The Importance of Other People's Languages

I have long believed that one of the reasons we are such a loutish nation is related to our steadfast refusal to learn another language or even acknowledge that there is one.  The Mexicans have fixed that to a degree by swarming over us in their semi-literate thousands to snap up the jobs that our noble selves find abhorrent.  After all, somebody has to clean the toilets, and it strains the imagination to think of all those unfortunate millionaires in Arizona with horrible weeds and bathtub rings and poo smells that they will have to live with now that all the Mexicans have gone to New Mexico.   The impact on real estate values in the gated communities alone fair boggles the mind.
Anybody who has taken a foreign language course will have discovered that there are words and concepts in other languages that simply cannot be easily rendered into English.  In some cases they are such useful words that we have claimed them for our own.  A famous example of this was brought into embarrassing prominence by that intellectual curiosity, former leader of the free world, George W. Bush, who was heard to say, in a public place, with regards to the French, “They have no word for entrepreneur.” It was not revealed whether any of his aides who had successfully completed fifth grade had the poor judgment to explain that the word and, presumably, the concept had been snatched from France.
But there are lots of others. Sushi for example, which is much more than dead sea life on a rice patty. Or siesta which is not just any nap, but rather a period in the heat of the day set aside for loafing around and having lunch and maybe a snooze, but maybe not. Or schadenfreude, a single elegant word meaning “the pleasure derived from somebody else's misery or misfortune,” a concept that Americans should be completely at home with having visited so much misery and misfortune on distant foreigners with the bad taste to speak a language we do not understand.
The important and valuable point is that a language tends to guide the thinking of its practitioners.  Those who speak only one language live in a somewhat circumscribed world. Like a painter who has only a single tube of green paint. His pictures will reveal only leafy closeups, caricatures, or distortions.  So it is that our so-called leaders peer at the world that appears to their blinkered minds to contain only one narrow spectrum stretching from the eye-scalding white of our own perfection through the grim grey British and the sooty grime of the misguided socialists to the inky blackness of Communists far and wide.
For the most part native Americans, by which I mean people who were born in the United States which is what the word means, speak English, or some  barely comprehensible variant of it, and see no reason to strain their intellectual resources with picking up a phrase or two in the gibberish of foreigners when there are important matters like Paris Hilton's love life or recent sports scandals to occupy their thoughts.  There are, of course, a certain number of immigrants who still speak the language of the old sod, but for the most part they want their children to forget all that and speak English only, forcing them into the tunnel vision of american linguistic and social thought and practice.
For the most part, the high-minded wise men who have been marching us off to distant and disastrous invasions belong to that seething majority who can barely speak their own language, much less anybody else’s. They see and measure the world through the lens of “refudiate” and “misunderestimate” from the comfort and security of their heavily guarded compounds along the Beltway.  Nobody needs multilingual advisors more than these benighted people.  They are proudly responsible for the death of thousands and the destruction of buildings, crops, and communications infrastructure in places they can't pronounce without a particle of understanding for the people they are destroying. All they see is a smelly backwater populated by people who need to be more like us who, through an inexplicable mistake by God, are sitting on top of a lot of oil that should properly be ours.
So the trumpets sound, the fighter jets are fueled up, and another blow is struck for peacelibertyandfreedom.
And that is why we should all study French in school.