Mother tonguers…

We had lunch today at Bahary, a little seafood place in a Palestinian neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Borough of Brooklyn. It was a guy place. Beth was the only woman. The guys spoke Arabic and English, shifting from one to the other with a graceful fluidity that was to envy.

We had been driving on 5th and 6th Avenues in the thirties and forties and we were starving. We moved from Hispanic to Asian to Arabic neighborhoods and everywhere heard the sounds of people speaking in languages not our own. I thought about the redneck consciousness that suggests that these people should somehow hunker down and learn English first, then participate in American life as their language skills improve.

American redneck xenophobia is an ugly thing, and ironic. These folks who would compel immigrants to learn English often don’t talk too good their own selves. “It don’t matter,” I heard a guy say graciously in Detroit this morning when somebody upset his luggage cart. I didn’t stop to quiz him on his attitudes regarding immigrants’ rights to cultural identity under our North American umbrella. Odds are that he doesn’t care one way or the other whether the Asians speak Chinese or the Hispanics speak Spanish. It’s definitely not fair of me to project, to infer ill intentions on the part of every native son too stupid to talk good. Even so, based on my personal knowledge of those camo wearing, beer swilling, Bambi slaying bullies in ball caps I’d venture a guess that the mother tonguers themselves are simply compensating for their own inabilities to speak it.