In today's West County Times, in a column called "Consejos" ("a bicultural advice column focused on relationships, culture and identity"), the three columnists (Danny Ramirez, Catherine Jagers and Liliana Gundlach) attempted to answer the following questions:
To vote in the United States, you must be a citizen. To be a citizen, you must be able to read and understand English. Then why are there ballots in Spanish??
Nowhere, however, do Danny, Catherine and Lily address the fundamental flaw in the question, which comes in the second sentence. Nowhere in America is there a requirement, either divine or legal, that one must be able to read and understand English to be a citizen. There is a requirement, as Danny points out, that "[i]mmigrants are required to 'demonstrate knowledge' of English before they can attain citizenship...", but "demonstrate knowledge of" and "read and understand" are two quite different things, and in any case this rule is applicable only to immigrants, not to those of us who happened to be born here and became citizens while being able to speak no language more sophisticated than "wa-wa-wa".
It's nice to be able to read and understand English when you go to the polls to vote. But, general belief notwithstanding, it is not mandatory.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about President Bush's discovery of significant parallels between the situation in Iraq and that in Korea. Apparently, this was not good enough, because last week he discovered other significant parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Apparently, if we were to abandon Iraq, it would fall into the same morass that Vietnam fell into after we were driven out of Saigon — the morass, as President Bush would have it, from which the terms "boat people", "re-education camps" and "killing fields" derived.
Of course, the first "boat people" were not Vietnamese, even though we coined the term for them. We can go back more than two centuries and find a whole different generation of "boat people" — Tory loyalists who fled a newly independent United States to avoid tar, feathers, the rail ... and the noose. That there were many Vietnamese, particularly in the South, who felt that they had to flee an imagined — and, one supposes, in many cases an actual — threat of sanctions by the victorious Communists is hardly surprising; history showed many examples of such situations long before Ho Chi Minh came along.
"Re-education camps"? The Vietnamese didn't invent those, either. I know someone who spent a year in such a camp in China a decade before the South fell; and, again, we can find other examples throughout history.
"Killing fields"? But those had nothing to do with Vietnam; they were a product of the Pol Pot government in neighboring Cambodia. In fact, about half the deaths in the "killing fields" were suffered in 1978 by sympathizers with Vietnam; and, ultimately, it was the Vietnamese who put an end to the "killing fields" by marching into Cambodia, ousting the Khmer Rouge, and installing the Heng Samrin government — an installation that the United States refused to recognize, insisting under the Reagan administration out of its distaste for Vietnam for years after the fact that the murderous Pol Pot régime was the only legitimate government of Cambodia. No, no United States administration — and particularly a Republic one — has any business associating the "killing fields" with Vietnam.
And what do we see in Vietnam today? A quiet, calm, relatively prosperous country with fairly good relations with the United States — a revelation, after the four decades of war that killed millions before the U.S. was driven from Saigon. And is this what we can expect in Iraq after we withdraw from that country? "Boat people", "re-education camps", "killing fields" — or, just maybe, a couple of years of upheaval followed by a settling-down into quiet and prosperity? Is that the lesson to be learned from Vietnam?