So which one should you, or your children, learn? If you take a glance at advertisements in New York or A-level options in Britain, an answer seems to leap out: Mandarin. China’s economy continues to grow at a pace that will make it bigger than America’s within two decades at most. China’s political clout is growing accordingly. Its businessmen are buying up everything from American brands to African minerals to Russian oil rights. If China is the country of the future, is Chinese the language of the future?
Probably not. Remember Japan’s rise? Just as spectacular as China’s, if on a smaller scale, Japan’s economic growth led many to think it would take over the world. It was the world’s second-largest economy for decades (before falling to third, recently, behind China). So is Japanese the world’s third-most useful language? Not even close. If you were to learn ten languages ranked by general usefulness, Japanese would probably not make the list. And the key reason for Japanese’s limited spread will also put the brakes on Chinese.
This factor is the Chinese writing system (which Japan borrowed and adapted centuries ago). The learner needs to know at least 3,000-4,000 characters to make sense of written Chinese, and thousands more to have a real feel for it. Chinese, with all its tones, is hard enough to speak. But the mammoth feat of memory required to be literate in Mandarin is harder still. It deters most foreigners from ever mastering the system—and increasingly trips up Chinese natives.
Greene goes on to discuss why even native Chinese speakers are losing their fluency in written Chinese. Fascinating stuff. I had no idea.
But why choose French? Greene again:
If your interests span the globe, and you’ve read this far, you already know the most useful global language. But if you want another truly global language, there are surprisingly few candidates, and for me French is unquestionably top of the list. It can enhance your enjoyment of art, history, literature and food, while giving you an important tool in business and a useful one in diplomacy. It has native speakers in every region on earth. And lest we forget its heartland itself, France attracts more tourists than any other country—76.8m in 2010, according to the World Tourism Organisation, leaving America a distant second with 59.7m. Any visit there is greatly enhanced by some grasp of the language. The French are nothing but welcoming when you show them and their country respect, and the occasional frost that can greet visitors melts when they come out with their first fully formed sentence. So although there are other great languages out there, don’t forget an easy, common one, with far fewer words to learn than English, that is almost certainly taught in your town. With French, vous ne regretterez rien.
Well, I never have, and as a cultural Francophile, I love reading reasons why more people should speak French. But I can’t help being a little skeptical of this conclusion, given the sheer numbers of Spanish speakers in the world, and their increasing importance to American life and commerce. Am I wrong here?
The series, by E.L. James, has a nickname, actually several: “The Book,” “Twilight for the grown-up set,” “mommy porn,” and the “mouthpiece for a generation.” Dana Schuster writes, it “is rapidly becoming a cult hit among Manhattan women, who are exchanging well-worn paperback copies and excited whispers about the book’s ‘red room of pain’ (Grey’s in-house sex playroom) everywhere from Fred’s at Barneys to parent-teacher conference night at school.”
It is functioning as a tool for female bonding, an aphrodisiac to women who might not be otherwise all that interested in sex with their husbands, a marriage revitalizer, a glimpse into the joys of reading for children who’ve never seen their parents doing it so much, and an educational supplement about BDSM:
“I found myself explaining what BDSM [bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism] was to some of the moms at a Saturday morning basketball,” says power publicist Alison Brod, who hails “Fifty Shades” as “the new kabbalah for female bonding in this city.”
I don’t think that’s what the women’s book clubs in St. Francisville are into these days. Then again, we don’t have any power publicists around here.
The Robert M. Beren Academy, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Houston, won its regional championship to advance to the boys basketball state semifinals this weekend in Dallas. But the team will not make the trip.
The Beren Academy players observe the Sabbath and do not play from sundown on Fridays to sundown on Saturdays. Their semifinal game is scheduled for 9 p.m. Friday.
“The sacred mission will trump excellence in the secular world,” Rabbi Harry Sinoff, Beren’s head of school, said Monday in a telephone interview.
