlands, where I finished high school.
By then, my acquired Dutch was already better than my native Spanish. Since Dutch is hardly a universal language, Dutch high school students receive two to four years of solid education in English, German, French and/or Spanish. Having two languages under my belt and with four years of studying other languages, the reader will ask, what is the problem? Well, I am not finished yet.
Thirteen English colonies on the East Coast of North America, most settled by groups seeking religious freedom, came together to form the United States. In his new alternative history, The 14th Colony, author Michael Silverstein describes a fictional additional colony, New Israelia, founded by Jews in northern Florida in the 1650s—300 years before the actual founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
“Before beginning serious research for this project,” said Silverstein, “I viewed a book about such a colony as a tongue-in-cheek way to explore one of history’s most vibrant and quirky eras, the mid-17th century. The more I researched, however, the more obvious it became to me that this wasn’t just an alternative history with a far-fetched premise, but something that could easily have happened.
“In a number of ways,” Silverstein continued, “this period also bore some chilling resemblances to our own times. There were international conflicts over markets and resources. There were heinous deeds committed by religious fanatics. Millions of people in different parts of the world were being brutally exploited and enslaved. False messiahs were garnering huge followings. There were even examples of irrational exuberance—the entire economy of Holland was almost taken down by a tulip buying bubble.”
The story of The 14th Colony plays out in both the New and Old Worlds—in an England governed as a republic under Oliver Cromwell; in the Spanish-controlled Americas; in the ghettos of Southern Italy and the surprisingly tolerant Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in Eastern Europe; and in the Holland of Rembrandt, and its Jewish-friendly colony in northeastern Brazil.
A fuller description of The 14th Colony, and the era in which the book is set, along with notes about its author and book ordering information, can be found on the book’s Web site.
“The American is not always a cretin, it must be said. Having covered Bush’s reelection campaign four years ago, I saw how that debilitating cocktail of ‘gay marriage-abortion-family-religion-terrorism,’ mixed into the cauldron labeled ‘moral values broth,’ moved entire states into W’s column.
“The ‘true’ American, according to conservative mythology, is White, with family, patriotic, extremely religious, hates socialism, communism, foreigners and paying taxes. He is so naive that he believes he can save America by attacking Iraq and, at any rate, he has invested himself in a mission: to export his model to other people (without asking their opinion). This American, if he ever existed, no longer exists. This is the terrible discovery that McCain and the Republicans have just made. And it’s super-good news for America and the rest of the world. ”
“The White American - whom McCain calls Joe the Plumber or Palin calls Joe Sixpack - is no longer blinded by lies. He has seen the war in Iraq and is suffering through a crisis, while Republicans spouting about abortion, taxes or an American victory in Iraq no longer move him. The latest poll shows that half of White men are going to vote Democrat. For the first time in thirty years!
They want someone who speaks concretely, calmly, moderately: in the center. They refuse to scorn the intellectual, the notorious “elite” that the McCain camp denounces - Obama graduated from Harvard. They refuse to be afraid (of bin Laden, of the enemies of America, etc.) The White American male has closed himself off from old-fashioned ideology and has entered the rational era.”
‘The Seduction of Colin Powell’
[Hoje Macau, Macau]
A little considered aspect of the current American election is this: What will all of the left-wing, anti-American intellectuals in the Third World do with themselves, if the United States of America elects a Black man as its president?
“In the United States, an Obama victory would be history-making enough. But for Africa and the Third World, it might have far-reaching effects that we aren’t yet fully prepared for. In many parts of the world there is an entire industry built around anti-globalization, involving activists and non-governmental organizations that agitate against the inequities and imperial transgressions of America. A major driver of this anti-Americanism is the moral culpability of the United States on the issue of racism. The evil White hand striking down a promising Black, Hispanic or Asian prospect is a central part of the narrative of the evil American empire. If you take that away - more than 50 years of scholarship and political mobilization in many countries falls apart.
If Obama is elected president, thousands of public intellectuals, radical professors, social activists and nationalist politicians and journalists will be plunged into crisis. Then they will have to explain how it’s possible that a Black person could be elected in this profoundly racist country.”
