Mack: Press One for Rational Thought

Thanks to Mac Hall for letting me publish that story to my site.

 

Press One for Rational Thought

 

Arizona, a most unfashionable state after firing on Fort Sumter earlier this spring, is now a pariah (or is that a piranha?) for wanting the English teachers in its public schools to speak, well, English.

 

There is no word on whether Spanish teachers in Arizona schools must know Spanish.

 

Employing standard English is clearly not a requirement for holding a sinecure as a super special golly administrative assistant czarina in some school districts, but, generally speaking (speaking in English), English teachers really should have pretty good control of the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Belloc, Churchill, Tolkien, and Thomas the Tank Engine.

 

If a strong accent is a bar to employment as an English teacher, any native Texan currently employed as such ain't a-gonna be much longer; he's gonna have t' drag up pronto an' mosey into th' sunset, y'all.

 

English teachers must know English, just as a nurse ought to know patient care and a welder should use more than Elmer's Glue for bonding.

 

Imagine taking your wheezing pickup truck to your mechanic:  "Hey, Cletus, Ol' Blue's stalling on acceleration again…hey, where are you going?"

 

"Sorry, old friend, I've been reassigned by the government as a dental assistant.  Diversity and multiculturalism, they say."

 

"Dental assistant?  Cletus, you don't know anything about teeth; you only got two of 'em anyway!  And who's gonna take care of Ol' Blue, my 1956 pickup?"

 

"Here's Sven, your new mechanic.  He's an expert in Swedish massage."

 

"Massage!? Ol' Blue don't need a massage!  It's the carburetor!"

 

"Ja, me fix carburetor good with warm towels, ja.  Ze government say so, ja.  Ich bin ein multicultural sensitive mechanic now, is good, ja?"

 

Arizona is catching a lot of flak (which is a German import) for trying to control the international border and protect American citizens in the absence of enforcement of federal laws by the federal government.  The reaction in some in the salons of D.C. has been to sneer and to wear the now-obligatory cause-of-the-month rubber wrist bands pooh-poohing a state that was home to sophisticated cultures hundreds of years before Washington was inhabited by anything more than mud turtles and malaria mosquitoes. 

 

Some states are proposing an economic boycott of Arizona.  Two problems obtain – Arizona is an exporter of electrical power and water to other states in a nation that, due to governmental short-sightedness, is lacking in both.  California, for instance, is no more in a position to dictate terms to Arizona than Washington is to our Chinese masters.

 

The second issue is this – whom ("whom," he said, for he had been to school) do the critics think live in Arizona?  Vikings?  Arizona has enjoyed a Spanish culture for some 500 years, and numerous First Nations cultures for millennia longer than that. 

 

In Arizona you eat breakfast at Juanita's café', not at Janice's, and if you speed you don't get a ticket from Al Caldwell's friend Officer Fatback but from Officer Rodriguez.  You might buy your gasoline from a station owned by an Apache whose folks have lived on the same bit of land for a thousand years.  All these American citizens want to live under the same Constitutional protections as the rest of us.

 

Boycott them?  Why?

 

For the record, I, unlike the Attorney General of the United States, have read Arizona's new bill regarding folks who cross the international border without a passport, a driver's license, or at least a Sam's Club card.  The law is positively Merovingian in its harmlessness and inadequacy.  Crossing into the USA for work or study (or, sadly, crime) remains a great deal easier than trying – trying, because you might not be permitted – to pop across the Canadian border to visit Niagara Falls for an hour.

 

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