Albert Einstein Would Never Have Been Allowed To Teach School In Gabby Gifford's Arizona

Blue Dog Gabrielle Giffords says she's in a fight for her political life with right-wing sociopaths and classic xenophobes. Although that's questionable, her reaction has been detestable: attack the most prominent Latino and progressive political leader in the state of Arizona, throw him under the bus and scream to the enraged mob of Glenn Beck followers, "Go get him; he's much worse. Leave me alone; I'm with YOU!" And when called on her contemptible behavior she assumes the posture of a martyr and claims she's the victim of sexism. The word "cowardice" doesn't begin to describe this craven, shameless, opportunistic excuse for a Democrat.

Before Nazi Germany started tossing Jews into ovens they tried what Arizona is doing now: ethnic cleansing. One of my grandparents was lucky enough to have parents who took the hint and escaped that cesspool of hatred, bigotry and narrow-minded xenophobia. His family came to America and prospered. In 1921, long before right-wing fanatics had seized control of Germany, Albert Einstein, a brilliant Jewish scientist from Ulm in Germany, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1933 Germany barred Jews from, among other things, teaching in universities. That pushed the ethnic cleansing thing along nicely and one of the world's most brilliant men emigrated to the United States. To the right wing bigots it was just another unwanted Jew gone. America reaped the benefits. Among other German scientists forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. From Wikipedia: "Among the other scientists who left Germany, or the other countries it came to dominate, were Edward Teller, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, and Lise Meitner, many of whom made certain that the Allies would develop nuclear weapons first, before the Nazis."

Arizona's right wing bigots, which, of course, includes the Republican Party of the state which is frightened of losing power as they fail to represent the legitimate aspirations of Latino voters in the state, are desperate to get the ethnic cleansing thing going in a serious way. I keep hearing how badly it has hurt small businesses across the state as people flee the hostile environment for other states. The Republicans don't care, of course, and many Democrats are too cowardly-- too much like Giffords, Harry Mitchell and Ann Kirkpatrick-- to stand up and fight for them.

Recently I saw a news piece at CNN about a brilliant Brazilian professor who was being driven out of her job because of her accent. The same would have happened to Einstein or Fermi. They had accents too. Unfit to teach? Doug Kahn lives in Arizona and he covered the accent bigotry for us last May. It's worth clicking the link and going back to read what he had to say in light of what's transpired since.

I came across an interesting article by author Andrew Q Lam, In Arizona, Is My Accent A Crime? and I want to share it with you. Andrew cannot teach at any schools or universities in Arizona, so I guess he'll just have to stick to the Ivy League schools.

I know a thing or two about the English language. I have published two books in it and written a third. For eight years I was a regular commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." As a journalist, my articles have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines and hundreds of websites. My short stories and essays are anthologized and taught widely. I went to Berkeley and Stanford. I've been a subject of a PBS documentary and lectured at Ivy League schools.

But I still have an accent.

That's because I came to the U.S. at the age of 11 at the end of the Vietnam War, and though I speak English fluently, I cannot fully shave my Vietnamese accent from my American tongue. Sometimes my "clue" can sound a bit like your "glue," and other times, when stressed, my "bitch" sounds like your "peach." Otherwise, I am as American as salsa and sweet-and-sour sauce.

I'm telling you this because despite my credentials, I may not qualify to teach English to immigrant kids-- kids like my younger self-- under current Arizona rules. Arizona has decided that it's unacceptable to have teachers whose spoken English is deemed to be heavily accented or ungrammatical, even though the latter has little to do with the former.

That prohibition led the great Andrei Codrescu, an author who taught English for 40 years but who came from Romania, to wonder out loud on NPR, "Did I land back behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago? My last 40 years of teaching would have never happened if the Arizona law had been the law of the land in 1966." Odd that 14 million listeners are fine with his accent, and for that matter mine, but that they would be thought problematic for a few students in Arizona.

The real problem, of course, is that Arizonian educational bureaucracy equated having an accent with lacking proficiency and fluency, which is sheer idiocy. Some of my South Asians colleagues are the most eloquent English speakers I know, and a few have spent their higher education at illustrious institutions like Oxford and Harvard. But they, too, most likely may not pass muster to teach English, lacking what one might call a "domestic" accent.

Worse, beyond the corridors of learning, under existing Arizona practice everyone who has a foreign accent is an automatic suspect. Eloquence does not matter, so it would seem, in Arizona. Experience and qualifications mean nothing. Have a foreign accent and you may be unemployable, and worse, automatically suspect.

The police state of Arizona could very well be the norm for many other states, with 55 percent of Americans recently polled supporting Arizona's drastic stance on immigration.

And despite the fact that U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona's new immigration law SB1070, the McCarthy era of informants and suspicion has already existed long before it went into effect on Thursday. "Under Arizona law, even victims of domestic violence can't have access to state-funded English or GED classes if they are undocumented immigrants," reports New America Media's Valeria Fernandez. "Parents are questioned when applying for state health care benefits for their U.S. citizen children; if they volunteer information to a caseworker that indicates they are in the U.S. illegally, they are reported to ICE."

I shudder to think that not only might I not be qualified to teach in Arizona, I could be stopped and searched for having an accent. For under duress my tongue often becomes unruly and my accent thickens, giving my foreignness away and pronouncing me interminably alien.

Yet what is an accent, and who really doesn't have one? "You're American, aren't you?" I am often asked when I travel overseas, including to my homeland, Vietnam. My Vietnamese, wouldn't you know, has a distinctive Californian accent.

The American motto e pluribus unum-- out of many, one-- is currently put up for scrutiny. For when a society fails to celebrate and respect differences and goes to the opposite extreme, when it hides behind the apparatus of a draconian policy, one that has no check and balance, the only logical outcome is injustice and cruelty.

We expect this kind of thing from the far right. It's what they did in Germany. It's what they're doing in Arizona and other places here in the U.S. But don't we deserve more from Democrats like Gabby Giffords to at least NOT attack the Democrats who are battling this kind of fascism? Her attack-- the Blue Dog attack-- on Raúl Grijalva is not just unprincipled, it is destructive to the Democratic Party. It won't earn her any more votes or any fealty from the Glenn Beck Mobs. And it will-- and should-- make her repulsive in the eyes of real Democrats in her district. If you can, please help Grijalva, who, unlike Giffords, doesn't spend his time sucking up to big donors, defend himself from the Blue Dog onslaught.

Monday night Keith Olbermann gave a very moving Special Comment regarding the Islamophobia sweeping certain segments of the country right now-- also ginned up by right-wingers-- and that gave me a great deal of incite into what kind of a person Gabrielle Giffords actually is. Please take a look if you missed it:

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