Del. McDonough pushing English once again

“Siding with the rebels, that was his nature,” McDonough said, with no small pride. “And landed in Baltimore.”

“How about you?” a guy asked. “Would they have thrown you out, too?”

“The best I ever did,” McDonough said, “was getting thrown out of Fells Point. Out of Turkey Joe Trabert’s old bar. Back when Turkey Joe was still a power.”

Well, it’s a nice story on both sides of the Atlantic, and a timely reminder of ethnic politics, too. That’s a subject about which McDonough, the Republican delegate, has lately roused considerable interest with a bill to make English the official language of Maryland.

This is, in fact, the third time McDonough has introduced this legislation and, like the first two, he anticipates this one sinking to the bottom of the ocean. But he’s not quitting. He intends to put it up for a vote in Baltimore County in the next election.

“Ten or 15 years ago,” says McDonough, “this wasn’t even on people’s radar screens. But it’s different now. Americans are patriotic and want English to be the official language. They feel strongly about their culture, their country, the things they believe in like the flag being challenged, like the language being diluted, mostly by the Spanish but also by the Chinese, the Russians, all sorts of things. They want to send a message: We have a culture in America, and we want to keep it.”

McDonough, it says here, needs to check his history, starting with a guy getting chased out of Ireland a long time ago.

Not all Americans are like his great-great-grandfather. Everybody didn’t arrive here speaking English. America arrives from Italy and Poland and Greece, from Japan and China and Africa, and from places where Spanish is the primary language.

And all arrive with an understanding: To live the good life, they will have to adapt. Those who want the full American embrace will have to learn its jargon, as spoken in schoolyards and street corners and businesses. And, in a nation of 300 million people, in which the vast, vast majority speak English, it is far more likely that the minority will learn English than it is that this vast, vast majority will learn the language of the relative few.

So the question is not one of American patriotism, or the dilution of a national culture. The American culture always has been a combination of the many. This is our strength, the thing that distinguishes us from all other nations: We take the best of each other, and this is what keeps us vibrant.

And we do it in spite of minor annoyances, which McDonough quickly mentions in defense of his bill.

“Ordinary citizens,” he says, “are offended by the fact that you call a phone number and it says, ‘Press 1 for English and 2 for Spanish.’ They’re offended by guidebooks on how to vote, in which half the book’s in English and half’s in Spanish.”

In fact, not all “ordinary citizens” find this offensive.

Some understand that it’s offered as a gesture of comfort. Not all newcomers arrive on our shores speaking English, and it’s not a language you learn overnight. The bilingual guidebooks, and the phone messages, aren’t a harbinger of the demise of English. They merely say, “We understand you’re new around here. We understand your anxieties about your new surroundings, and here’s our little gesture to make things easier for both of us.”

“My bill,” says McDonough, “merely acknowledges English as a unifying force in the history of our culture. People come to America to be Americans. We have a culture, and its unifying force is English.”

Sometimes, though, a unifying force is fear — unwarranted fear, the fear that the lonely outsider will somehow corrupt the vast majority of insiders.

McDonough’s right: People come to America to be Americans. But they figure it out pretty fast: Being American ultimately means speaking English. They’ll come around to it without anybody making it “official,” and without anybody imagining some terrible threat that does not exist.

Michael Olesker is an award-winning newspaper columnist and author of three books.