English First, People Second in Nashville

Watched a lot of football this weekend, some of it on FOX. The worst thing about watching football on FOX, aside from Joe Buck, is having to watch that stupid dancing robot. There aren't enough red cards in the world to express how much I hate that thing. However, I've got one for some folks in Tennessee.

The NY Times wrote on Saturday about a ballot measure in Nashville to make English the official (read: only) language spoken in Davidson County, TN. If it passes, Nashville would become the largest American city to ban the use of languages other than English by city officials. Councilman Eric Crafton defends his ballot initiative by citing this worst-case possibility if the status quo is allowed to stand:

I happened to see a state legislature meeting in California where several of the state representatives had interpreters at their desk because they couldn’t speak English.

Former Tennessee R.N.C. chairman Johnathan Crisp somehow sees an even bigger picture: “Our opponents talk about Nashville being the ‘Athens of the South.’ But if you go to the other Athens, in Greece, all of the government workers are speaking Greek.”

Glad he specified Athens, Greece, because at first I thought he meant Athens, Georgia, the one north of Florida, and I had no idea they spoke Greek. They don't, which makes sense, now.

One of these ancient structures stands in Athens, Greece; the other is in Nashville. Can you tell which one is which?

But let's get to the point: Greeks speak Greek in Greece because almost 94% of the country, according to 2006 numbers, identifies itself as being Greek, while 99% of the country speaks the language. For the math-challenged, that leaves about 1% of non-Greek-speaking Greeks in Greece. Compare that to the 10% of Nashville households that choose to speak a language other than English. Presumably not Greek, but a not insignificant 1,000% difference.

(This does lead us to at least one interesting revelation: 'The Athens of the South' is today arguably more diverse, at least linguistically, than its once-ancient counterpart. Go figure.)

If passed, however, Nashville municipal officials will be required to speak English, with exceptions made for cases of 'health and safety,' which is the worst kind of jingoistic bullshit. It's deliberately deceptive. It's condescending. It's saying, "we care about your health and safety so much we made it an exception clause in our little law. But now that we've outlawed speaking your language ourselves, which we never did to begin with, good luck finding someone to talk to, suckers!"

At best, these Republicans are just trying to create one universal way for Nashville to communicate, which just so happens to be English; at worst, they're trying to persuade minority groups to leave town in search of a city willing to speak their language. If it's the former, there are far better ways to go about it. If it's the latter, it's un-American.

Eric Crafton and the Nashville Republican Party are ordered to cease and desist per Section C, Article 6 for insulting the spirit of American democracy, whatever language it happens to speak.