Re: On being a noncombatant in the culture wars

From: <glennmorton@entouch.net>
Date: Fri Mar 03 2006 - 20:50:09 EST

For Ted and Michael,

Ted, excellent piece by your friend who wrote:

>>>

Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists, jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger stage."

<<<<

If truth be known, I came to China to learn the language because it is a challenge--probably the biggest intellectual challenge of my life.  Don't tell my company but I probably would have been willing to come here even if they had halved my salary.  Advancement and more money are nice, up to a point. After that, the main goal of life is to have the adventure, and influence people as best you can towards what you perceive to be the truth. 

And watching how Americans will gripe about the Mexicans who come to the US and never learn the language, but then seeing Americans in Europe and China never learning the local languages, I heartily concur with the advice in your friends piece.  One of the great pleasures of my bad chinese language skill is that I can actually carry on a conversation (haltingly) with people from Central Asia--people I never would have had the pleasure to meet had I not learned Mandarin.

Michael Roberts writes:

>>>For Ted, one thing I like about your approach is that you are not partisan and you are willing to make your mind up about whatever issue. At least I don't know what you are going to say until I have heard it.<<<

This is not a dig at Ted, but at the criteria outlined above. I too like what Ted says and thinks.  However, Michael, I would be careful of having that as a great standard.  You can achieve the same effect with a random sentence generator.  There too, you will not know what it is going to say until you have heard it.

I bet you didn't expect to hear me say that either, thus, maybe I am a random sentence generator.

 

Received on Fri Mar 3 20:50:23 2006