The school filed an appeal to change the time of the game with the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, or Tapps, the group that organizes the tournament. On Monday morning, representatives of the school were notified that the association’s nine-member executive board had rejected the appeal.
“When Beren’s joined years ago, we advised them that the Sabbath would present them with a problem with the finals,” Edd Burleson, the director of the association, said. “In the past, Tapps has held firmly to their rules because if schedules are changed for these schools, it’s hard for other schools.
“If we solve one problem, we create another problem.”
Membership in the association is voluntary, Burleson said.
There’s so much to admire in the stance Beren has taken here. Most important, of course, is Rabbi Sinoff’s statement that “the sacred mission will trump excellence in the secular world.” I cannot express how inspiring and admirable I find that, especially in this day and age. Secondly, though, the school’s leadership is not screaming bloody murder and threatening to take Tapps to court to compel them to accommodate its needs. I wish Tapps would have found a way to do that, but if you read the whole story, Tapps’s argument makes sense. Beren knew what it was getting into when it signed up with Tapps, and now the school is agreeing to bear the cost of its convictions.
No matter who wins the state basketball championship, those young men, their coaches, and their rabbi are already champions where it counts the most. Congratulations to them!
Final Michigan polling shows the state is a toss-up, if enough Democrats turn out to vote for Santorum in today’s open primary. Nate Silver says it could go either way. Michigan Democrats are being urged by liberal activists to turn out for Santorum today, for the sake of throwing the GOP nomination to the most unelectable candidate.
The survey, conducted by Gallup, included two samples of registered voters: 1,137 from a dozen “swing states,” all of which Obama carried in 2008, and another 881 nationwide. The swing states included six that George W. Bush carried twice (Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia), three that Bush carried once (Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico), and three that last went Republican in 1988 or earlier (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
The findings: Santorum leads Obama in the swing states, 50% to 45%, and nationwide 49% to 46%. This gives him an edge of three percentage points over Romney, whose swing-state lead is 48% to 46% and who ties the president nationally at 47%.
To be sure, this is only one poll, and the election is still more than eight months off. One possible explanation is that voters are less unfavorably disposed toward Santorum because they don’t know him as well as they know Romney, and that once they learn how hard-core the former senator is on social issues, they’d bolt for Obama if Santorum becomes the nominee.
Taranto contends that liberals are wrong if they believe most Americans are, or will be, as horrified by Santorum’s social-issues stands as they are:
The liberal left is disdainful, both culturally and ideologically, of Middle America, and that is why the Democratic Party keeps nominating meritocratic toffs like Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
He cites this sarcastic line from a Clive Crook column that sums up my entire complaint with the “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” thesis (= Middle Americans vote Republican, against their economic interests, because they’ve been bamboozled by the culture war):
“When prosperous liberals vote their values, not their interests, that’s enlightened. When poor conservatives do it, it’s dumb.”
Precisely. Nobody writes books with titles like, “What’s The Matter With Manhattan?” or “What’s The Matter With Malibu?”, analyzing why wealthy liberals vote Democratic, against their economic interests. It’s assumed — correctly — that certain things matter more to them than money. They too are “values voters.” Taranto’s basic argument is that Santorum has gotten close to a sweet spot of cultural conservatism married with a more blue-collar-ish stance on economics than Romney has — and that that stance is a lot more potent electorally than many realize.
I did not pause in those days to question the great myths by which she was surrounded. She possessed that unmistakable magic of authority and majesty that settles on some people and bypasses thought. The fact that she was a woman, and a very feminine woman, made that magic even more potent. You might admire her, as I mostly did, or hate her as the embodiment of all that was evil, as many British people also did. But you would never have missed the chance to be close by in the years of her greatness. Power crackled and flickered around her presence.
Much later it came to me that I, and plenty of other people, had been bewitched. I lived abroad, in Moscow and then in Washington D.C., and saw my country as others saw it. Quite often I found that foreigners had a completely misplaced admiration for Britain, which—to their puzzlement—made me sad. I knew the melancholy truth.
