Daily Archives: May 23, 2006

Inconsistency

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Let’s see if you can wrap your head around this one — according to this blogger, when graduating students at The New School heckled Senator McCain, the students were rude. But when graduating students at the University of Missouri — St. Louis booed and heckled Representative William “Lacy” Clay (D-MO), it was the congressman’s fault.

He nearly incited a riot! Those UMSL students were a “captive audience” to a speaker who said things they disagreed with, for pete’s sake. What else were they supposed to do?

Oddly, I couldn’t find anything about the near riot from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which suggests it was a very minor near riot. The UMSL web site confirmed that Rep. Clay was a speaker at the commencement for the “College of Nursing, UMSL/WU Joint Undergraduate Engineering Program, College of Fine Arts and Communication, School of Social Work, UM-Rolla/Engineering Education Center, Gerontology Program (master’s program) and Public Policy Administration Program (master’s program).”

What do you want to bet the hecklers were engineers? They are a sensitive bunch.

I haven’t found the text of the congressman’s remarks, but according to one of the graduates it must have been hell:

He spent a good five minutes talking about how President Bush lied, there were no weapons of mass destruction, we need to bring our troops home, etc. (the typical rhetoric of the left). He even gave the number of U.S. casualties to date. During this tirade many people began to boo and yell. At one point the jeers were so bad that Mr. Clay said “Now wait a minute, I have the microphone so you need to listen”

The grads had to sit through five whole minutes of actual truth about the President and the war, and understandably they were so upset that the congressman “needed security to escort him from the building.” Poor babies.

(Did Senator McCain need security to leave Madison Square Garden last weekend? Well, actually, he would have had security no matter what. Senator Chuck Schumer spoke at my son’s graduation from Purchase College, or the college formerly known as SUNY-Purchase, last Friday — he didn’t say anything interesting — and there was security up the wazoo even though the audience liked Senator Chuck just fine.)

Now, some of you might think the blogger is being a tad inconsistent. But no, it’s about respect, he says. Some grads from the New School had turned their backs on Senator McCain even before he began speaking, but the grads at UMSL were justified in heckling and throwing a near riot because Rep. Clay attacked the president of the United States (Yes! And for five whole minutes!) and then reprimanded the audience after they started booing him.

“I don’t expect you to understand this,” the blogger says. Actually, I believe I understand it just fine.

Naturally this guy found the protesting of Condi Rice at Boston College extremely distasteful, even though it was mostly silent. The protests “spoiled” the graduation.

It’s a good thing my boy didn’t go to BC; I don’t think I could have endured a speech by Condi without throwing up. That would have spoiled the graduation, I think.

Oh, and someone should explain to the blogger that the most likely reason the AP’s account of the speech and the actual speech were slightly different is that the AP was working from a press release of the speech provided by the Department of State prior to the graduation, and Ms. Rice evidently decided to leave out the part about the use of force in Iraq being “the right thing” at the last minute. Maybe she didn’t want to incite a near riot. That was respectful of her.

Glenn Greenwald, who clearly does not understand respect, blogged yesterday:

So pro-Bush students heckled Rep. Clay’s speech and were so disruptive that the Congressman actually needed security to escort him out of the building for fear that his physical safety would be endangered. Does that show that the Angry Right is deranged and is jeopardizing their chances to win elections? No, it shows the opposite. This incident also shows how deranged the Angry Left is.

Of course. That’s perfectly clear.

According to Instapundit — who cited the Gateway Pundit post and said that “a Hateful anti-war speech by Rep. Lacy Clay (D-MO) . . . provokes a near riot” — this episode “[s]eems to illustrate the point made in this WSJ editorial about the Democrats’ penchant for self-marginalization and self-destruction.” The WSJ Editorial to which Instapundit cited condemned the heckling and booing by the New School students of McCain’s speech. But to Instapundit, that same Editorial also shows that Democrats are acting stupidly and angrily when they give commencement speeches and are heckled by Republican students to the point where they need security to be escorted out.

Of course. Democrats are supposed to smile and say “yowzah!” at whatever Republicans do, because to disagree with Republicans is bad as well as politically risky. No one is going to want to vote for Democrats who badmouth Republicans. Even other Democrats will run screaming from a Democrat who badmouths Republicans, apparently. I’m not sure why this would be true given recent polling on the popularity of Republicans, but it must be true. The only Dems who can expect to win elections are docile and respectful Dems. But it’s OK if Republicans insult Democrats because, you know, Democrats deserve it.

Gateway Pundit also points out how hateful Jack Murtha is, because he, too, has been giving anti-war speeches — including at Commencement ceremonies — where he forces Republican students in the audience to heckle, walk out and act disruptively. How come Rich Lowry wasn’t decrying the terribly uncivil conduct towards war hero Jack Murtha? At least according to Instapundit’s rationale, it’s because it is the anti-war speeches themselves that are hateful — not the student’s understandable reaction — and so the speech and the speaker are to blame for provoking the disruptive behavior of those patriotic pro-war students.

So, to re-cap the rules: (1) When a pro-war politician gives a pro-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle and boo him, that shows how Deranged the Angry Left is — because they heckled a pro-war speech. (2) When an anti-war politician gives an anti-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle, walk out and even riot, that also shows how Angry the Left is — because they “provoked a near riot” by pro-war students.

