> > 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/>