It's the season of legislative activity on Capital Hill, some good, some bad. I recently wrote about the House passing a bill including a proviso to let divisive fire-breathing chaplains in the military -- be they Muslims, Hindu fundamentalists, or Wiccans -- pontificate at public functions about how right their particular religion is and how wrong all others are. (I forgot to mention that the intention of the bill was to let fire-breathing Christians carry on.) This is bad. The May 18 Senate vote to declare English the “national language,” by contrast, is good (“Senate Votes English as ‘National Language,' Washington Post May 19). Let's give credit where credit is due.

But first, because it's so much fun to eye-roll, here's my vote for this week's dumbest political quote. (I think I'm going to have to start awarding the equivalent of the Golden Fleece award, a tongue-in-cheek “prize” for the most wasteful bit of pork-barrel politics.) It comes from Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who called the bill “racist.”

I'll comment on this below. But first, to what the amendment does do. In a nutshell, it tries to put the brakes on an America where people who refuse to mainstream get to continue to function in what for our society is the language of the lower classes, Spanish. The bill, sponsored by Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), pulled some of its punches at the last minute, leaving alone extant laws that mandate bilingual ballots and education, so it's not clear what in fact it will accomplish besides making a gesture.

However it's a gesture that needs to be made. In the military, for example, whose enlisted ranks contain a large percentage of Hispanics, can you imagine the chaos if a law said that such soldiers or sailors had a right to Spanish-language training and command? We already bend over backward for Hispanics, including putting applicants to the service academies who self-identify as Hispanic on a fast track to admission with lower predictors than are required of other applicants, and offering them guaranteed seats.

Let's be clear too that this is really all about Spanish, just as the recent House bill to allow proselytizing at public functions was really all about Christian fundamentalists, not Hindus. Nobody is concerned with French (that's Canada), or with Turkish (Germany's problem). The intent of this bill is to prevent the calcification of a lower class of poorly educated immigrants, many of whom are illegal, from our southern neighbors, from being able to embed themselves as a permanent marginalized subgroup. I'm all for preventing that.

I'm not married to English. Yes, it's the language I grew up with, the language I usually write in, and the language I function in when teaching in this country. But when I lived and taught in Germany, I functioned in German: teaching, going to the store, sitting in the theater, making palaver in the store. Even now I speak German with my two little boys: it's an easy path to bilingualism. Right now the two-year-old speaks a mixture. But no fear of losing English: the four-year-old responds to complex articulations from me, delivered in German, in perfect English. Things get translated in mid-air.

When I taught in Rwanda, my graduate students at the National University were tri-lingual: their first language was the fiendishly difficult Bantu language Kinyarwanda; on top of that they had Belgian-delivered French, and then came English, the subject of their graduate work. I couldn't work in Kinyarwanda, so we did a mixture of English and French. Of course both were foreign languages to my students, but also Rwanda's entree into the international arena. I was there to encourage that. You want to speak “up,” not “down,” make them more international, not more provincial. Coming to Annapolis, I had a student who confessed to me that back in the ‘hood in Los Angeles, he didn't speak the “high English” we used in class. (He wrote a story for me about the Crips and the Bloods.) “Darren,” I said, “speak what you like at home. It's a matter of pragmatics: this is the language of the ruling class. If you want to be part of them, you have to speak their language.” He got the point; he'd gotten it already.

Could the U.S. function in Spanish? Of course. Spain does. And if this were, like Mexico, a country primarily colonized by Spain, that would be our mainstream tongue, the thing that gives people access to all that's good and interesting in a culture. I love and revere Spanish culture, both European and post-colonial, including such world works as Don Quixote, the “golden age” dramas of Lope de Vega and Calderon, and such contemporary masters as the Chilean Isabel Allende and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. I have no fear of Spanish, and think we could have just as great a country if everybody spoke it. (My Spanish, still too easily confused in my head with Italian, is delivered in the Castilian lisp I learned while taking Spanish in Germany: when I speak to the guys mulching my lawn, I have to lose the “high-class” accent to be understood.)

The problem is, the Spanish-speakers this law is about aren't reading Don Quixote. They probably aren't even literate. In immigration, as my favorite commentator Robert Samuelson (Washington Post/Newsweek) insists, the problem is that the immigrants we're letting in are the poor and uneducated ones who drain the high end of the system (schooling, medical care) and in return only pick the lettuce -- while denying entry to the Ph.D.s who would benefit us. Thus the problem is not immigration; it's immigration of poor low-skilled people who are likely to stay that way. Similarly, it's not about Spanish, it's about the language of poor uneducated laborers who either cannot or will not assimilate. (A recent study suggests that salaries of unskilled immigrants fall over time as a proportion of mainstream salaries rather than rising.)

All the power, all the knowledge, all the mainstream culture in this country is in English. Sure, it could be Spanish, but it isn't. You tie two arms and a leg behind you if you willingly commit to a marginalized culture to the exclusion of the mainstream. The trick is to learn the mainstream for public consumption and, if you like, retain the marginalized at home. Nobody cares what you speak with your parents so long as, once you report to duty in (say) the military, you can function in the mainstream language.

So this is about class, not race. It's not because they're brown that immigrant Spanish shouldn't be given any more legal protection than it already has. (Even so, “Hispanic” was invented as a “race” in the l970s. Are Spaniards “Hispanic”? Are Brazilians? Is it a language designation, or a racial one?) It's not “racist” to say, we're speaking English because, folks, that's the mainstream idiom. After all, if I lived in Spain I'd be polishing up that Castilian lisp.