When I lived in Germany, my German and British friends jokingly baited me with three questions. What do you call someone who speaks three languages? What do you call someone who speaks two languages? And what do you call someone who speaks one language? The answers respectively were trilingual if you spoke three languages, bilingual if your spoke two and American if you spoke one. My friends had themselves a good laugh at my expense.
Well tonight on the CNN Newsroom, regular Barack Obama basher Lou Dobbs attempted to spin Barack Obama's recent comments that American kids needed to learn how to speak Spanish into a negative. Dobbs disingenuously asserted that Obama's suggestion was elitist and patronizing especially to the American "working class".
For some unknown reason, political pundits and some members of the mainstream media such as Dobbs really are the ones who with regularity are guilty of talking down to and insulting the intelligence of the American working class. It's as if Dobbs and other detractors of honest dialogue think that working class Americans, presumably dominated by blue collar workers, lack the capacity to understand that a lifestyle improvement such as learning a different language would also provide benefits to them as it does to Americans in general.
Dobbs skipped over the fact that Obama also said that immigrants to America needed to learn how to speak English. When I lived in Europe, I observed that a lot of Europeans spoke English in addition to their native language and it was a huge expectation that some Americans had of our European hosts. It was also in Europe that I became familiar with the fancy term "ethnocentrism" that when applied to Americans, means that we have the tendency to elevate the importance of our cultural traits and values above those of people from other places.
So in a nutshell, Lou Dobbs is wrong and is back on his immigration soapbox attempting to turn Obama's sensible comments about learning another language into a wedge issue which he hopes will gain traction. However, I know the American working class is smarter and more perceptive than Dobbs seems to give them credit.