Zizek

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Dennis R. says:

>  > It srikes me now that the US is the LEAST 'globalised' country in 
>the world.
>
>Nonsense. It's got a Third World electoral system and a Second World
>economy, but its culture, mass media, and selected service industries are
>global through and through. Read the mass culture carefully, and you find
>all sorts of resistance and subversion.

The US public hardly consume any foreign films, though.  Films in 
foreign languages are rarely shown in commercial theaters.  Aside 
from occasional British programs, the US public are hardly exposed to 
TV programs produced in foreign nations either.  Moreover, the US 
public generally received with equanimity the news that NATO bombed 
Yugoslav television and that the US bombed Al-Jazeera.

While the US government expands its already gigantic surveillance 
capacity, it ironically lacks experts who can translate intercepted 
messages.  Geoffrey Nunberg writes:

*****   Our lack of linguistic expertise is not a new problem -- nor 
one that will go away soon.  The FBI has acknowledged that it could 
have had warnings of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing from 
intercepted tapes and notebooks in Arabic if it had had the resources 
to translate them; similarly, the United States could have known 
ahead of time about the 1998 nuclear tests in India and Pakistan if 
it had been able to translate information in its possession.

<http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/tongues.html>   *****

According to Nunberg, "American colleges and universities graduated 
only nine Arabic majors" in 2000.  Nunberg proposes that the US 
institute "a national heritage language program aimed at helping the 
children of immigrants maintain and develop their fluency and 
literacy in their native tongues," but such a proposal would face 
stiff oppositions from the English-only crowd.

Perhaps, monolingualism will eventually spell the downfall of the 
Empire.  A post-post-modern linguistic turn....  :->
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>