Glenn says the Wall Street Journal was upset about the heckling of McCain because the students were “sneering at our war heroes.” But he recalls that in the past Republicans have been a tad less than respectful to Democratic war heroes –e.g., Murtha, John Kerry, Max Cleland. “Sneering at war heroes was one of the principal tactics of the Bush re-election campaign and has been a reliable tool to attack and smear any war hero who speaks out against this administration,” Glenn says. For that matter, McCain himself got the smear treatment in 2000 when he was running against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination. He used to be crazy, remember? I guess he got better.

But I think I see the difference. If you express disagreement with a war hero to his face, you are being disrespectful. But if you smear him behind his back, it’s perfectly OK! Clearly, righties understand principal and ethics so much better than we lefties do.

Know Nothings

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Molly Ivins is brilliant at getting at the root of things.

Republicans in the Senate have constructively declared English the national language. That’ll fix everything. Every foreigner at our borders will stop and say: “Gosh, ma foi! English is the national language here. Good thing to know. I’ll begin speaking it immediately.”

Yes sir, you want a solution, call a Republican. …

… By all means, reform immigration with this deep obeisance to the Republican right-wing nut faction and their open contempt for “foreigners.” But do not pretend for one minute that it is not a craven political bow to racism (yes, racism–I am actually calling them racists, although they pretend it hurts their feelings. Try reading their websites and see for yourself), and to nativism, to xenophobia and to Know-Nothingism.

The Know Nothings, you might recall, were members of a semi-secret nativist organization of the 1840s and 1850s formed mostly in reaction to political activity by Irish Catholic immigrants. While the nation lurched toward constitutional crisis and civil war over slavery, secession, and states’ rights, the nativist Know Nothings directed their energies toward such “reforms” as allowing only native-born Americans to hold elected office and requiring 25 years of residence to become a citizen. They also touched off at least a couple of riots and burned some Catholic churches to the ground.

The Know Nothings broke apart as a political organization in the late 1850s, as realization that the Union was about to dissolve finally eclipsed fear of Catholicism. Nothing like a real crisis to distract people from a fake crisis, I guess. I wonder what those guys would say if they knew that in the future about the whole dadblamed nation would celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

Conservatives are quick to point out that the current immigration crisis is about illegal immigration, and I appreciate that. But it is possible to be in favor of secure borders without dissolving into hysteria over “reconquista.” You can hope to protect American jobs from illegal (and cheap) workers without getting one’s knickers in a twist over display of a Mexican flag.

Making English the “national” language has nothing to do with illegal immigrants; it’s just good old-fashioned xenophobia. It’s not clear to me what the “national” designation even means. Apparently the Senate was split over whether English should be the “national” language or the “common and unifying” language. At least one senator, Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, supported “national” but not “common and unifying.” And the difference is, what, exactly?

Most descendants of earlier immigrants believe their people learned English as soon as they stepped off the boat, but historians tell us that’s not true. The common pattern in the 19th and early 20th centuries was for the first generation to learn just enough English to get by; the second generation would be bilingual, and the third generation would be English-speaking only. But there were exceptions:

For example, German speakers in the Midwest were successful in maintaining their mother tongue across generations. They founded many public school systems that were bilingual in English and German; such schools lasted until World War I. French Canadians in New England used bilingual and French-speaking parochial schools as an anchor for maintaining French, which was widely spoken until the 1950s.

I remember reading that some time after the Civil War, Irish immigrants in St. Louis complained about the bilingual German-English school system; they wanted their children to be taught in Gaelic and English. Now people are in a flap over “bilingual ed” in Spanish and English. The bilingual approach may or may not be the best way for ESL students to learn English, but “bilingual ed” isn’t new, nor is it the end of civilization as we know it.

Xenophobes tremble in fear that the U.S. will become a multilingual nation, but in fact it always has been a multilingual nation. And that’s going back to the time when those languages included Cherokee and Navaho, but not English. A great many nations are multilingual; Switzerland, Belgium, and China come to mind.

Even on the island of Britain, birthplace of the most holy English language, the Welsh finally defeated centuries of English attempts to eradicate the Welsh language, and Wales is now officially bilingual. Traffic and other signs must be in both languages, and the BBC dutifully provides Welsh language television and radio programming to gwlad beirdd a chantorion. Somehow, Britain seems to be struggling along, none the worse for wear.

At the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne describes his French-English bilingual family and comments on the “national language” nonsense:

As it considered the immigration bill last week, the Senate passed an utterly useless amendment sponsored by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) declaring English to be our “national language” and calling for a government role in “preserving and enhancing” the place of English.

There is no point to this amendment except to say to members of our currently large Spanish-speaking population that they will be legally and formally disrespected in a way that earlier generations of immigrants from — this is just a partial list — Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Norway, Sweden, France, Hungary, Greece, China, Japan, Finland, Lithuania, Lebanon, Syria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia were not.

Immigrants from all these places honored their origins, built an ethnic press and usually worshiped in the languages of their ancestors. But they also learned English because they knew that advancement in our country required them to do so.

If the Welsh are any example, the best way to be sure Spanish speakers resist learning English is to make a Big Bleeping Bigoted Deal out of it. If Spanish speakers are made to feel that speaking English is a capitulation to bigots and a betrayal of their heritage, they might feel inclined to resist. Otherwise, I suspect most Spanish-speaking immigrants will go through the same transition other immigrants have gone through.