They thought we were still polite. They thought our schools were still good. They thought we were law-abiding and hard-working and patriotic. Educated Russians were particularly deluded about this. They longed for there to be a country completely unlike the USSR. The poor longed to be American. The intellectuals longed to be English.
And with this went an absurd, uncritical worship of Margaret Thatcher, which I came to call Thatcherolatry.
Hitchens’s intensely elegiac essay makes me try to imagine a similar conservative case against Reaganolatry. In Thatcher’s defense, however, I wonder what exactly she, as a politician, could have done to reverse the cultural decline that, in Hitchens’s view, has undone her achievements. I don’t care for Reagan-worship, not because I have anything against Reagan, but because the enthusiasms of his cult are usually a substitute for a lack of imagination and courage in facing the problems America has in 2012, not 1981. Still, it’s hard to imagine what Reagan could have realistically done in his era to have avoided or ameliorated the most difficult challenges we face today. Hitchens writes, of Thatcher:
But what is certainly true is that in all her years she did little or nothing to reverse the demoralization brought about in the 1960s, when she had the power to try.
What ought she have tried? I’m not asking rhetorically; I’d really like to know. It’s generally recognized that Reagan reversed the demoralization of the late 1960s and 1970s, but regaining a sense of national confidence and optimism is not the same thing as remoralization. Reagan did not remoralize America. But is it reasonable to expect any politician to achieve that sort of thing? Did Margaret Thatcher fail, or was she doomed to fail by deep cultural forces beyond her control?
Rachel Balducci’s mom started treatment for breast cancer today. Last night, the night before her chemo began … well, I’ll let Rachel tell the story. With pictures. This will make your day. Your month. Your year.
I bet you know someone struggling with cancer, or chronic illness. Why not try this?
On this Monday, with the knowledge that the crisis was upon them, the soldiers and citizens forgot their quarrels. While the men at the walls worked to repair the shattered defences a great procession was formed.
Constantine Paleologus
In contrast to the silence in the Turkish camp, in the city the bells of the churches rang and their wooden gongs sounded as icons and relics were brought out upon the shoulders of the faithful and carried round through the streets and along the length of the walls, pausing only to bless with their holy presence the spots where the damage was greatest and the danger most pressing; and the throng that followed behind them, Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholic, sang hymns and repeated the Kyrie Eleison.
The Emperor himself came to join in the procession; and when it was ended he summoned his notables and commanders, Greek and Italian, and spoke to them. …
Constantine told his hearers that the great assault was about to begin. To his Greek subjects he said that a man should always be ready to die either for his faith or for his country or for his family or for his sovereign. Now his people must be prepared to die for all four causes.
He spoke of the glories and high traditions of the great Imperial city. He spoke of the perfidy of the infidel Sultan who had provoked the war in order to destroy the True Faith and to put his false prophet in the seat of Christ. He urged them to remember that they were the descendents of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and to be worthy of their ancestors.
For his part, he said, he was ready to die for his faith, his city and his people. …
All that were present rose to assure the Emperor that they were ready to sacrifice their lives and homes for him. He then walked slowly round the chamber, asking each one of them to forgive him if ever he had caused offence. They followed his example, embracing one another, as men do who expect to die.
The day was nearly over. Already crowds were moving towards the great Church of the Holy Wisdom. … Barely a citizen, except for the soldiers on the walls, stayed away from this desperate service of intercession. … The golden mosaics, studded with images of Christ and His Saints and the Emperors and Empresses of Byzantium, glimmered in the light of a thousand lamps and candles; and beneath then for the last time he priests in their splendid vestments moved in the solemn rhythm of the Liturgy.
Later in the evening the Emperor himself rode on his Arab mare to the great cathedral and made his peace with God. Then he returned through the dark streets to his Palace at Blachernae and summoned his household. Of them, as he had done of his ministers, he asked forgiveness for any unkindness that he might have shown them, and bade them good-bye.
