Cuantas lenguas hablas...

When I was about six years old, my father told me that we were Hungarian, and that Hungarians had to

learn lots of languages. I found a book on Russian in the library and memorized the Cyrillic alphabet.

That’s how my fascination with languages began. I realized years later that what he meant was that Hungarians have to learn other languages because no one learns Hungarian; silly me. But that fascination persists to this day, and it changed my life.

I speak six languages, sort of. If I were to rank my mastery of them, I would say English 10, Spanish 9, French and Portuguese 7, Russian 5, and German 3. I can almost understand half a dozen Romance languages, but I can’t construct a grammatically correct sentence in any of them. But I’ve traveled to more than 20 countries, and I can carry on conversations with locals in all of them except Japan.

More than anything, being able to talk with people from other countries has given me opportunities to test my beliefs against those of people with different perspectives. Growing up in Mexico, I was surrounded by people who laughed at the suggestion that Americans were better than other people.

Not that they thought that Mexicans were better; it was just intuitively obvious that people are the same everywhere – at least from one country to the next. People in my social circle were of course better than those who weren’t part of las cuatrocientas familias – the 400 families who mattered. (It’s not always 400; I was friends with the Escalón family from El Salvador for a while, and El Salvador has only 14 families who are better than everyone else).

It didn’t take me long to realize that people who didn’t grow up in my country think that American exceptionalism is nonsense. I was offended at first, then chastened, and ultimately embarrassed. Of course they didn’t think that Americans were inherently better than people from other countries; we are people from other countries. There were people here when our ancestors arrived, but we killed them – most of them, at any rate. Smallpox, ethnic cleansing, our unique implementation of Apartheid – we were endlessly creative in snuffing them out. And now, here we are – examples for the world to learn from. Aren’t we something?

And then Trump happened.

It’s not that we’ve lost the ability to challenge our closely held beliefs; it’s that we never had that ability.

The two oceans that separate us from the rest of the world always provided buffers that allowed us to cling to beliefs that would crumble in the face of even the slightest challenge. That’s what the Internet has done. People from other cultures can see what we think and let us know what they think. And they think we’re, as Trump’s Secretary of State said, freaking morons.

More than 60 percent of registered Republicans believe that the election of 2020 was stolen. Fifty secretaries of state, the majority of them Republicans, affirm that the results of the 2020 election were correct as reported – not just a majority, not just the Democrats; ALL of them. If you’re looking for a way to prove a proposition, the unanimity of our secretaries of state regarding the validity of vote counts as reported would be an excellent example. That notwithstanding, 60 percent of registered Republicans say that that doesn’t prove that there was no fraud. Really? If that doesn’t prove it, what would?

Advanced degrees aren’t the only key to upward mobility; in my case, being fluent in Spanish and Portuguese opened doors. The President of the Inter-american Development Bank (like the World Bank but just for Latin America) once told me that because of my fluency with Spanish and Portuguese and the fact that I was pursuing a doctorate in economics, I was just the guy he was looking for to replace him some day. That’s a pretty good door to open, even if it didn’t work out.

I’m still an elitist, but I believe in a different aristocracy – the educated elite. I don’t mean people with degrees – although certifying one’s knowledge isn’t a bad thing. But I talked to a girl working the returns desk at Home Depot yesterday who could obviously breeze through medical school if given the chance.

Smart comes in many flavors; stupid, just one. We need people like her. We need for our kids to achieve their maximum potential, to earn a good living, to feel proud of themselves, and to earn enough to pay income tax that we can use to fix our broken country. And we need citizens smart enough to understand that. If you don’t want to pay taxes, move somewhere else.

We need electricians and welders. We also need people who can construct a grammatically correct sentence. There’s no reason why welders and electricians shouldn’t be exposed to a basic understanding

of psychology, sociology, history, economics and political science. We need voters who understand the issues and can make informed judgments about how to fix what’s wrong. Creating a class of people who can earn a living but can’t cast an informed vote is the dream of one of our political parties, but it’s self- serving and selfish. We can do better. Two improvements come immediately to mind.

We need to make a seismic shift in our educational system: We need to teach our children what lies look like, and how to detect and debunk them. My sense is that junior high school is about the right level to introduce such a class into our standard curriculum, but earlier might work even better. I’ll leave that to the experts. (I’m rewriting the chapter on education from my last book, “HTTPV.” I opined that online education would create a bettereducated society. How did that work out? Smart kids got smarter, and dumb kids got dumber. So much for that).

Our children should also learn at least one foreign language, probably Spanish. We have a definite advantage here in Porterville in that regard; half of our kids have a grandmother who never really mastered English, which means that they’re forced to learn Spanish – not just the “Hola Paco, ¿qué tal?

That’s all that kids who have had four years of Spanish in many American schools can say, but actual conversational Spanish that they can speak with confidence. Watch a few interviews of Europeans who learned English in school, and they sound like Americans with an accent, and not much of one at that.

Talking with smart foreigners is like talking to intelligent, educated people who disagree with you. It’s a free education. You get a chance to unlearn things that you “knew” that weren’t true.

In Spain there’s a saying: “Cuantas lenguas hablas, tantos hombres eres.” (You’re as many men as the number of languages you speak). Because what you know, and what you don’t, determines who you are.

Les Pinter lives in Springville. He will be holding a Victory Party the first Saturday after the November 5 election at a venue to be named later. Sign up for an invitation at http://lpinter.com.