Warlords of the First Amendment

Mike Gallagher is the sixth most popular radio host in America. Frankly, I had never heard of Mike Gallagher until about a month ago, when I was driving up to Maine and hit a stretch of I-95 that was beyond the reach of NPR. Gallagher was bloviating into the empty airspace with a long lament against Lowe's home- improvement stores. Whilst wandering the aisles of said emporium, he found his sensibilities assaulted by a product promotion that was broadcast on the public address system in both English and Spanish. He was outraged. "What's next, Chinese?" he demanded. The insult seemed to reside in the mere sound of a language of which he did not approve. "This is America!"

The English Only movement notwithstanding, this was the first time I'd heard someone demanding that a private business actually narrow its voluntary accommodation of a demographically diverse purchasing public. He wanted his audience to call Lowe's en masse to complain, protest or boycott the chain until all vestiges of the Spanish language were ousted, renounced and securely walled off. To Mike Gallagher, it was a matter of "American sovereignty."

Gallagher lives in the gloriously multilingual, fractious cosmopolis of New York City, as it turns out--a city where the public school population encompasses native speakers of 140 different languages; where every bike messenger speaks at least six; and where the upper classes pay $300 an hour for tutors who can cram enough Swedish, Arabic and Latin into their kids' noggins to give them a fighting chance at a slot in kindergarten. So pardon my French, but whence the resentment of even the sound of "foreign" languages--never mind one so ubiquitous and accessible as Spanish--that you would want to boycott every last random utterance as blasphemy within our borders?

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