October 23rd, 2008 By DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
I flagged this study by Yale law professor Ian Ayres in the civil rights roundup [The link in which I’ve now fixed — DS], but I just wanted to block quote some of the findings:
We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, “over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested.” After controlling for violent crime rates and property crime rates in specific neighborhoods, as well as a host of other variables, we found the following:
For every 10,000 residents, about 3,400 more black people are stopped than whites, and 360 more Latinos are stopped than whites. Stopped blacks are 127% more likely to be frisked — and stopped Latinos are 43% more likely to be frisked — than stopped whites.
Stopped blacks are 76% more likely to be searched, and stopped Latinos are 16% more likely to be searched than stopped whites.
Stopped blacks are 29% more likely to be arrested, and stopped Latinos are 32% more likely to be arrested than stopped whites.
Now consider this: Although stopped blacks were 127% more likely to be frisked than stopped whites, they were 42.3% less likely to be found with a weapon after they were frisked, 25% less likely to be found with drugs and 33% less likely to be found with other contraband. We found similar patterns for Latinos.
As one might imagine, the U.S. election campaign has attracted tremendous attention in Mexico, where people are concerned about migration issues and other border-related topics like narco-trafficking, human smuggling and NAFTA-based bilateral trade of about $300 billion per year.
October 22nd, 2008 By DAVID SCHRAUB, Assistant Editor
I didn’t do a roundup today, but I did write two posts that are pretty directly tied to civil rights (not including the Sarah Palin’s wardrobe post I just linked to below).
First, the data is now out on how barring affirmative action affected minority enrollment at Michigan’s state universities. The result? It’s a mixed bag, but the overall trends are a shift in minority enrollment to less-prestigious universities, a greater difficulty in attracting even qualified minority students (in part because of the elimination of race-conscious scholarship programs), and, most oddly, a fall in minority enrollment at some schools which never used race-conscious policies in the first place.
Also in that post, a citation to a study of minority law graduates from the University of Michigan law school from 1966 - 1996, when the school still used affirmative action. The authors found that the minority graduates had equally-successful careers along every metric compared to their White peers.
The other post noted a new rule by the Federal Bureau of Prison prohibiting the shackling of pregnant woman during labor or delivery. Readers might recall that I flagged a case this summer ruling that such procedures do not violate the 8th amendment, because, the 8th circuit said, pregnant women giving birth present a “flight risk”. Since that dealt with a state prison, and this is a federal rule, it is likely that the rule would have had no effect on the case even if it was enforced at the time. But it does give us some momentum, and that’s a good thing.
McCain seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.
In addition to my respect for John McCain’s service to his country and, especially, for his suffering as a prisoner of war, about the only other aspect of McCain’s philosophy and politics that I found somewhat respectable was his compassionate position on illegal immigration.
Thus, it is kind of sad that McCain, as The Politico says “seems to have wound up with the worst of both worlds: He appears to be getting no credit from Latino voters for his past support for immigration reform, while carrying the baggage of other Republicans’ hostility to illegal immigration.”
However, I can not shed tears for McCain for many reasons, and because, if he was the maverick he claims to be, he would have held his ground against the extreme right of his party on this important issue. McCain’s silence on this issue is deafening.
While the presidential candidates don’t say a word about immigration in English, they continue to fight over it in Spanish.
This week, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign launched a new Spanish-language ad which says that Sen. John McCain “surrendered to anti-immigrant forces” and “betrayed” the Latino community.
The ad refers to McCain saying during a presidential debate that he would not vote for his own immigration bill.
The legislation — popular in the Latino community — would have provided a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants and created a guest worker program.
During the presidential campaign, McCain backed away from the bill saying that border security must come first, before any legalization plan.
Since McCain did not have the courage to tell Barack Obama to his face, during the most recent debate, the guilt by association slurs Sarah Palin has been uttering, I don’t think he’ll have the courage to confront the base of his party on this issue either.
