Rachel Lucas Learns that History Lingers

Before the eleventh century, the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples of England had more trouble with each other and the Romans, Danes, and Vikings than with the French.

In A.D. 1066, William the Conqueror took over England for France. He installed Frenchmen as the new ruling class, to the point where the English we speak now probably owes as much to Old French as to Old English.

Since that time, the English have had a kind of hate-hate relationship with the French.

I look for the European Union to fix all of that in a thousand years or so.

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The Single-Tasking President

I've often said we ask too much of our Presidents. Whenever I hear someone criticize the President for taking vacation, or not handling today's crisis or local emergency, I respond that one guy shouldn't make or break the system.

Barack Obama on the campaign trail, in response to John McCain's call to cancel a debate to deal with the credit crisis:

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person will be the next president," the Democrat said in Clearwater, Florida. "It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once. It's more important than ever to present ourselves to the American people."

But after a few scant weeks in the Oval Office:

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been "overwhelmed" by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Apparently, Barry never had a job in which he had to satisfy multiple customers at once.

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Adult Stem Cells Save People; Embryonic Stem Cells, Not So Much

Spanish and British doctors have successfully grown a trachea from a woman's own adult stem cells and replaced her own damaged trachea with it. The team reported their results from the June operation in the Medical Journal Lancet. From the article, emphasis added:

The graft immediately provided the recipient with a functional airway, improved her quality of life, and had a normal appearance and mechanical properties at 4 months. The patient had no anti-donor antibodies and was not on immunosuppressive drugs.

A trachea is not a heart, but the fundamental change in the way twenty-first century medicine will approach first organ failure and then age-related ailments cannot be overstressed.

From The Minority Report and The Independent:

University of Bristol Professor Martin Birchall, who worked with the Spanish team, said, "This is just the beginning. I think it will completely transform the way we think about surgery. In 20 years' time the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."

No children were maimed, harmed, or grown in the lab to be harvested like cattle for the production of this trachea.

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Why America Needs One Language

America, from her birth, has had as a common bond a single language. It's not the only language in the world. It wasn't even invented here. But in hard times and prosperity, safety and danger, through political struggles and wars, the single language has allowed Americans of all origins to take full part in public life. Without the ability to speak a common language, we are a mere collection of colocated tribes, soon to disintegrate and be cast into the dustbin of history.

If they share a language, the poorest child can converse with the wealthiest financier, should the need arise. Without a common tongue, the rich and powerful can easily ignore even a mob in the street, a mob much more likely to turn to violence when its well-spoken, cogent and passionately delivered points are, through lack of understanding, ignored as gibberish.

Several factors contribute to the necessity of a common language. I apologize for the lack of scholarship here; your refund is in the mail.

• Efficiency
  
  The amount of waste and energy required to accomodate multiple languages is staggering. Teachers, government workers, and really everyone would be asked to communicate in the language preferred bythe few, at the expense of the many. While the elitist would suggest that is good and proper, it is no more realistic than it is just, and it is even less just than it is efficient. Far better to have a single standard and let everyone conform than to have as many standards as are required, which is to say, no standard at all. Taken ad absurdum, we would strain efficiency if all official functions had to have the capacity to be conducted in Esperanto or Klingon for the two people with those as their native languages.
  
  
• Psychology
  
  Language is not just a tool for communication, it is a mapping of ideas into reality. Language introduces an historical bias in favor of its roots. While both Spanish and English are European, and thus impart a European viewpoint on their speakers, the differences are pronounced. Americans have an ingrained trust and loyalty toward the United Kingdom, stemming initially from our common language and smelted in two world wars. We say we share a common history with the British, but we really mean a common language.
  
  
• Safety
  
  When a call comes to a 911 dispatcher, safety demands clarity, and clarity is shattered by a language barrier. The same applies to any interaction with police, fire rescue and emergency medical technicians.
  
  Captain's Quarters has the horrific story of a group of illegal immigrant women forced into prostitution by the "coyotes" with whom they had contracted for passage across the border. It turns out that the coyotes were actually pimps who took their identification and forced them to be used in a way so inhuman that 'prostitution' doesn't quite cover it. The business apparently was conducted all in Spanish. I make no attempt to create a bogeyman here: I believe the business was conducted in Spanish to obscure its purposes.
  
  Not speaking English, the girls were unable to call for help or explain their circumstances.
  
  
• Trust
  
  People who speak the same language trust each other more. Traveling in a foreign country and meeting a person who speaks your language, a level of trust is established immediately. Conversely, speaking in a private language engenders distrust among those who are excluded.
  
  Without a shared language, we rely on translators. Translators must not only convey the nuances of thought between two languages, but they must avoid the temptation to insert their own bias. So we must trust the group speaking the foreign language, and also the translator.
  
  
• Economy
  
  Encouraging a person to speak a language that most others do not is not doing it a favor. Those who cannot fluently speak the dominant language are destined to a life in the underclass.
  
  
• Unity
  
  Employers and employees, lawyers and waitresses, cops and prostitutes are united together in communication. A nation is united by history, culture, and defense of shared territory -- all of which for all practical purposes require a shared language.

We must resist all attempts to characterize monolingualism as racism, nativism, or any kind of intolerance. It is necessary. Without it, sooner or later we all end up working for the coyotes, or unwittingly becoming them.

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Return them, or die.

That is what the British government should tell Iran.

They should say, "We do not care if they were in your territorial waters. You will put them back where they were now, or you will no longer have the means to govern yourselves."

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