Marcus Epstein’s post on Obama’s bilingualism gaffe suggested that most Canadians can speak French and English. This is incorrect–most Canadians have studied French, or if French have studied English, because it’s required by law in elementary school. But if they were asked to actually speak the other language, the results would look something like this, written by P. G. Wodehouse in 1935

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty. hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed upon Montv Bodkin when he left for this holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French. and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle. he said:

‘Er. garcon.’

‘M’sieur?’

‘Er. garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l‘encre et une pièce de papier — note-papier. vous savez — et une enveloppe et un plume?
‘Ben. m’sieur.’

The strain was too great. Montv relapsed into his native tongue.

‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘tn the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.

‘V’là, sir! Zere you are, sir.’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk — pin — pipper — envelope — and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’[The Luck Of The Bodkins, By P. G. Wodehouse, Chapter One]

John Derbyshire writes here that

Obama’s idiotic suggestion that all our kids should learn Spanish is, amongst other things (this is multi-dimensional stupidity) an illustration of educational romanticism run amok.

The cold fact is that absent exceptional circumstances — the most common of which is, total immersion at a receptive age — not many human beings can learn another language. Oh, you can learn enough to stumble along and get by on a trip abroad, but if you can attain fluency in a language not your own, without those exceptional circumstances, you are an unusually smart and gifted person. (For my own sad track record, see here.)

Of course, when you have a major language and a minor language, it’s members of the minority who are more likely to be bilingual. That makes makes Canada’s bilingualism a huge jobs program for French-Canadians, who dominate the Canadian Federal Civil Service, and what would do the same for Hispanics in the United States under Obama’s plan.

One theory for why states and cities are raising their high school graduation requirements (Los Angeles now requires passing Algebra II to graduate) is that they are hoping to persuade their dumber students to move somewhere less demanding, and keep people with dumb kids from moving to the state in the first place. For example, Arizona now has much easier high school graduation requirements than California, so it would be smart for families with not so bright kids to relocate, and it would be smart for Mexicans planning to sneak into America to choose Arizona, where their kids are more likely to become high school graduates, than California.

The theory isn’t very plausible, however, because there’s little evidence that California’s politicians and educators are smart enough to understand it.

You might, however, someday see politicians in, say, New Hampshire devising ways to get illegal immigrants to live in Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts even while working in NH.

That reminds me that I wouldn’t be surprised to see the following happen:

Imagine you were a fairly young man relatively high up in the rather geriatric Cuban Communist dictatorship. You are content to bide your time until Fidel and Raul are gone, but you intend to then emerge as the Deng of a prosperous post-Communist Cuba. And you intend to enjoy that role for a long time.

As you survey post-Communist transitions, you note the sad case of East Germany, where Communism badly dented the formerly famous Protestant work ethic, leaving economic malaise even two decades later.

Cuba is in even worse shape culturally and morally: huge subsidies and tiny wages mean that Cuba is now full of welfare bums and hustlers who won’t take jobs.

Think of how much easier everything would be for you as El Presidente of capitalist Cuba if you could just get rid of the bottom quarter of your population.

You aren’t a cruel man. You don’t wish the Cuban parasite class ill. You just want them to go be parasites on somebody else, somebody who is big, rich, and only 90 miles away.

Fidel made many mistakes, but he was a clever man, never more so than in 1980, when some political dissidents took refuge in a foreign embassy, hoping for asylum in America. Fidel made lemonade out of lemons by not only letting the political prisoners go, but by emptying his prisons of all the real criminals too, dumping them on Uncle Sam in the Mariel boatlift.

Could you pull off something like that anew? Could America be fooled twice?

Say you started rounding up all the welfare mothers and pimps as “anti-Communist wreckers.” The Cubans in Miami would soon be up in arms (it would help to schedule this right before a Presidential election). Finally, you could relent and let a million bums sail for America in a Dunkirk like exodus, where they would be granted asylum as soon as they landed. The Wall Street Journal would write rapturous editorials about it.

After telling Americans earlier this week to have their children learn Spanish, Sen. Barack Obama admitted yesterday, “I don’t speak a foreign language.”

Upon learning this news, New York Times op-edster Roger Cohen, who has written dozens of columns about how Barack Obama is the perfect postnational cosmopolite Citizen of the World, committed suicide in despair, his hopes and fantasies shattered.

Obama lacks a second language despite living for four years at an impressionable age in a foreign country and then spending eight years at a lavish prep school that currently offers five different languages and makes studying at least one of them mandatory in 7th grade. Sen. Obama also has an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, which has a foreign language requirement and offers 37 different foreign languages, including some that don’t exist anymore, such as Akkadian. He later spent three years at Harvard, which offers more instruction in more languages than I can count, including 19 languages indigenous to Africa alone. So, Obama has had more opportunity to learn a foreign language than 95% of all native-born Americans, but he hasn’t.

And, yet, despite only speaking English, Obama seems to have done pretty well for himself. After all, he is the frontrunner for the Presidency. I guess he’d be the frontrunner for Galactic Overlord if only he’d learned to speak Bahasa Indonesian, Spanish, and Klingon.