My pastor shared that with me. We didn’t make it to liturgy and Forgiveness Vespers yesterday. A rotten bronchial virus that’s going around town struck all of us in my family over the weekend. It never feels right to begin Lent without Forgiveness Vespers, but we sure did. We were all too worn out and crummy-feeling last night to do a forgiveness service at home, but we’re going to do it early this evening.
Anyway, ever since reading about the Fall of Constantinople, and especially after visiting there (Istanbul), I have thought this story would make a terrific movie. Probably too politically incorrect to make today, though — and if so, that’s a sign of how far we have fallen.
Rick Santorum’s statements over the weekend demonstrate once again why his tone and temperament make him such a poor expositor of social conservatism. There is a substantial and appealing case to be made for why JFK erred in his famous 1960 Houston speech about religion and politics, and why the legacy of that speech — delivered in an America that was far more anti-Catholic than it is today — helped created what Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square” (= a public realm where religion has no meaningful place in the dialogue). Archbishop Charles Chaput made just such a case a couple of years ago. From that speech (also delivered in Houston):
For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring. But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new. He “‘secularize[d]’ the American presidency in order to win it.” In other words, “[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the ‘plausibility structures’ of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to ‘privatize’ presidential religious belief – including and especially his own – in order to win that office.”6
In Massa’s view, the kind of secularity pushed by the Houston speech “represented a near total privatization of religious belief – so much a privatization that religious observers from both sides of the Catholic/Protestant fence commented on its remarkable atheistic implications for public life and discourse.” And the irony — again as told by Massa — is that some of the same people who worried publicly about Kennedy’s Catholic faith got a result very different from the one they expected. In effect, “the raising of the [Catholic] issue itself went a considerable way toward ‘secularizing’ the American public square by privatizing personal belief. The very effort to ‘safeguard’ the [essentially Protestant] religious aura of the presidency . . . contributed in significant ways to its secularization.”
Fifty years after Kennedy’s Houston speech, we have more Catholics in national public office than ever before. But I wonder if we’ve ever had fewer of them who can coherently explain how their faith informs their work, or who even feel obligated to try. The life of our country is no more “Catholic” or “Christian” than it was 100 years ago. In fact it’s arguably less so. And at least one of the reasons for it is this: Too many Catholics confuse their personal opinions with a real Christian conscience. Too many live their faith as if it were a private idiosyncrasy – the kind that they’ll never allow to become a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe. Maybe it’s different in Protestant circles. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say, “I doubt it.”
Read the whole thing. You may disagree with it, of course — I do not disagree with it — but it is a thoughtful argument that invites engagement.
“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Santorum said.
“That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square,” he said.
The headlines today, predictably, are about Rick Santorum’s queasy stomach. Once again, Road Rage Rick swings a culture-war broadaxe when a stiletto is required. He sounds anything but presidential when he talks like this. To be clear, the problem I see is not that he’s wrong about JFK’s speech and its effects; it’s that he articulates his objection in crude, semi-hysterical language that’s easy to caricature and to dismiss.
Similarly, Santorum’s inability to resist lobbing a crude culture-war grenade screwed up a perfectly legitimate and necessary critique of the idea that all Americans should go to college. Here’s what he said:
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum lit into President Obama at a Americans for Prosperity Tea Party event in Troy, Michigan over his advocacy for higher learning. “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum sniped. “What a snob!”
The crowd responded favorably to the former Pennsylvania Senator’s remarks, applauding and cheering to his putdown of the president.
“Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands!” Santorum added. “There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”
What a snob! Good grief. Santorum also said that liberal professors want to take religion away from their students. That may or may not be the case, but as Charles Murray points out in “Coming Apart” (and as has been documented often in social science studies), college-educated people are more likely to be religious than working-class folks. If your child goes to college, he or she has a greater chance of holding on to religious belief than if he or she does not. That doesn’t fit Santorum’s preferred populist narrative, but it happens to be true.
leave a comment