Recently, one of my cousins sent me a picture of an American flag with the caption, " Why the hell should I have to press '1' for English?" My initial reaction was flippant:
Non sciro.
Non so.
No se.
Je ne sais pas.
Ich weisz nicht.
Ya ne znayu.
Yo, s'up wiff dat?
But seriously, folks.... With an American flag proudly flying over my 4br/2ba suburban home, why the hell should I have to press "1" for English?
Simple. I paid for it. I bought some product or service from a company that probably does business not only in the United States, but in other countries in the western hemisphere, most of which speak languages other than English. So the company has one customer service number to service a diverse customer base. Whatever it is I bought, the next sequential serial number might have been bought in Bogota. That's globalization. That's what NAFTA and CAFTA and all of that other free trade stuff gets you. That's life in Walmart World. And guess what, Walmart World doesn't have an "official language," it speaks whatever language it needs to in order to make a buck... or a yuan.
It might seem ironic that the "English only" crowd, which tends to be on the right side of the political spectrum, objects to corporate services being provided in languages other than English, or that the person on the other end of the phone calls himself Robbie, but his real name is Ravi. However, the political right is not monolithic. There is the globalist right, typified by George W. Bush, which embraces free trade. Then there is the Anglo-nativist right, typified by Pat Buchanan, which not only rails against free trade, but also conveniently ignores the fact that the original natives of this continent did not speak English.
They didn't speak Hindi either; nevertheless, we still insist on calling them Indians. So what do we call the rapidly-expanding South Asian population in the US? Real, honest to God... oops, Shiva... Indians? I suppose if we can go 500 years calling native Americans something they clearly are not, we can also pretend that the whole world speaks English.
Really, those who do not, ought to. How do they ever expect to get ahead in this world? After all, America rules the world, and all real Americans speak English, by God! Therefore, by logical syllogism, all real Earthlings speak English, and obviously, the rest are illegal aliens. Unfortunately, our space program is in really sad shape, so we can't possibly deport all of those illegal aliens off the planet... although we can send a few hundred thousand to Allah.
For most of the illegal aliens, however, we will probably have to come up with some form of guest worker program. For instance, the Chinese factory workers employed by the pseudo-American corporation Walmart might have some sort of pseudo-American status. And if the Chinese government doesn't like that idea, tough. We'll just let the American economy continue to bleed hundreds of billions of trade deficit dollars all over them. That'll show them!
But of course, adjudicating the legal status of billions of non-English-speaking people on this planet is a huge problem, and it will take time to formulate the right policy and to implement that policy. Meanwhile, I would like to propose a short-term solution for those who object to pressing "1" for English:
"Para ingles, presionar dos."
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Thomas Gangale is an aerospace engineer and a former Air Force officer. A resident of San Rafael, California, he is currently the executive director at OPS-Alaska, a think tank based in Petaluma, where he manages projects in political science and international relations.